The key terms that I’m interested in circle around the idea of porosity. Chiefly this is an attempt to find ways of addressing significant spatial conditions [and temporal too ­ wherever I’ve gone with this idea, time has kept appearing in widely different forms] that shape the activities of, and are shaped by para- and sub-state level agencies (transnational agencies, GONGOs and both international and local NGOs).

International space(s) are the major determinants of the social, economic and built environments in which NGOs are formed and operate, and contribute their own particular international spatialities. If we were to indicate the generation of such international space, a crucial major role would go to agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF in the late 70s and 80s in creating the conditions for the globalisation of capital, the smooth space of accelerated flows of materials, goods and people ­ in certain limited forms...This would be where my first porous state of spatialization would appear: the supposedly homogeneous space of this economy is mined and burrowed to a major extent.

Global turnover currently owes between 15 and 20% to the “shadow economy”
(Glenny: IMF, WB, and others) ­ a shadowy term itself that runs between major organised crime to much lesser infractions of state and international law. If we are examining the role of NGOs then both in their own right, and in terms of the conditions created that are the concern of other agencies, criminal organisation cannot be excluded. They are the form of NGO that exerts the most influence. They have extensive and widely ramifying importance. They have been the earliest and most innovative in mining this “international” ­ this could be expressed through the way D&G explore holeyspace (with reference to mining) as a form of smooth/nomad space.

One major instance serves here to introduce a host of particular spatial porosities ­ drugs and the war on drugs (now dovetailed with the war on terror). Globalisation accelerated, ramified and greatly expanded the drugs trade; and the routes thus established have been exploited for other trades ­ arms, counterfeit and tax-avoidance goods (now overtaking drugs in gross value of trade) and people.

[1] The creation of new border conditions ­ pseudo-states in the case of
Moldovan Transnistria (arms, sex trafficking, Israel-UAE, drugs).

This case raises an interesting dimension of how il/legal crossovers occur
between agencies: MT possesses not one but two stadium to meet all UEFA conditions ­ the only ones in Europe- besides other advanced sports/leisure/retail facilities, and a football team that is designed to compete in the Champions League. But since no-one recognises MT, (including Russia despite subsidizing the place through Gazprom) this is the only way in which Moldova and MT co-operate ­ to secure UEFA recognition. This might give us pause to think of NGOs like the IOC, FIFA etc in a different light? [Consider, perhaps, the forms of urban re-structuring that various Olympics have inaugurated ­ Seoul, Barcelona, but especially Beijing, and now London?]
-
places where the state intricates itself directly into this economy in specific locales: ...the border areas are frenzied frontier posts of enormous hundred-room brothels, exit gates for Burmese slaves, sites for amphetamine factories and heroin refineries and river crossing posts for weapons, teak, tigers, bears, rubies, Buddha images and other items of Burma’s dwindling natural and cultural heritage. (Skidmore, Karaoke Fascism, p.79)

Another instance would be Cuidad del Este ­ the Paraguayan gangster capital suspected by American intelligence as a centre of Al-Qaeda activity; 60% of Cuidad’s income is derived from smuggling (Glenny) ­ positioned on the border between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. The largest trade is in counterfeit goods, and it makes Ciudad a crucial point on the routes such goods are developing worldwide. The source for a lot of this trade is in Fujian. Here you find zones beyond the reach of Chinese government agencies ­ the mountains of south Fujian are, notorious for hosting huge factories that are buried underground… producing counterfeit cigarettes...some of the biggest and lucrative counterfeit factories in the world… built deep in the mountain…

Quite literally a porous landscape, as well as in its other aspect (Glenny 385-6). The connection of this trade and its interrelation with narcotics etc also gives rise to new exponentially growing construction in Fuzhou, Shenzhen etc; which points to...

