lexicon

Producing urban order:‘cleaning up king’s cross’

Lexicon – At a Loss for Words

That we only know what we know how to know, is a truism. Asking questions, excavating materials,

questioning boundaries and formulating answers, seemingly then constitute the work of

learning within any given field. But ‘Geographies’ is not a field as such but an amalgam of material cartographies, national and other identitarian heritages, spatial explorations,

emergent subjectivities and critical analyses of the conditions of our lives. While each of

these may have a credible academic trajectory, the task of making them co-inhabit an active,

academic learning situation, sets up a heterotopian space in which all of the above are

contested, inverted and transposed. Accepting this instability as constitutive, Geographies,

seeks new objects of knowledge and new modes of understanding our lives as relational

geographies of contemporaeinity, geographies that navigate the disciplining dimensions of

belonging, exclusion, identification and dis-identification.

This year, the ‘Geographies’ course chose to look at St. Pancras Station, the new home of Eurostar in King’s Cross, as its collective investigative project. We chose this in the mistaken belief that we would find there a hub of globalisation in all its levels; tourists and business people streaming back and forth from the European continent and representatives of all the

technologies of control such as police, customs and immigration etc’. We thought that in St. Pancras the work of architecture and spatial organisation would unfold in front of our eyes bringing together the manifold layers of a dense urban environment. We thought that the

contradictions between the social complexity of a migrant area in which transience, drugs

and prostitution were some of the major contemporary economies and the glittering new

design for the housing of travel and mobility, would result in a spatial texture that was new

and unfamiliar.

What we actually found was very different. St. Pancras which seemed initially to embody the dynamics of what is currently Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, a huge

building site that will envelope the entirety of the West side of King’s Cross, found us its

critical investigators, at a loss for words. How to break down its seamless, monolithic logic of

development ? How to see through its opacity and the interwoven density of its control and

surveillance mechanisms ? How to understand the self staging of ideal consumption ? How

to puncture the fantasy of cosmopolitan and privileged travel ? What to do with the context

of another environment that was being effaced as we went about our investigations ?

It was clear to us that in order to engage with these gleaming facades, we would need another

language, not one of opposition and analysis, but a language that in itself rehearsed the

effects that this space had on us; disaffected, short sighted, resistant but also slightly, only slightly, seduced. The Lexicon tries to cut across the language of planning and controlling

and transporting and developing and replace it with another vocabulary. A vocabulary that

rehearses how we experienced the place, that teases out unexpected pockets of sheer existence,

a vocabulary that stages rather than describes, what we think is actually going on.

And so, we offer you our vocabulary, which is in fact our effort to know something differently,

know it otherwise and from elsewhere.

Ambience anti-social behavior

Bombingbreakdownchampagne

cleanlinesscommandmentdataveillance

desire linesdestination

dis-identificationdispersalEvictions

fake surveillance camerasgasometers

gentrificationglamour

iconoclasticintelligenceinvisibility

labour (immaterial)linear

metropolisoyster card

retailsimplification

threaturban order and renewal

AmbienceA multitude of facets of our environment create an ambience. The

atmosphere in the transient space of St. Pancras International is determined by movements of people generating a smooth flow and fulfilling their tasks, passengers boarding or leaving trains, individuals waiting, drinking coffee or doing their shopping. Responding to recent

capitalist phenomena, shopping malls are a concomitant symptom of

transient spaces.

Yet, the sonic ambience in the St. Pancras shopping zone is different to malls. There is no background music, no broadcasting

programme tempting to buy the cheapest offer, but instead a friendly

female voice frequently announcing the Eurostar arrivals and departures

in English and French. Thus the European gateway function is stressed.

As a node for large-scale transport, this station connects six underground

lines and three train services. It advances the circulation of people and

goods and embodies urban concentration. Individuals enter and leave

this space in a flow with limited opportunity to gather or connect. Such criteria common of urban concentrations and individuality partly define Marc Augé’s concept of ‘non-places’, which we inhabit

whilst travelling.1 They are produced by ‘supermodernity,’ defined by

excesses, overabundance and a change of scale. A non-place is therefore

‘a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.’

2 We perceive non-places only partly; they are not inscribed within our memory. Conversely, they are attributed to a specific time and position and do not hold enough significance to be regarded as places. St. Pancras International has redeveloped the Victorian site in accordance with English Heritage, including 62 retail units and 15

bars and restaurants mainly based on franchising, a transparent waiting

lounge and other traveller services. Yet it is globalisation and simplification that generate anonymous urban conditions. The universal language of

signs and pictograms as well as certain architectural elements guides

temporal and ephemeral fluxes of people. Signposts displaying them are a reminiscent of highway traffic signs. Additionally, the architectural element of whitish colonnades lining the shop fronts separates the flow of shoppers from that of passengers. Furthermore, people in uniforms

impose an atmosphere of order: Information personnel dressed in light

blue, uniformed private security, ticket inspectors, and various police

uniforms.

Yet surveillance is executed on two levels: visible, through

the presence of control organs and concealed, by monitoring cameras

built into architecture or disguised as lamps. More than 450 cameras, interlinked with IP CCTV, monitor the current building site. Additionally, this system incorporates access, fire, and building control and is simplified through intelligent surveillance technology using a single, common

interface.3 The lack of any visible fire extinguisher4

on the undercroft-

1. Augé, M. Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of

Supermodernity. London / New York, NY: Verso, 1995. p. 34.

2. ibid. p78.

3. Cf. St. Pancras International IP CCTV Network. Available from: http://www.security-int.

com/categories/ip-cctv-

solutions/st-pancras-

international-ip-cctv-

network.asp [Accessed

10/04/2008].

4. As became appar-ent from a fieldtrip on March 11, 2008.

and platform-level of St. Pancras International reveals a shift towards a visible simplification and deflation of space, simultaneously demanding intelligent technologies.

Anti-Social Behaviour ‘A set of actions causing or likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more

persons’.5

While drug dealing, vandalism and intimidation are considered

criminal offences and as such punishable by law, the so-called anti-social

behaviours are not, or at least not directly. Since the acceptance of the ‘broken windows’ theory as the basis of new techniques of urban social control however, anti-social behaviour has become the new target of

urban policing. The proponents of this theory argue that neighbourhoods

where broken windows or other manifestations of disorder are not tackled

display a lack of informal social control and attract serious criminals into

the area.6 In the United Kingdom the consequent criminalization of

‘disorderly’ behaviours has led to the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) and to a new tool of urban social control: the Anti Social Behaviour Orders (ASBO), employed by authorities to ban offenders from continuing their distressing behaviour, spending time with a particular group of friends

and/or visiting certain areas.

Although meant as civil regulation, breaching an order is

considered a criminal offence, punishable by a fine or up to five years in prison. Every year more than 40% of the orders are breached,7 which indicates how the ‘modernist’ disciplinary rhetoric justifies in reality a practice of exclusion that enables councils to legally ‘clean up’ areas from undesired individuals.

8 The main target of the anti-social

behaviour orders are, in fact, vulnerable individuals such as the mentally

ill, the elderly, the very young, drug and alcohol addicts, sex workers and

beggars, clearly unwanted in areas undergoing processes of regeneration

and gentrification.9

Between 1 April 1999 and 31 December 2005, Camden borough has issued the highest number of anti-social behaviour orders

in Greater London.10 The council’s objective to clean the area is a long-

term commitment, reflected in the Camden Council Corporate Plan’s aim to ‘reduce the fear of crime’.11

To achieve a perception of the area

as a safer place to live in, the community has been empowered to report

offenders and produce evidence against them.12

The creation of a system

of panoptic surveillance, of which every ‘social’ neighbour becomes the centre, is epitomised by the controversial practice of ‘naming and shaming’.

13 Such practices contribute to the exponential increase in the number of behaviours criminalized and subject to formal social control, thus generating a climate of suspicion in which any behaviour outside

the norm is likely to cause distress.

5. Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Part 1, Chap-

ter 1, 1 (1) (a).

6. Beckett, K. and Her-bert, S. ‘Dealing with disorder: social control in

the post-industrial city’,

Theoretical Criminology,

Vol.12(1), 2008. p. 8.

7. Foot, M., ‘A triumph of hearsay and hyste-

ria’, The Guardian, 05/04/2005.

8. Summers, C., ‘Clean-

ing up King’s Cross’,

BBC News online, 12/12/2002.

9. In the case of the last

two, breaching the orders

leads to their paradoxi-

cal imprisonment even

though begging and

prostitution are non-im-

prisonable offences. See Foot, Loc.cit.

