Red zones are only the extreme case of ubiquitous checkpoints in the city. On the occasion of a major meeting of world leaders, the city is divided into forbidden and accessible sectors. The new “forbidden city” an enclave “temporarily” marked by fences, walls, surveillance cameras, police barricades, searchlights, flying helicopters, and so on is becoming the image of a publicized utopia of complete security. On the body of the city, the mark of a new project of subordination is inscribed. All the more so, because the city is increasingly becoming ungovernable. Urban conflicts erupt in major cities and the police assumes the role of an “interior army.” It used to be Beirut, Jerusalem, Belfast, Los Angeles, Paris or Rio; but now urban conflicts and riots, urban violence, and racial clashes are everywhere. As Agamben (2001) remarks, modern authorities tend to adopt the model of the infected medieval city, where zones of progressive control were erected, leaving part of the city to the plague while securing disinfected enclaves for the rich. In 2001, Genoa, with its prototypical red zone, appeared as an “infected city.” The new world order, utopian and nightmarish, is based on zones of varying degrees of control, where checkpoints attempt to introduce the globalizing rhythms of neoliberalism. The utopia of absolute governance is tested at various scales in cities as well as on continents. Eventually, a partitioned globe is strategically designed to emerge.
Red zone in front of French embassy in Tunis, 2013.
Red zones are temporary constructions aimed at permanent results. As the “terrorist threat” (which, as a term, is designed to encompass any threat to the status of the new order) is constantly renewed, exception becomes the rule and emergency becomes canonic. While red zones appear as exceptional when compared to ordinary urban rhythms, they in fact inaugurate new urban rhythms in view of a heavily mythologized new metropolitan order. Exception thus becomes the model of repetition.
Jon Coaffee has revealingly shown how the economic core of London, “the City,” has evolved into an enormous enclave defined by an urban “ring of steel” (Coaffee 2004, 276–296). As “counter-terrorist” urban policies have evolved from temporary responses to Provisional IRA threats and acts, to more permanent measures taken after 9/11, the City has gradually become an area “excluding itself from the rest of central London, through its territorial boundedness, surveillance and fortification strategies” (ibid., 294).6
Red zones deliberately dramatize threat as a recurrent exception. As with prophylactic rituals, what the red zones ceremonially act out is a demonized otherness. Those potential or actual trespassers, are described by the mere existence of the red zones as outsiders, not to be allowed in the “forbidden city.” Law-abiding citizens are asked to comply with the measures, consenting in the suspension of their “right to the city.” They are asked to participate in a ritualistic purification of the city, in the exorcising of the evil, which, as in most rituals, appears as both unnatural and beyond society. Red zones ceremonially describe the new citizen: just as the supermarket cashier (itself a checkpoint) defines the purchaser, the airport check-in defines the traveler, and the police blockade sanctions the authorized driver or the legal immigrant, so does the red zone aim to define the new citizen. Always eager to abandon his or her rights in exchange for a feeling of security, this new citizen accepts a permanent state of emergency. The wall erected by the Israeli government in Palestine is only an extreme case of a red zone concretizing a permanent state of emergency, circumscribing through a series of checkpoints the social life of the new citizens.7
Red zones are purposely presented by the media as a spectacle that celebrates state violence as justified and effective.8 The display of absolute control contradistinguishes the image of power created by the neoliberal mythology. No more leaders parading in open cars or shaking hands with common people. Modern politicians exhibit themselves mostly through the media, posing as benign, humane, but also determined. The images ceremonially reproduced by the red zones are images of exclusion and distinction constructing the profile of a quasi-feudal power that paternalistically promises to provide security above all. All those constructions of control, completely out of scale and functional only in the case of a civil war scenario, constitute a new fortress, a castle for the governing elites. This mediatized castle, however, is only the extreme case of the protected enclaves of the partitioned city (Davis 1992, 221–260).
In challenging the acceptance of red zones, the antiglobal movement has revealed the pedagogic use of these zones in forming the characteristics of urban dwellers. Their role in an emerging model of government remains to be actively shown. All of the movement’s practices show explicitly enough the transformation of public space into a series of controlled enclaves culminating in the mediatized Castle of World Leaders.
To borrow a term from Edward P. Thompson, we can observe a “counter-theater” (Thompson 1993, 57, 67) created by people’s symbolic acts of civil disobedience in front of red zones. Demonstrators may sometimes show, through the theatricality of a controlled clash, that red zones are actually drawing lines inside the society and not between the society and an external enemy. By doing so, they refuse to play the part of the plague in a sanitizing city and thus reveal that what presents itself as a prophylactic (protective) measure is in effect similar to those discriminating rituals of initiation that most societies use to define their members.
Citizens before the fencing politics
The identities of contemporary city dwellers are defined by frames but also act themselves as defining frames for those who have them. Identity borders are carefully defined and correspond to the defining perimeter of the spatial and temporal enclaves in which they are performed. Not only do checkpoints enforce the discriminatory effect of a fenced spatiotemporal perimeter, they also test urban identities in their recurrent performance constantly proving their efficiency in defining recognizable citizens.
Contesting contemporary identities would thus mean contesting their repeated performance enacted in framing enclaves. A different public culture, based on mutually aware and open identities, would need different spatial experiences. Public space would have to be transformed from a series of enclaves, indifferent to each other, into a network of communicating areas. A permeable membrane instead of a frame would have to indicate the perimeter of these areas. Instead of checkpoints that discriminate, passages that connect would have to ensure spatial and temporal relations as necessarily formative of interdependent identities.
Liminality, the experience of temporarily occupying an in-between territory, can provide us with an alternative image for a spatiality of emancipation. Creating in-between spaces might mean creating spaces of encounter between identities, instead of spaces that correspond to specific identities.
The act of recognizing a division only to overcome it, yet without aiming to eliminate it, might be emblematic of an attitude that gives to different identities the ground to negotiate and realize their interdependence. Emancipation may thus be conceived not as the establishing of a new collective identity but rather as the establishing of the means to negotiate between emergent identities.
From van Gennep’s seminal study on the “rites of passage” (van Gennep 1960) we can borrow a revealing insight: societies have to instruct and guide their people when they change social status through crucial events in their social life. Birth, marriage, death of a relative, coming of age, entry into a professional community, army service, acquiring the status of citizen, warrior, etc., all mark specific identity transformations. As these transformations are crucial for social reproduction, and as they have to be combined with tests and the inculcation of relevant knowledge to those who are destined to change, societies devise ways to regulate those transformations and ensure that the process will always be