En la entrevista que aparece en BLDGBLOG al fotógrafo Simon Norfolk se hace referencia a su texto Et in Arcadia Ego:
What these "landscapes" have in common – their fundamental basis in war – is always downplayed in our society. I was astounded to discover that the long, straight, bustling, commercial road that runs through my neighbourhood of London follows an old Roman road. In places the Roman stones are still buried beneath the modern tarmac. Crucially, it needs to be understood that the road system built by the Romans was their highest military technology, their equivalent of the stealth bomber or the Apache helicopter – a technology that allowed a huge empire to be maintained by a relatively small army, that could move quickly and safely along these paved, all-weather roads. It is extraordinary that London, a city that ought to be shaped by Tudor kings, the British Empire, Victorian engineers and modern international Finance, is a city fundamentally drawn, even to this day, by abandoned Roman military hardware.
La infraestructura urbana (el hardware de las ciudades) muestra una enorme inercia, de modo que los diseños permanecen, aún sin ser ya visibles o cuando su función original ha desaparecido, siglos después de ser concebidos y materializados. Pero su presencia influencia los flujos y las redes urbanas (el software).
Una de las fuerzas que diseñaron en el pasado muchas ciudades occidentales fue la estrategia militar. Pero esa misma estrategia, como una forma de arquitectura extraordinariamente potente, configura hoy en día muchas de las ciudades donde se desarrollan los conflictos contemporáneos. La imagen de Simon Norfolk nos muestra Baghdad en el Irak inmediatemente posterior a la segunda Guerra del Golfo ["Rashid Street in Central Baghdad. The buildng on the right overlooks the bridge and so was heavily damaged in the fighting."].
Sobre los nuevos estrategas militares ocupados por el urbanismo ha investigado el arquitecto israelí Eyal Weizman, al analizar las ciudades escenario del conflcito palestino-israelí. En este conflicto el ejército israelí desarrolla estrategias de destrucción urbana selectiva. Del mismo modo la ocupación civil del espacio en los territorios ocupados responde a una estrategia militar y no tanto a “cuestiones civiles” de gestión territorial. Su trabajo se puede seguir en el libro A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, en la entrevista en Cabinet Magazine (issue 9 Winter 2002/03) The Wall and the Eye: An Interview with Eyal Weizman, o en su artículo The politics of verticality en Open Democracy. Recientemente fue elegido para las 2006–07 James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City Competition por su propuesta Destruction by Design: Military Strategy as Urban Planning (Subtopia y context realizaron un excelente análisis del trabajo de Weizman a raíz de sus conferencias canadienses y aquí puede consultarse un resumen de la conferencia). Pero el lugar fundamental para conocer su análisis del diseño de la destrucción urbana es el artículo Lethal Theory (versión pdf):
The fact that most contemporary military operations are staged in cities suggests an urgent need to reflect on an emergent relationship between armed conflicts and the built environment. Contemporary urban warfare plays itself out within a constructed, real or imaginary architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization, and subversion of space. As such, the urban environment is increasingly understood by military thinkers not simply as the backdrop for conflict, nor as its mere consequence, but as a dynamic field locked in a feedback-based relationship with the diverse forces operating within it – local populations, soldiers, guerrilla fighters, journalists and photographers, and humanitarian agents. This essay belongs to a larger investigation of the ways in which contemporary military theorists are conceptualizing the urban domain. What are the terms they are using to think about cities? What does the language employed by the military to describe the city to themselves (for example, at international conferences dealing with urban warfare) and to the general public (most often through the media) tell us about the relationship between organized violence and the production of space? What does this language tell us about the military as an institution? Not least important is the question of the role of theory in all these operations.
En este trabajo describe con detalle las “acciones microtácticas” (como la destrucción selectiva de edificios, o, en ocasiones, la “simple” apertura de boquetes en viviendas para abrir nuevas rutas de movimiento de los soldados) que utilizan los estrategas militares israelíes para generar una geometría inversa que reorganiza la “sintaxis urbana”.