10. Available from http://www.crimereduc-

tion.homeoffice.gov.uk/asbos/asbos2.htm.

[Accessed 18/04/08].

11. Camden Council

Corporate Plan 2007-2011 Draft version 2.2, p. 15-16.

12. From the Home

Office home page. Avail-able from: http://www.

homeoffice.gov.uk/anti-social-behaviour/penal-

ties/anti-social-behav-

iour-orders/ [Accessed

18/04/08].

13. See ‘Senior Government advi-sors question policies

on ASBOs & ‘naming and shaming.’ Avail-

able from: http://www.

liberty-human-rights.org.

uk/news-and-events/1-

press-releases/2006/making-our-kids-crimi-

nals.shtml [Accessed

18/04/08].

14. Haraway. Donna. How like a Leaf. New York: Routledge, 1999.

p. 107.

Bombing The day of the attacks on the London underground and buses, I was wandering around town as I happened to be out. I had just

moved to London that year and most things seemed curious to me, but there was nothing like this day. I had a feeling I was inside a film set, shooting a scene of chaos. I was in Victoria Station and the first thing that went through my mind was to get home. Public transportation had stopped working. I hadn’t realised what had happened, but it seemed like

something had gone really wrong. I would hear various people saying

that there had been bombing attacks around town. I started to have the

feeling that I was living in a moment of what before I used to watch in

movies or maybe the news. I tried to stop a cab to take me home. The

taxi driver told me he couldn’t take me because he was on his lunch

break. I decided to walk till I got there even though I knew it would be

two or three hours. On the way, I learned a lot more about what had happened and I started to accumulate feelings of agony. People seemed calm in the streets. I would pick up their conversations saying that this

has happened in London many times. The builders in the building site near my house kept working without changing their pace, and I kept

thinking of the taxi driver that smiled at me and said that he had to go

on lunch break. A sense of panic overwhelmed me. I locked myself up in

the house. I couldn’t face any of these people. There was absurdity.

During the next days and for quite some time, I avoided to pass through my usual route in King’s Cross. The sight of people rushing

to work as always beside the photographs of the missing persons in the

station paralyzed me. When did bombing become so natural in our life?

Breakdown In this work, we have explored King’s Cross as a space from

which to think our contemporary moment. Our engagements with the King’s Cross area revealed a disordered and incoherent space. The

messiness of King’s Cross seems to be in constant negotiation with the

tidy and orderly St. Pancras International Station. We looked at these negotiations and clashes as productive and creative moments, and a

condition from which to think the current moment we live in.

If we accept that a unified coherent world has been lost forever, or has perhaps never existed, we can pay attention to how the collapse

of that project of the world, suggests a vast space for the creation of

essential tools to intervene with our contemporary instant. We must

therefore take advantage of the breakdowns. Donna Haraway looks at ‘breakdown’ as a word for those moments when denaturalization occurs, for those occasions when what is taken for granted can no longer be

taken for granted precisely because there is a glitch in the system.14

That

breakdown of the system provokes a space of possibility. The possibility

opens up precisely because things don’t work smoothly anymore. The

breakdown is not a negative situation to be avoided, but a situation

of non-obviousness. We must turn that condition into something

productive.

In our explorations of King’s Cross we felt the need for a

language with which we can move at ease in the transformations of

space; for a language concerned with the gaps, the flows, different modalities of change, singularity and mobility. There seems to be a

need for more suitable ways to engage with the lack of harmony and the

struggles with the system. We can use the moment of the breakdown for

investigations of new tools, of new questions, of different modalities of

intervening, of new subjects, of subjects that respond to the lives, to the

movements, to the multiplicities, to the singularities, and to the changes

and transformations of the King’s Cross area and of our contemporary

world.

CHAMPAGNE ‘96 metres of pure bubbly heaven’ stretches out alongside platform 5 of the Eurostar. 96 metres of space from which to demonstrate

one’s financial prowess. 96 metres of space from which to ooze antiquated glamour and style. 96 metres of space from which to consume decadence

and elegance.

70 varieties of liquidised economic capital. The bubbles of air accelerating up to the top of glass, sparking and whirring with exclusivity.

The droplets of water coating the outside of the flute, dribbling with finesse. The gold embossed labels, the gold embossed coasters, the gold illuminated lettering, gold connoting prestige.

£7.50 to £25.00 to buy into the rhetoric of St. Pancras International, to become a part of the ‘flagship of this new style of railway station’ (Mike Luddy, Project Director for St. Pancras International). Space for up to 110 people to imbibe a fluid emblem of French high culture. Plenty of room to stand and clink glasses. The man in the top hat reclining whilst his eyes peruse the area, scanning the surroundings

for recognition of his economic credentials, the acknowledgement of his

cultural worth. Legitimisation of his being from becoming a spectacle and figure of aspiration, ‘conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure’.

15 Consuming to

signify superiority.

Glass panes separate the degrees of consumption. Their transparency endow the consumers with importance. Visible, exposed, the consumers fulfil the planner’s desire to compete with the Parisian ideal. The appropriation of French signifiers in order to texture the station. Champagne to inject glamour, to signify the elsewhere, the outthere, the nowhere.

15. Veblen, T. ‘Conspicu-

ous Consumption’ In

Lee, M. (ed). The Con-

sumer Society Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

16. M’bembe, A. On the Post Colony. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1975.

Cleanliness One of the characteristics of urban place is its aim for cleanliness. All the newly created buildings have walls and floors brightly coloured without any stains. They are also equipped with hyper-modern sanitary

facilities, typified by toilet and cleaning tools that are hardly recognisable as such. The cleanliness of hyper-modern urban place overwhelms

people who pass through them, not only because of the cutting-edge

technology but it gives the impression of a perfectly controlled space.

Nothing undesirable is there: dust, garbages, and even certain kinds of people are unacceptable. Clear transparent glass is another way to look

clean. It introduces sunshine, and everywhere is lit with the grace of

technology. There, something dark or muddy cannot exist, there is no

space prepared for them specifically. They are gotten rid of even before entering. Sometimes ‘cleanliness’ is even a synonym for maintenance or order. On the streets in areas with low security and low lighting, there tends to be broken windows or bins filled with garbage, while such chaos is not common around these hyper-modern urban buildings. Historically,

the modern city has been intended to be clean or give the impression of

cleanliness. City planning begins with the creation of infrastructure; roads and water pipes on, above, and under ground. It initiates order

by making continuous flows for the perishable, because pool equals stagnation. Both ways are multiple veils that conceal something muddy underground and spread out a plain surface on top of it. If covering

a city with only straight lines and plain surfaces means ‘clean’, urban order would create nothing but cleanliness concealing and driving off

‘dirty’ – not extinguishing it. Besides, this is why every urban place is essentially similar looking; the same wherever in the world, whenever in the year. Something not clean can exist somewhere else outside urban places. ‘Cleaning up’ is fundamentally the act of pushing the excrement out and creating a sanctuary immune from mud for those who would be

suitable to live there. However, it should be disputed that the undesirable

is the legacy to tell from when and where a place originates and exists, or

makes it itself.

Commandment Commandment in the colony, mentions Achile M’bembe, ‘is the imaginary state of sovereignty’ which is placed through a set of

instruments that claim rationality.16

Rationality becomes the tool and

argument to impose systems of control and superiority. It enables a

degree of acceptance and legitimation amongst both the colonised and

colonisers that have to assimilate these oppressions as common good

acts.

The Anti-Social Behaviour Order was brought into the Crime and Disorder Act in 1998 and first implemented in 1999 in England

17. Foucault’s term em-

ployed when explaining

the shift from disciplinary

societies to controlled

societies in : Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, (1977-78); ed. Senellart, M. Trans. Burchell, G. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

18. Argent (King’s Cross) Limited, King’s Cross is ready for business, 2008.

19. Roger Clarke,

Dataveillance – 15 Years On, 2003, Avail-able from: http://www.

privacy.org.nz/assets/Files/95523188.pdf [Ac-

cessed 18/04/08].

and Wales. It appears as a states tool of control that is shared with

society that is activated as a needed witness, to detect negative behaviours

within the members of the community. A controlled society17

that is

equally monitored and an essential element of this monitoring. To

police is no longer something solely marshalled by the sovereign but it

is also distributed within the population. Therefore, the mechanism of

commandment is used in the name of so called Western Democracy, whilst

ironically diffused through the brains and bodies of the citizens. ASBOs can be understood as one of the multiple phalanxes that compromise the notion of commandment, which is nowadays disguised

under the notion of normativity and social acceptance. They stand up

as a needed condition for the economical prosperity of the city and the

urbanization. The main objective seems to focus on clearing the streets

of people hanging around, shouting, swearing, cycling dangerously,

drinking, being noisy and other followers of socially unacceptablr

conducts.

