Bunker Cities (Walled in)

Imagine how, in the future, those of us who are better off will live in private villages surrounded by security fences. On the outside dwell the poor. A ghetto for the rich and a ghetto for the poor. These two-tier cities and societies are likely to prove one of the key challenges of the 21st Century.

Science fiction? No. All over the planet this new way of living is already being developed.

In the huge cities of the South a new middle class has seen its earnings explode. In Africa, Asia and Latin America their standard of living has equalled Europeans’. However these oases of prosperity have sprung up in a desert of misery. They have survived by becoming bunkers.

In Brazil, all the new urban projects are « condominios », virtual private towns with their own infrastructure, their own shops, their own armed guards and enclosed by an impenetrable wall that keep them “safe” from the outside slums. Private police in the « condominios » and armed gangs in the favelas grow in tandem. The privatisation of cities means less government power. Two separate worlds where there’s hardly any State authority.

And it’s increasingly the case in Europe, too. In France, in the south western city of Toulouse, there are dozens of secure private estates that have been built in the shadow of a huge public housing project where the police have given up patrols. In the « Mirail » public housing estate there are no longer even any local police. So-called mediators have replaced them; young residents from the projects try to keep the peace among the worst troublemakers. Those who could, have moved to private residences.

Walls are the symptoms of conflict. Or weapons in a new form or urban warfare. An ersatz peace, built with reinforced concrete. In Baghdad, the US military has reshaped all the neighborhoods by setting up gates. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis now live in what are effectively open-air prisons.

Political walls, religious walls and more specifically social walls. Walls that blind the social injustice on the other side. The State’s withdrawal goes with more walls, more ghettos and more private police.

More than 20 years after the collapse of the Cold War Iron Curtain, thousands of new walls snake through cities and societies, shaping a nightmare future where urban apartheid is the new social pact.
The future is already here.

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