[2] what Skidmore refers to as narcoarchitecture follows on from this [I think she gives too restricted a reading of the concept, limiting to a rather pared down repressive model of Benjamin and Kracauer]. She uses it to express a relation (in Burma, but aspects can be generalised) between laundering narco-wealth through construction and the forms of building that relate a glut of marble and concrete high rise hotels, malls and facilities for international capital/tourism to ideologically saturated kitsch national monuments and forced relocation of city inhabitants to peri-urban new towns/re-building urban sites as closed militarized communities. The term can be broadened to give a wider perspective on such transformations of urban space that follow from IMF/WB strategic adjustment plans (Davis) ­ the explosion of squatter megalopolis, violent re-structuring, increasing segregation and fragmentation (Soja), the spread of militarized californias (Davis). First, in the financing of construction and re-structuring ­ Dubai being a good case in point ­ and in the use of such projects to create routes through which money flows and the attempt to supervise this through transnational banking agencies, police etc. Second, the creation of an infrastructure for expanded and intensified consumption that obscures the boundary between il/legal trades in goods and services ­ especially in the creation of new tourist zones (Cambodian coastline). Third, we can think the role of shadow economies in how (Soja’s) fragments engage continuously and variously together on urban scales ­ drugs traffic is one notable route, but there are new dimensions now in the fashion trade that accomplish this...

[3] which brings me to another aspect, drawn from Saviano’s account of Naples: the porosity of older public architectures. If we accept that the rise of NGOs is related to the monetarist, IMF/WB drive to privatise state agencies formed within various forms of the social (-democratic) state and bring them into a monetary economy as part of their global restructuring, and that the growth and transformation of cities is also related to this, a significant part of the way in which shadow economies entered into this adjustment was by pirating social architectures. The thing I like about Secondigliano and Scampia is the light. The big wide streets are airier than the tangle of the old city centre, and I could imagine the countryside still alive under the asphalt and massive buildings. After all space is preserved in Scampia’s very name, which in a defunct Neapolitan dialect means open land. A place where weeds grow. Where the
infamous Vele, or Sails, a monstrous public housing project, sprouted in the 1960s. The rotten symbol of architectural delirium, or merely perhaps a cement utopia powerless to oppose the narcotraffic machine that feeds on this part of the world.

Chronic unemployment and a total absence of social development planning have transformed the area into a narcotics warehouse, a laboratory for turning drug money into a vibrant local economy. (Saviano, 63-4). This description is matched by the account of il/legal sweatshop installation and operation in other of Naples’ suburban estates in a chain that links textile/fashion manufacture and distribution, and retail
worldwide. This chain is a chain of porous excavations. The previous link is to the circumvention of time-consuming customs inspections at Naples container dock; and the suppression of costs by tax-avoidance. One crucial aspect is the camouflaging of movement of goods. To do this apartment blocks near the docks have been stripped of nearly all interior structure to house goods in transit in the disguise of ordinary housing. Make architecture permeable. Similar accounts of burrowed/permeated environments could be culled from eg Sudhir Venkatesh’s analysis of gang life in Chicago. Both bring with them a wealth of detailed description of spatial tactics and cultures. This refashioning of older public architectures and spatial organization is a crucial part of porous globalisation; and it also defines major territories in which NGOs work and arise.

[4]We are in a fashion caught up in our own genealogy ­ the development of a fabric of grass-roots organisations, of bottom-up self-government, of complex relations of consultation and participation have been the (sordid) history of planning and architecture since the 70s. Through this we trace the transformation of a political field, related to state and the national-political (Cockburn, The Local State ­ serial efforts by state both local and national to fashion the terms of participation) to either a depoliticisation (Davis etc) or key shifts in forms of political activity (aaa, PREPRAV, Urban Act etc) towards the biopolitical and micropolitical. Can this be treated in some way as architecture becoming-minor in its own practice? A becoming-porous?

[5] The very materials of this traffic become porous. Saviano details how, for example, the cement used in the explosion of narco-financed construction was impregnated with dangerous waste that the camorra organizations were also trafficking. But beyond this, and the various ways of transporting drugs (impregnation etc), my attention was taken by the now commonplace stories of bodies packed into containers ­ the intrication of one goods into the space of another. [Note the dimensions of containers were also the work of an NGO ­ an international design/engineers conference: Levinson]. I think the first instance I came across of this aspect was in a novella by Ghassan Katafani, Rijal fil shams. Said discusses this in the midst of a discussion of the fragmentation or fracture of time, a scenography that is a true political medium. The matter of spatiality and its agencement is time ­ everywhere time is discussed in these works. How does this fit into/across the consumption-time of Becker, as the doyen of Chicago economics ­ time (consummation) was his measure of value and the standard of the new homo economicus?

MARA 0809 The International - ideas for the brief by Andy Low