Commandment is introduced not only in the way people act, but

also in their motivation to search for antisocial conduct, which endlessly

provides feedback to the system of control. Acceptance is subsequently

intrinsic in the origin of the apparatus, since it encompasses the artificial presence of the society. Here is a form of Biopower that aims to organise social relations by means of peoples’ status and witness suspicion; a fake logic demand to control the milieu by claiming the restitution of order and

ultimately making the ASBOs a pre-established condition to and for specific target groups.

Dataveillance King’s Cross: ‘The best connected development in the UK.’

18

The phraseology behind the programme of regeneration active

in King’s Cross works to think the changing urban space as a major

nodal point in a transnational infrastructure. Like many urban centres, King’s Cross ‘connects’ its actors both to a wider physical geography and to geographies of information accessible to public and private agencies.

A short journey through or around this space can be data-mapped

according to the visitor’s engagement with fixed and mobile terminals in operation throughout the area. Roger Clarke’s concept ‘Dataveillance’ can be used then to describe a rapidly evolving scheme of multi-layered

surveillance that advocates the collection and analysis of personal data

as it is accrued through interaction with urban space.19

Kings Cross and St Pancras stations and the immediate surrounding area punctuated by Euston Road offer up a series of

opportunities for Dataveillance to function. The implementation of the Oyster card on public transport has created a vast database linking the individual to his or her movements and physical address. Working in

20. Green, N. and S. Smith, ‘A Spy in your Pocket’? The Regulation of Mobile Data in the UK’, Vol 1 (4), 2003. Available from: http://

www.surveillance-and-so-

ciety.org/arti cles1(4)/pocketspy. [Accessed

18/04/08].

tandem with CCTV, electronic tracking on London’s Underground is utilized by the Police who regularly request access to the database held by Transport for London. Promotional stands in the concourse of King’s Cross Underground Station encourage travellers to take advantage of Barclaycard’s OnePulse scheme, which combines both Oyster and credit transactions in a single card. And the high volume of e-ticket collections

made in the stations due to their regional and European transport links

corresponds to the number of online accounts being registered with

companies such as Eurostar. Incentives to link one’s financial details to the activity of travel through online accounts reveal the role these industries

play in actively producing a type of mobile consumer/traveller/tourist.

On a seemingly local scale, in the St. Pancras Station Arcade itself, data mining operates even less covertly with the initiation of

competitions or ‘Prize Givaways’ designed to collate and store personal details for use in direct marketing campaigns. Sprawling across Euston Road and surrounding side roads, noticeably populated by Internet cafes

and ATM points, small-scale retailers offer to unlock mobile phones and promote the use of Bluetooth technology to exploit the decentralisation of everyday communications. These micro practices expose the

individual to globalised mobile networks and ‘more deeply entrench the notions of ‘mobility’ and ‘locatability’ as commercially valuable pieces of information.’

20 Acting as a border to London’s Congestion charge zone, King’s Cross represents a moment of arrival into the highly surveilled centre, where Automatic Number Plate Recognition checks vehicles against a national database for illegal activity.

The contemporary urban space is engineered to facilitate the

movement of simultaneously mobile and locatable subjects: users whose

informationalised self is registered, networked and analysed through

integrated services, which suggests a primary motive for producing

urban development is to produce ideal candidates for Dataveillance.

Desire Lines The station is a site of changing speeds; it represents a period of adjustment so one can change from the pace of life in Paris for instance, to the pace of life in London. The function of the station layout is to channel these passengers towards their exit, to assimilate them with

the speed of the city they have arrived in. After spending so much time

stationary and seated in the relative calm of a train, the passenger must

readjust and prepare for the hustle and bustle of a major city. The first obstacle they must tackle is the station itself; they must navigate a way from the train platform through to their next connection. The route they

take is their desire line, the path followed to get from point a to point b.

Desire lines are used in surveying to describe such a route: people are monitored and followed and their course is noted. The name comes from

the paths made over time as people walk over land taking what is often

the most direct route possible. In a station such as St. Pancras this route is broken up and disrupted, the different types of passengers will have

different speeds and will create different pathways. From the straight

line of the regular businessman, whose continual use of the station lends

itself a familiarity of the exits; to the meandering tourist who may exit the train in somewhat of a daze, at first taking in the station and its architecture then going through a period of adjustment as they assess

which exit they need to take.

The station will have been constructed in such a way as to allow

a direct free flowing movement from the platform to the exit destinations, the most popular of which is likely to be the tube station at the other

end of the station. Lining these most popular routes will be the retail outlets tempting the passengers inside, which, though unlikely to cause

much swerve from the straight path taken by the regular passenger, will

cause much deviation from tourists as they meander and zigzag their way across the station.

As well as contending with at least these two flows and their speeds, the station must also contend with the two directions used in

the station (to and from the trains) and the crisscrossing of these routes caused by the multiple entrances. The desire lines used by the passengers

as they enter and exit the trains will go some way in determining how

successfully the station is operating. The planning and architecture will

also work to control the desire lines, as will the signage, but only now that

it is operational can it be truly observed.

Destination ‘Meet me at St. Pancras!’ The station is no longer a gateway, a space of passage, temporality or the temporary, the in-between. Meeting no longer implies meeting the weary traveler, luggage in tow. The station

is no longer the repository of trains, the icon of movement and the power

of industry. ‘Meet me at St. Pancras’ implies a lingering, a going to a place and staying, a destination. Destination marks a location, a point of duration. Often veiled in leisure, the destination is a retreat, island get-away, resort. At St. Pancras, destination functions to draw people in, to conceal them within a self-contained space. The inherent flows of the station, the passing of trains, people and goods is obscured behind glass

walls and champagne booths. The marketing campaign has obfuscated

the station’s function to provide the opportunity for commoditization and commercial venture. The station acts as a destination of shopping,

cafes, and restaurants. The destination is constructed. It is designed

and built to mediate its own experience. The arcade has been erected

beneath the station’s immense glass roof. The trains have been displaced

above the stores. To experience the station is no longer to walk into an

21. Dis-: function: prefix; 1a: do the opposite of

<disestablish> b: deprive

of ( a specified quality, rank, or object) <dis-franchise> c: exclude or

expel from <disbar>; 2: opposite or absence of

<disunion> <disaffec-

tion>; 3: not <disagree-

able>; 4: completely <disannul>; 5: [by folk etymology]: dys- <dis-function>. Available

from: www.merriamweb-

ster.com. [Accessed

March 31, 2008].

22. ‘Whenever a ter-ritorial assemblage is

taken up by a movement

that deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial conditions), we say that a machine is released.’

From Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. On the Line. Trans by J. Johnston.

New York: Semiotexte (1982.) p. 19.

open space and be confronted with the trains, but instead to enter into

lines of movement along storefronts and café seating. Meet me at St. Pancras, it’s a destination now.

Dis-identification What might happen on a train? The nostalgic chance

encounters made possible by the concept of the train, its seemingly slow

pace, where towns and countrysides pass outside the windows in one

continuous blur. Who will I meet, what will happen, who will I be? I am

deterritorialized by the train itself and once deterritorialized, I am the becoming-train and as such a passenger. I become the train as it moves,

as I fulfill its function, to travel between one point and another. In this deterritorialization, I become deprived of my own individual code and function within the code of the train. As a passenger, I am merged

within the space of the multiple, the group, moving through smooth

space and time. I am no longer identified, but dis-identified.21 The train

becomes the dis-identification machine22 as it proceeds along its tracks.

Movement is vital both as the train’s function but as the catalyst for the emergence of the train-machine. Movement is the on and off switch of the dis-identification machine. Within the zone of dis-identification, everyday actions and conversation allow for chance juxtapositions and phantom sightings

as passengers are re and deterritorialized with each other. This zone produces a space of exception from daily life, which is so often characterized by an avoidance of interaction with others while moving. At this point, dis-identification occurs on the level of the individual passengers. The group of the passengers remains heterogeneous and

rhizomatic because each passenger is not the same. As a passenger, or a becoming-train, I do not loose all of myself or my code. I am only

deterritorialized at certain sections. Like the wasp that does not become an actual orchid or the orchid that does not become an actual wasp, I do

not become the train. I remain myself, but with broken code. Being a passenger is not two becoming the same, but instead functioning within

the same codes. Dis-identification does not alter, add or remove identity, but is the transference, the movement of code, itself.

DispersalDisperse if disorderly

The meaning of the verb ‘to disperse’ is twofold: it refers both to the action of splitting a gathering of people and to their scattering

over an ample area. Among the new techniques for urban social control

adopted by town councils across the UK in the past decade, the criminal

and civil legal practice of ‘dispersal notices’ is certainly the least visible

23. Human Rights Act

1998, Art.11, 2.

24.In the United King-

dom the use of dispersal

orders is established by

section 4 of the Anti Social Behaviour Act 2003. Available from: http://www.legislation.

gov.uk/acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030038_en_5. [Accessed 18/04/08].

25.Beckett, K. and Herbert, S, Dealing with disorder: social control in

the post-industrial city’

Theoretical Criminology,

Vol.12(1), (2008).

26. Anti Social Behav-

iour Act 2003, Part 4 (6).

27. First-hand experi-

ence with unanswered

requests from Camden

Council.

28. Dispersal notices in Camden. Available from:

http://www.camden.gov.

uk/ccm/content/polic-

ing-and-public-safety/

news/2006/dispersal-notices-in-camden.en.

[Accessed 11/02/08].

and the most contentious.

Since 1998 the right to ‘freedom of peaceful assembly’ (my italics) is followed by the clause that restrictions may be applied ‘by members of the armed forces, of the police or of the administration of

the State,’ in the ‘interests of national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals or

for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’23 ‘Public safety,’

‘disorder’ and ‘morals’ are, to say the least, vague and problematic terms that reflect the equally controversial notion of anti-social behaviour behind the ASBOs24

: both measures appeal to a common understanding

of order that is far from universally shared and that ultimately aims at

excluding the socially marginal from contested public spaces.25

Dispersal notices operate on the urban space by delineating a territory in which the ‘freedom of peaceful assembly’ is suspended in the name of forestalling disorder, which equates to a preventive

criminalization of behaviours that do not fall under the category of criminal offences. Under a dispersal notice a group – that is, two or more individuals – can be requested to leave the zone on the grounds that their behaviour is likely to cause alarm or distress to the community. Not complying with the request becomes then a criminal offence, punishable

by up to three months in prison or a fine of up to £2,500, or both. Dispersal orders can be seen as infrastructures of urban social control that operate both on a temporal and on a territorial level. From

9 p.m. to 6 a.m. dispersal zones create a curfew for individuals under the age of 16, who, if ‘not under the effective control of a parent or a responsible person aged 18 or over’ may be removed to their residence

by a constable in uniform.26 On a territorial level, dispersal zones are

areas of exclusion whose boundaries are publicly named but whose

maps are not easily available.27

There have been several dispersal zones in the borough of Camden since 2003 and the current Camden Town Notice runs from Kentish Town to Euston Road, where it connects to the West End Notice in the ‘first joint dispersal area of its kind in London’: from Camden Town to Oxford Street, to Trafalgar Square, to the Strand and back to Euston Road. If disorderly, prepare to be dispersed from the whole of

Central London.28

EvictionsThe urban condition: suspension of reality.

Ian Sinclair lists residual nostalgia multitude - grunge, smack, crack,

skunk, discarded rubbers, black-glassed massage parlours, begging bowls, flea-bitten dogs, muggers, shunters, fast-food banditry – that do not disappear from the public view just randomly. It becomes a secluded part of the new urban

order, the Radiant City that is still to come, Brussels-connected, Euro-buttered.

A research of the changing urban condition in London 2008 and the King’s Cross area specifically, has drawn the attention to a certain wildness and roughness of the deliberate policy (from developers and council) of evicting the unnecessary particles of the remaining localities. The area, known for its working-class community, industrial

past and black market economies is gradually turning into vassal lands

of landlords and developers. Urban wealth drive acts as cause and

consequence for removal of the poor and the un-useful that contradict

the area’s new face.

Those experiencing an act of eviction are playing a peculiar

role in the cities changing face, as to be forcefully removed, without

ones wish to do so, enacts a ceaseless social war. While benefiting some, it displaces others urban condition - everyday routines and walkways,

familiar views and faces, work and sleeping places, certain zones of comfort. Such evictions for cities ‘renewal’ commitment only intensify the urban inequality visible in the usage and proclamation of the public

and private space.

A serving of a glass of champagne in the longest bar includes

rubbish that has to be taken out. Being the necessary tool for global capitalist production – evictions create lands for further developments avoiding fragile particles. Effectively shadowing the ‘bygone’ habitations de-developers produce cosmetic renewal of the area, community, space

and it’s feeling. Embarked on in the name of progress and beautification such processes remain framed by possible income generated interest and

maximized private profit gained from those who always temporarily and precariously inhabit urban spaces.

The whole mess is underwritten, yet again, by a notional futurology.

Fake surveillance cameras Fake security cameras are non-functional surveillance cameras

designed to fool intruders, or anyone who it is supposedly watching. The

cameras are intentionally placed in a conspicuous location, so passing

people notice them and believe the place to be monitored by closed-

circuit television (CCTV). CCTV is a video camera that transmits a signal (unlike broadcast television, the signal is not openly transmitted) to a specific set of monitors. There are an estimated five million CCTV cameras in England; that’s one for every 12 citizens. Roughly 1,800 cameras watch over London’s railway stations, and another 6,000 permanently peer at commuters on the Underground and London buses. Fake security cameras are a useful way to deter criminals and save

money. Sometimes referred to as dummy security cameras, the devices actually have helped to prevent many crimes. Mounted in high profile, totally visible locations, these cameras are not hooked up to anything,

they mostly operate for a long time on batteries and sometimes have a

few flashing lights or other obvious characteristics to make them look as if they are doing something. Many a would-be robber has changed his or her mind about entering someplace illegally after spotting one of these

dummy security cameras looking right at them. With today’s technology,

an inexperienced thief really has no way to know whether or not he’s

looking at a wireless, state of the art surveillance device or a fake security

camera. Some of them actually pan back and forth, although these require more frequent battery changes. Only sophisticated thieves can tell - at a distance - whether they are being observed by a real security

camera.

Fake security cameras are especially effective in areas that you

expect to be covered by security cameras. For instance, many of the

cameras in subway stations around the world are fake security cameras

and nobody can tell the difference. During hard times, when the crime rates inevitably rose and cities were strapped for cash, the ratio of fake

cameras to real ones was about 2-to-1 in some metropolitan areas.

Knowing that the fake cameras would be regarded as real, the fakes

were sprinkled in among the real ones to provide an extra incentive for

would-be robbers and thieves to practice their trade in another location.

Except for the lack of recorded footage provided by the real cameras,

fake security cameras are almost as effective in reducing crime rates in

subways as the real ones are.

Gasometers Among the iconic symbols of London’s industrial legacy are Battersea Power Station, the turbine hall that became Tate Modern and The Triplet, the three linked gasometers that since 1880 have cast their iron shadows over King’s Cross. These Grade-II listed relics of the gas age are now dismantled, their bones carefully stacked in piles

near their original site where the Channel Tunnel Raillink now stands,

other buildings have been cleared and most unlisted structures no longer

exist. A lone gasometer, ‘Single Gasometer No. 8,’ still looms proud (but uncertain) above the remains of a bygone era; the stretch of goodsyards, workshops and once magnificent buildings forced into semi-dereliction await the ambitious regeneration by the developers.

With its gasometers, empty warehouses and cobbled streets,

King’s Cross was until recently a gritty urban anachronism, an

anarchic island of notoriety, in contrast to the aesthetically and socially

regulated spaces of central London. Its neglected sites of industrial ruin accommodated the transgressive and playful activities of the notorious

King’s Cross area. By offering an alternative aesthetic to the highly controlled spaces of the city, the deterioration of the area evoked a sense

of disorder, possibility and fragmented traces of the past.

Urban space production is a machine of control, policing,

29. Simmel, G. ‘The Ruin’ from Georg Sim-

mel, 1858-1918: A Col-

lection of Essays trans.

K. Wolff. Ohio: Ohio Press, 1959.

30. ibid.

31. Liebskind, D. ‘Traces of The Unborn.’ Archi-

tecture and Revolution

Ed. N. Leach, Routledge (1999) p.127.

planning regulations, zoning and regulating flows. Planners and developers rationalise the landscape in a process of ordering, planning

routes and setting out zones for specific purposes. In this space of order and utility, the functionless becomes extraneous, ‘other’ and undesirable. Having no place in the planned urban space, the ‘wasteland’ of industrial ruins confound our notions about use and value from the margins.

Through their classification as ruin, these spaces and objects escape their original purpose for being and are liberated from the constraints

of value or function. Thus becoming an embodied critique of the ideals

which champion the virtues of a seamless, regulated urban space.

Every structure is inscribed with its own finitude but ‘so long as we can speak of a ruin at all and not a mere heap of stones this

power does not sink the work of man into the formlessness of mere

matter.’29 Georg Simmel presents the ruin as a meaningful entity, not

the complete triumph of nature over man, but a moment of fragility

between persistence and decay. It is precisely their fragmentary nature

and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins meaningful. Through architecture and development, however, man can once again manifest

‘the most sublime victory of the human spirit over nature.’30

In his essay, ‘Traces of the unborn,’ Daniel Liebskind describes his project of resistance to the erasure of history in terms of architecture

and city planning, identifying a ‘need in every society for icons which constitute a particular area the structures which form the texture of

living memory.’31

The developments at King’s Cross, under the eyes

of English Heritage and Camden Council, have to an extent revered

the icons, building the future on the bones of the past. The original

St. Pancras Station building has been restored and converted to luxury loft apartments and the The Triplet will be ressurrected as the trendy

decoration of an apartment building. Successfully, the developers have reassigned the structures’ functions so they can exist in the controlled

new urban space.

As ‘Single Gasometer No.8’ keeps watch over the wasteland it is now fenced in and under surveillance. Like the rest of the undesirables in the area it might be moved along or if the developers proposal goes

through it will have a function as a carpark and become part of the

new King’s Cross; useful, safe, regulated and pleasant enough for the commuters on their way from the train to the office.

Gentrification ‘Gentrification’ was coined by the sociologist, Ruth Glass in London 1964: ‘One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle-classes - upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages - two rooms up and two down - have been taken over,

when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive

32. Glass, R. Aspects of Change in London. Ed. Centre for Urban Stud-

ies. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964.

33. Available from:

http://www.islington.

gov.uk/Environment/

Planning/Major-Schemes/KingsCross/[Accessed 18/04/08].

34. Available from: http://kingscross.argent-

group.plc.uk/ [Accessed

18/04/08].

35. Brooks, D. Bobos in Paradise: The New Up-

per Class and How They

Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

36. ‘Creative Class’ is de-

fined as the people who work in information-age

economic sectors and in

industries driven

by innovation and talent.

37. Florida, R. The

Rise of the Creative

Class…And How It’s

Transforming Work,

Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

38. Smith, N. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London: Routledge, (1996).

residences....Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are

displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.’32

Today, the term gentrification and its causes are perceived more broadly. A social, economic and cultural phenomenon, gentrification is the colonisation by the middle-class and high-income groups of areas

of decline often in working-class neighbourhoods whose communities

are subsequently displaced, priced-out by higher rents. A topdown

action mediated by institutions and social agents such as urban policy

makers, developers, and banks the ‘regeneration’ and ‘renewal’ of the demonized, dystopian inner-city is the spatial and social restructuring space in the interests of the elite and in the name of progress.

King’s Cross is undergoing one of the largest and most complex

programmes of planning and development led regeneration in Europe33

.

Here Argent, the developers, are constructing a huge area, north West

of the new St. Pancras International, their website advertises ‘ten new spaces, 20 new streets, ‘home zones,’ three new bridges across the Regent’s Canal and more than 400 trees, represent a real step change in the quality of the public realm at King’s Cross with high quality

and genuinely public new streets and open spaces.’34 One area will be

devoted to corporate offices and like any gentrification hotspot a cultural zone is planned with Central St. Martins new campus as its focus and large parts of the site will be devoted to housing. The Argent rhetoric

and that of the many other developments around London, spurred on by the 2012 Olympic games, is a celebration of the gentrified city. Once a gritty, industrial, red-light district of London, today’s King’s Cross has been conquered by surveillance cameras, business men and soy mocha

latte drinking bourgeois-bohemians.35

Urban Renewal guru Richard Florida argues that if you want to

attract growth and prosperity, you need to turn your city into the kind of

place that ‘the creative class’36 will want to live in. Once you attract these yuppies/creatives/bohos Florida argues, the employers and investors will

soon follow.37 Seeking out the run-down neighborhoods and turning them

bobo friendly, complete with noodle-bars, organic supermarkets, clubs,

art galleries, and sidewalk cafes is his recipe for prosperity. According

to Neil Smith, this triumphant rhetoric of gentrification works from a colonial, frontier narrative of conquest by upscale gentrifiers, bringing development and civilization, to the ‘urban wilderness.’38

However, before

this ‘wilderness’ can be tamed, the ‘natives’ and other undesirables must be removed and with this removal, a loss of identity and sense of place,

replaced with the globalised homogeneity of a ‘generic city.’ The sustainability of a constanly gentrifying city is questionable.

Gentrification is a process of reuse and recycling rather than one of production and there will come a point when the ‘developing’ city will consume itself when it runs out of places to conquer. We may one day see a total

displacement of populations from the high-rent, homogonised, sanitised

centre of London, afterall when a place gets boring even rich people leave.

glamour1. An irresistable alluring quality that soemthing possesses by virtue of

seeming much more exciting, romantic or fashionable than ordinary

things.39

2. ‘Meet me at St. Pancras International, the destination station.’ An imagined space far removed from its fundamental functionality.

3. Elevation of a dreamscape.

4. A move away from mobility in order to inaugurate an epicenter of consumerism.

5. The commercialisation of exclusivity.

6. The quality of being fascinatingly, if perhaps falsely, attractive.40

7. ‘Mundane, everyday consumer goods become associated with luxury, exotica, beauty and romance with original or functional ‘use’ increasingly difficult to decipher.’41

8. The imaging of a space associated with decadence and romance.

9. Magic enchantment. 10. The installation of The Meeting Place, a moment when two bodies part amidst a intensity of emotion.

11. Grandiosing of a space associated with mundane activities.12. A place to confirm and attain cultural capital.13. Clinging onto the image of romantic Paris.14. Desirability.15. ‘It’s taken an enormous amount of long-term planning, but I think we’ve got a station every bit as glamorous as New York’s Grand Central, with the bonus that here you can see the trains,’ Rob Holden, chief

executive of London and Continental Railways.

Iconoclastic As Baudrillard argues in his article Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual

Reality,42

the orgy of images that collapses into the contemporary sphere

becomes meaningless since images seem to present a void signification. The question raised is clear, are we becoming iconoclasts?

43 Images only

refer to images and no longer to their sign: the object they were related to.

Are we living in a virtual reality? A Blade Runner44

environment where the

replicants are transformed in a fake world that embraces us? The artifice is now in the essence of the image since it becomes the mirror of this

invented and much more Occidental reality. The simulacrum is then the basis of the everyday life and hypnotizes people with its conceptualised friend: the seduction. In his recording La Selva, composed by recordings

from La Selva rainforest in Costa Rica, Francisco Lopez presents a

39. Encarta World Eng-

lish Dictionary

40. Chambers 21st Century Dictionary

41. Featherstone, M. ‘Lifestyle and Consumer Culture’ From The Con-

sumer Society Reader. Ed. M. Lee. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. p. 94.

42. Baudrillard, Jean, The Conspiracy of

Art, London: Mit Press, (2005).

43. Term used by Baudrillard when refer-ring to the fact that im-

ages, as in the Byzantine time, do not refer to any

meaning. They are fake

and by this denied.

44. Blade Runner (1982) Directed by Ridl Scott; written by H. Fancher and D. Peoples; based on the novel by

Philip K. Dick. Warner Brothers, 112mins. (Video: VHS).

non manipulated record45

of the authentic sounds of this rainforest.

When he performed it, the critique of the audience was that the record

was not realistic enough. They could not establish a relationship between

the disorganised assemblage of noises they heard and the sounds that

they expected a rainforest to generate. The fallacy of this reality, pre-

established due to the contemporary tendency to produce ‘Sounds of Nature’ CDs, shows this Hyper-reality we live in without realising.

What does St. Pancras station want to portray? Located in King’s Cross it seems to be a micro-cosmos inside a much wider and

complex area that embraces diverse communities, local shops and not

too many croissant and champagne everyday life. A will to re-code the urban

neighbourhood by a unique transport structure yet not used by many

residents. The station performs a reality of speed and connection with

Paris as a central point of European contemporary life while it covers the essence of the zone. Wandering in King’s Cross, St. Pancras seems to be the only ‘real’ element because promoted and seen. Moreover its romantic connotations with the moto ‘Meet me in St. Pancras’ presents the station and

so the area as a place of encounter, where travellers and people of the

world could meet in elegant and modern cafés. An image performed by the visual as well as the rhetoric that accompanies the station. A reality

shown in the media that veils not only social problems but its realities

where prostitutes, local communities, small shops, drug dealers and charity

centres interact with architects, bobos and anarchist libraries. An attempt

to perform a real urban King’s Cross through an iconoclastic symbol.

Intelligence In general terms, intelligence is understood as the ability to

acquire and apply knowledge and skills. Paul Michael Privateer has traced the social history of intelligence from Greek culture to today’s smart technologies and investigated the role of intelligence as a social

ordering tool. ‘Fashioned largely by economic forces, the economy of intelligence was a multidiscursive and ‘multidirectional’ force that created ideological cohesions between ideas of capitalism, the new nation state,

the scientific method, and the social value of applied material technologies. These collaborations not only produced new ways of knowing the

world but began their institutionalization.’46 The conglomerate of

economy, science and nation-states continually produces a demand for

applications of ‘intelligence.’ Today’s integration of this term is manifested in the security apparatus of what Michel Foucault has included in his concept of ‘control society,’ which Gilles Deleuze has developed even further emphasizing technological developments: ‘[…] control societies function with a third generation of machines, with

information technology and computers, where the passive danger

is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination. This

45. In the sense he did not do editing work.

46. Privateer, P. M. Inventing Intelligence a

Social History of Smart. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. p. 26.

47. Deleuze, G. Negotia-

tions, 1972-1990. Euro-

pean Perspectives. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995. p. 180.

48. Cf. “Word on the street ... they’re

listening”. Times

online, 26 November, 2006. Available from: http://www.timesonline.

co.uk/tol/news/uk/arti-

cle650166.ece [Accessed 12/04/2008].

49. Available from: http://www.intelligence.

gov.uk/ [Accessed

12/04/2008].

technological development is more deeply rooted in a mutation of

capitalism.’47

Now, fifteen years after this quote was published, this third generation of machines is referred to as ‘smart technologies’, which are also implemented in operating systems supporting surveillance and

tracking strategies.

It has as well been roughly fifteen years that CCTV (Closed Circuit Television) has been made available on a broad basis. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) was implemented in form of Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), which does not merely make supervision of congestion charge areas possible but also monitoring of

traffic flows and tracking of cars. In Dutch CCTV, artificial intelligence has been implemented in the form of a special kind of speech

recognition; This detects aggressiveness by way of analysing changes in the speakers’ voices. London police, transport officials, and councils are interested in implementing speech recognition before the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.48 The London Borough of Newham implemented a biometrical identifier – a facial recognition – in their borough -wide CCTV system (which is also voluntarily used in Frankfurt to support border control). Furthermore, one of the future CCTV implications will be to recognise people by their unique way of walking. In Britain, more than 4.2 million of CCTV systems reveal a large industry concerned with research, development, implementation, operation and administration; the security apparatus is thus enormous economic factor.

Business Intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term encompassing concepts and methods to support and improve decision-making on fact-

based analyses. It signifies application, technologies, and practices for the analysis, collection, integration, and presentation of business informa-

tion and sometimes also to the information itself. This can also be seen

in terms of politics where ‘intelligence’ has penetrated the governmental security apparatus.

The Cabinet Office maps out their Intelligence Community, the Central Intelligence Machinery of the United Kingdom, online.49

The Intelligence and Security Agencies encompass the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), aka MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the Security Service, aka MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5). Further annexed are the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC).

Invisibility King’s Cross is rich in social forces that are not apparent on

the surface. While this group includes the human infrastructure such as

cleaners and other maintainence crews of the station, it also encompasses

the myriad of people—and types of people who no longer dwell in

King’s Cross. They are gone but their traces still impact the area.

This haunting happens in two forms: memory and officially recognized ghosts. For example, the barber on Caledonian road fondly remembers

the shenanigans of a clever, resident non-prostitute who conned her

clients out of their money without rendering a service; he can still picture her outside of his shop’s window. More dramatically, a few ‘listed’ buildings on the site of nightclubs such as Canvas have been boarded

up by the City of London for centuries, officially due to ghosts. These historic warehouse are protected from demolition yet cannot be occupied

due to these commonly accepted residual paranormal presences. As the

head of security of the site says: ‘Everyone knows there are ghosts in there. You can’t be afraid of ghosts.’

Labour (Immaterial) One thing we have noticed is an ‘invisibilty’ of the labour force both, in constructing the station and working in the station. This is

defined by the closing off of the areas of construction and the distribution of service employees throughout the station, in such a way that most people

just seem to be moving through the station (ie – there are no information kiosks, just people who walk around and can answer questions, there

are no garbage bins, just cleaning staff on constant trash pick-up duty). But isn’t this a visual reflection of the rise of the importance and power of immaterial labour? The rise of immaterial labour marks a distinctive

shift away from manual, production based labour to those of knowledge,

technology and service. In this sense, the important work is usually

the ‘idea’ work, what can be marketed, the before and after images, the unveiling of the finished product. This is visually represented by the constant bombardment of construction sites with sketches of what

something will look like when it is complete, as opposed to images of the

work in progress.

Linear Linearity as an ordering principle. Renaissance rationality. The means of controlling flows. Controlling bodies in motion. No room for disorder, no open spaces, no lingering, no grand arrival space. Restricted

socaility. As Richard Sennet recognises, in modern cities although bodies pass one another at a high rate, the level of sociability is significantly reduced. The corridors of the station enforce a journey overlooked with

commerce. Places to spend proliferate the space. Emphasis on lived relations is diminished instead transferred to relations with objects. The

linear dimensions ensure this relationship is entered into.

East Midlands Eurostar

East Midlands Eurostar

East Midlands Eurostar

East Midlands Eurostar The Embrace Paul Day

First Capital Connect Eurostar

First Capital Connect Eurostar Carluccio’s

C h a m p a g n e B a r

Sir John BejemanWest Corwall Camden WHSmiths Pasty Co. Food

Metropolis Metropolises hold several key issues like core, hub, and cosmopolitan. Firstly metropolis is a core of a larger area, including

a suburban part, so that it can hold a great population that consists of

workers for itself. It is a highly intense city, able to function as a centre

of business. At the same time, metropolis does not have enough space

for everyone to live their daily life. For that reason, people commute to

metropolis from the suburbs where the overflowed population settles, taking sometimes more than an hour every day. The population of

metropolis in day time and night time shows a sharp difference, and

transportation changes accordingly centred on rush hours. The second

aspect of metropolis is as a hub connected to other metropolises. They

often have more than one airport and international rail stations in

their suburbs, creating a transportation web between metropolises and

abbreviation of smaller cities around these. In these transportation

facilities, they even have virtual national borders. Passengers can go through passport control in the station to depart, and while physically

crossing boundaries, they just take coffee in their seats. This situation is a

result of seeking convenience mainly for business people for whom saving

time situates a top priority. The last issue of metropolis is cosmopolitan,

though the level of diversity depends on the historical and geographical

background of cities. In metropolis, the conversations in several languages

fly about on a daily basis, and people from different backgrounds share the same place and the same moment, because transportation carries

not just business people but their families, students, and travellers as well.

Furthermore, there might be another way to traverse borders for those

who cannot afford the official way. After immigrating, they compose communities perhaps even without noticing, and also create inside and

outside of community that sometimes seems to be ‘closed’ for people from outside. In metropolis, there is a magnetic attraction working. It

draws people and does not part with them easily. This is why metropolis

keeps holding large populations and creates its suburbs.

Oyster Card Oyster card is the brand name for the electronic ticketing system used on Transport For London (TFL) and some National Rail Services in Greater London. The service has been implemented, and is currently operated by TFL, in conjunction with EDS and Cubic Transport Systems. Oyster cards use radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to provide a contactless smartcard, with the intention of

maximising efficiency at ticket gates and minimising the use of paper. The card acts as an aerial, whilst the reader acts as a receiver. The card

transmits data whenever it comes within range of a receiver, with a

standard range of 8 cm. Following a recent extension of EU privacy

laws, RFID has come under the regulation of GS1, an industry body which seeks to standardise and regulate asset identification systems. Oyster cards use an asynchronous system, with balance and ticket data held on the card (as opposed to a central database). Data from the card is intermittently backed up to a central database, allowing personally identifiable access to a passengers previous 8 weeks of travelling with the card. There are pay as you go and season ticket

versions of the card; with the latter additionally storing name, address and credit card details on the card itself.

Approx 10million Oyster cards have been issued, of which 5 million are reported to be in regular use.

50

Whilst the Oyster card has primarily been introduced under the auspices of consumer convenience; the potential for this technology to operate as an integral component of the apparatus of disciplinary power

over a subject, is what prompts many concerns over its implementation

in the urban order. An interrelated problem, however, is that this threat

also generates many conspiracy theories and misinformation concerning

the technology.

According to information acquired51 from TFL under the

Freedom of Information Act (2000), the following information obtained from Oyster cards is used for analysis by TFL:

50. Oyster data use rises in clime clamp-

down. Available from:

http://www.guardian.

co.uk/technology/2006/mar/13/news.freedo-

mofinformation [Ac-

cessed 11/04/08].

51. ibid.

• How many people pass through the ticket barriers at London Underground stations.

• The number of people travelling from one station to another at

different times of day.

• The time it takes for customers to travel from the start station to the

end station of their journey.

Ostensibly this data is used for improving transport services, yet the possibility of it being personally identifiable, raises the prospect of data mining for anti-terrorism or marketing purposes.

For instance, there have been 436 requests from the police for Oyster card information. Of these, 409 requests were granted and the data was released to the police.

52 An extension of this access has also

been sought by British Security services.53

The Oyster card has expanded beyond the transportation sphere, with an allusion to possible marketing potential, via the introduction of

the Barclays Pulse One card. This is a combined conventional credit card, Oyster card and contactless credit card. In the current implementation, payment and Oyster functionality remain separate, yet this was despite ambitions for integration being previously apparent.

54

The use of RFID means that in principle anyone can read the contents of an Oyster card. The card transmits data whenever it is in range of a receiver, and there is no authorisation process to initiate this

procedure. The cards operate on the licence free frequency of 13.56

MHz, and therefore be read be read by anyone who chooses to operate a legally obtainable receiver.

Consequently, the spectre of Foucault’s conception of

panopticism looms prominently when considering the Oyster card. Whilst the card can be interpreted as an active machination of power,

much of the concern generated by it, is the result of the potential for

unregulated exchange of personally sensitive information enabled

by the standardised and interoperable technologies upon which it is

implemented. As Foucault states: ‘the disciplines must increase the effect of utility proper to the multiplicities, so that each is made more useful

than the simple sum of its elements.’55

Foucault also argues that powers seek to ‘reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less

manageable than a unity … that is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion.’56

As a tool for managing the convoy of

a multiplicity through the TFL system, the regulation and control enabled by the data the Oyster card produces, would appear to make this apparent.

Retail The station is a curious entity - run by one company yet with

many others operating within it. The main concourse serves as a link

52. Oyster data use rises in crime clap-

down. Available from:

http://www.guardian.

co.uk/technology/2006/mar/13/news.freedo-

mofinformation [Ac-

cessed 11/04/08].

53. See: MI5 seeks powers to trawl records

in new terror hunt. Avail-

able from: http://www.

guardian.co.uk/

uk/2008/mar/16/uksecurity.terrorism [Ac-

cessed 11/04/08].

54. See: Tfl Shelves Oyster e-money. Available from:

http://www.theregister.

co.uk/2006/05/09/oys-ter_smartcard_shelved

[Accessed 11/04/08].

55. Foucault, M. Panop-

ticism from The Foucault

Reader ed. P. Rabinow. London: Penguin Books, 1984. p. 208.

56. ibid.

between various transport routes, from domestic trains and the Eurostar

to the Underground and bus networks. The main concourse’s function

is now no longer as a waiting area but as a shopping arcade. Whilst

older stations still retain this function, at St. Pancras the station has been designed so that it maximises the retail opportunity.

The retail outlets are carefully picked so as not to cause conflict and competition within the station - for example, WH Smiths take care of all the newsagent duties. Many of these shops will have gained the lease terms due to owning shops in other stations, and therefore

having a proven track record; or by possibly brokering deals that allow them to operate in this high profile station by also operating in a less successful station. The types of shop also differ from most stations, with

fewer retailers that offer products specifically for travellers and even commuters. The station has dictated what type of customers it should

have in selecting these retailers rather than continuing with the more

universal goods offered in other stations.

Undoubtedly the nature of online retail has altered what

has been desired from a retail outlet in a station. For a long time the

entertainment industry could find a lucrative market offering goods for portable devices such as compact disc players; however, the advent of downloading has proven this to be less desirable and now music and film retailers are going out of business. It is possible the operating company

was aware of this precarious industry, and decided against having such

an outlet in the station, or perhaps none came forward to bid to be

involved in this venture.

St. Pancras International also presents a significant and radical overhaul in snacking and food outlets associated with travel, where the

rise in coffee shops has made these outlets ubiquitous, and in situations

where the station provides a more middle class eating experience (to reflect its customers). Gone are the McDonalds and Burger Kings; instead we have organic burger stalls, which surely must make the station’s eateries

some of the most expensive around. Also, the amount of café seats far outnumber those in any other station, where counter service is more

prevalent and few places have their own seating areas. The customer was

expected to buy their food and find their own place to eat or wait until they boarded the train. This is the start of a new trend that will no doubt

be echoed in future stations. Indeed the facilities reported at the new

terminal 5 building in Heathrow are perhaps a step further in making food

outlets sites of class division with exclusive restaurants by celebrity chefs.

A significant shift in the retail aspirations of the station is represented by the focus on the champagne bar. Whereas previously one

of the key features of railway stations up and down the country were

the pubs that adjoin the station (often with descriptive names such as the railway tavern), the station has opted for a classier, or ‘continental,’ experience. There is a pub still waiting to be built but is tucked away

in the corner of the station, and can’t hope to have the same amount

of character as those other decades old establishments. The station has

moved away from the fast retail of other stations and has aspired to

create a station in which to spend time creating an upmarket shopping

experience.

SimplificationOne cannot testify an event during its perception. The necessary delay between the retinal impression, the

interpretation of the image and its public witnessing are the base of

the relation between knowledge construction and visual representation.

Telecommunication technologies and automated sensing fill this delay, providing an extremely elevated number of digital images and data,

many directly accessible to the public.

London St. Pancras is the set of a proliferation of these automated visual representations: at every corner, on every beam,

in every remote recess of the station and in the spaces surrounding

it a number of close-circuit television cameras constantly sense the

movements of the inhabitants and visitors of the station. This remote-

sensing system operates within a controlled range of radio frequency

allocations, a spectrum of specialised use of the electro-magnetic field. Overlaps and interferences are to be avoided. The images they register often will remain invisible, drawn directly into series of digital archival

systems and dispersed back-ups and redundant networks, using other

frequencies, other segments of the spectrum. Their invisibility is there

to provide the inhabitants and visitors of the station with a sense of off-

set security and control. Their invisibility is also a negative mark of the

automated ways by which cohabitation in this part of London operates. The ongoing digital archive that they form is embedded in a large set of

simplifying techniques that ensconce the current state of affairs of public

life in the major Western European city.

It is difficult to discern the origin and trajectories of the transformations that are re-shaping the physical structures of the cities

we inhabit: the contemporary city is a constantly re-organising field of forces in movement, a specific combination of transformation processes in dynamic combination. Today the idea of the city as a repository of

long-term political, economic, social and cultural processes presents itself

as one with the hierarchical set of technical organisation modalities that

have shaped and regulated it in large and homogeneous compartments

and sectors. The unprecedented growth of the 20th Century city has been accompanied by a vast remodelling of its architectures, infrastructural

nodes, control and management procedures. The railways system that

had in London St. Pancras and King’s Cross a major hub have helped in a major way to establish in the 20th Century an unprecedented technical

achievement, guaranteeing the turbulent growth and prosperity of

the largest European metropolis. And while doing this they have also

established the form of the industrial landscape as a mirror of the

modern London. A closer look at the transformation process that mark the

contemporary city shows them at odds with the mainstay of the

equivalence between the organisational framework of modernity and

the morphological structures of its material landscapes. The equivalence

between the form of the built environment, its management techniques

procedures and protocols, and the forms of the societies that inhabit

London, appears now to be undergoing a process of shifts, offsets and disjunctions. The frames, limits, borders and separations that

characterise the modern architectural backdrop of London, as opposed to the mixtures, overlaps and vitality of its original structures, are

not only a physical marker of the simplified systems that build up its complex polity. London’s infrastructures reverberate with the long growl of technical control and management techniques. The construction of

the new international gateways of London St. Pancras and Heathrow seems to accelerate the flows into and out of the city, and the engineering techniques set in motion to manage these flows accelerate in their turn the separation and distinction of the different paths.

One could probably say that the way London is changing through the implementation of its new infrastructural network of international

transportation, both London St. Pancras and the extension of Heathrow, is by means of simplification, differentiation and separation of flows. By allocating specialised spaces and tracks to different sets of fluxes, the new technological environment that accompanies the construction of these

two gateways, London is also re-organising its internal flows of people, information, materials. The increasing number of visitors and travellers

demands a complex organisation of their paths, a dynamic order set in

motion not to cross each-others ways. No clogs, interruptions, blockages can interfere with the general mobilisation. The set of relay-controls and

signals that guided trains in the 19th and 20th Centuries are now being extended to the movements of passengers and citizens by way of the omni-present CCTV cameras. Their presence modulates, controls and mitigates turbulences in the flows of people in and across the station, providing a reduction of friction and an increase in security. A security

which is not an immediately material one, a set of controls which are

not perceivable at once. It appears that this level of invisibility of the

archives that inform, structure and guide the operation of the station,

and of the airport also informs the many transformation patterns that

are re-shaping the cities we inhabit.

While perceiving the simplified life of this part of London, we were confronted with the difficulties that accompany any attempt to represent the contemporary city and testify of its ongoing processes

of construction, transformation, improvement, development. We

were facing the opacity of the technical processes that inform our

infrastructures, and the ways that their operation is enfolding our public

lives. By simplifying our cities, by allocating one place for every flow and setting everything in its place, we are extending the expert and sectorial

rationalities that regulate infrastructues to the ways we manage our

cohabitation.

ThreatThe current terrorism threat level is Severe.

57

Threat is a term that has splintered in cultural meaning since

the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 07/07. No longer associated with temporary situations of conflict, conditions of threat have become an increasingly normalised feature of contemporary urban living. As part

of the government’s counter terrorism strategy, the articulation of a

National Threat Level is primarily aimed at security practitioners working across the Critical National Infrastructure, but also filters into the public domain through the media, the workplace and through transport.

58

For the three bombers who, having journeyed from Leeds, initiated the 2005 attack on two London tube trains and a bus, King’s Cross acted as an entry point into the city. King’s Cross simultaneously

entered the public consciousness both as a terrorist target and as a site

of communal repair in the aftermath of the bombings. In reaction to a

growing atmosphere of risk, from 1st August 2006 information on the terrorist threat level was made publically available by the Home Office.59

The allocation of a specified threat level can be seen as being utilised here as a tool for understanding relationships with place and for framing

strategies of spatial management.

While the vocabulary of Threat is present throughout the visual

culture of London’s Underground tube stations, not only in warnings to observe and report suspicious behaviour but also to secure one’s own

Oyster card and belongings, such warnings are neither readily visible nor audible in St. Pancras Station. The station aims to circumvent the need to produce anxious subjects through the exclusive, frivolous nature

of its commercial services and the ‘museumisation’ of its spaces. Security announcements are infrequent and moments of disruption or heavy

crowding are sparse. Users of the station are made to feel literally secure

as they are removed from the context of travel and diverted towards

practices of consumption.

Throughout its conversations with the area, the group has experienced

stoppages and silences - excuse-laden e-mails and standardised responses.

We have encountered junctures where information flows cease and ‘dialogue’ breaks down (if it ever really occurred). The decision to relay information on national security to the public coincides with ever-

57. Available from:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/security/current-

threat-level/ [Accessed

04/04/08].

58. Reid, J. Threat

Levels: The System to Assess Threat from Inter-

national Terrorism’, The

Stationary Office (TSO), London, July (2006) p. 2.

59. Available from:

http://security.homeof-

fice.gov.uk/counter-terrorism-strategy/

about-the-strategy/

threat-levels/ [Accessed

04/04/0].

tightening restrictions on the level of information exchange permissible

between bodies and security agencies, organisations and government.

Anti-terrorist hotlines present the semblance of a direct line

of communication between the individual (who has become highly fetishised due to the singular embodiment of the suicide bomber) and these agencies. Like all major sites of commerce and travel evolving today, St. Pancras Station performs personalisation: in its case through branding, bronze statuary (and other body-oriented exhibitions) and specialised retail opportunities.

The language of threat, whether highly visible or discreet, is

currency for advocating public knowledge and non-knowledge, vigilance

but never panic, self-surveillance and docility, dialogue and censorship.

Urban Order and Renewal London is ever changing and has been since it was first settled; the previous order being changed from the village, town and into the city

that it has become. From pre-Celtic times, through Roman, Saxon, and Norman conquests it has been a place where some power has come to rest, but not until the 13th century has it taken on its importance as the

administrative centre of England.

Other parts of England, Wales and Scotland have seen commercial and political upheaval but with the Act of Union in 1707 between England and Scotland and in 1800 between England and Ireland, all of the political power went to London. This was the time that England colonised the world; by 1900 one quarter of the land mass and one fifth of the world population was under British rule. London was a reflection of the political imperialism present throughout the world. The City of London, which is based around the commercial and finance sector today, was and still is an enclosed area in which the elite of Britain can work, live and play. The people who were not from the same class (Bourgeoisie) or religion (Protestant) were and still are excluded from living in that area. This has seen the development of

ghettos in the 15th and 16

th centuries beyond the city walls in areas

such as Covent Garden, Bethnal Green and Bermondsey and even the political elite having to set up the national parliament at Westminster

outside of the walls. These ghettos were moved as waves of migrants

or immigrants came into London and encroached on the elites. These ghettos are still in short reach of the City but none are within the City

walls.

The changing face of London can be seen most starkly in King’s Cross. Once a run down area, (some say deliberately by developers) King’s Cross is now the rail hub for Europe. The land handed over to

the consortium of developers has risen in value over the last 15 years

and is one of the largest developments in London. We will see new

housing, office and business development in the coming years. The social restructuring has seen the rise of gated communities in the area,

social control of people who exhibit anti-social behaviour (these expand as new categories are developed in the Sun Newspaper, the Mail etc.) and social engineering of previously working class neighbourhoods into

more middle class areas. In the last council elections the borough moved

from New Labour to Tory/ Liberal control. Does anything really change? New migrants/emigrants are seen as a threat to the social well being of previous migrants/emigrants. The

Celts saw the Romans as a threat and burnt the Roman city of London down. They were eventually defeated but the next wave was the Saxons, then the Normans. As the city developed and the English/British Empire expanded, the Catholics, mainly Irish, were excluded from living in the

city of London, and they settled in areas such as Soho or little Tipperary, Covent Garden or Little Dublin, Bethnal Green and Bermondsey. When the slums were cleared in Central London new migrants from Russia and Eastern Europe settled in the late 1880s. Scare stories about Irish Fenians, Jewish Russian anarchists, and now today the Muslim threat seem to go hand in hand with each new immigration wave. Nobody ever asks what caused the immigration in the first place? There always seems an undercurrent of people who are deemed

to have anti social behaviour and are targeted by the establishment. In

many ways it seems that the modern city is being redesigned so that

people are scared to engage with other people, with gated communities

becoming more commonplace. The increasingly pervasive police

power takes away individual and community responsibility creating

an authoritarian state ruled from the centre. Is this the continuation of

walled cities in Britain? Keep the ‘stranger’ out. Then act bewildered when the ‘strangers’ try to break the walls down. Are we only going to have defensive communities and not engage with each other and look at

ways of uniting for a positive future for people in Britain and throughout the world?

ContributorsOrianna Cacchione • Jurga Daubaraite • Mara Ferreri

Sarah Kazi • Amal Khalaf • Ella Levitt Alistair McDonald • Peter Middleton • Margit Neuhold

Gareth Painter • John Palmesino • Cleo Roberts Irit Rogoff • Claudia Segura Campins • Nicola Sim

Midori Takeuchi • Rita Tojal • Pati Vardhami

AcknowledgementsAlbert Beal • Kuan Han Chu • Phil Condon

Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths CollegeChris Dobson • Paul Fairman • Elizabeth • Dominique Ellis

Housmans Bookshop Jaffar from the Bahrain Community Centre

Juan Carlos • Juanito

Bernard KeenanKing’s Cross Continental Stores

King’s Cross Neighborhood CommunityJudith Leung • Cheung Chin Lin • Shing Chi LiuGran Sasso • Florian Schneider • Stephan Schulte

Street Wardens of Camden CouncilBob Stuckey • Tony and Peter Barbers

Triantafylopoulos • Saluius Uzpelkis • Hong Chi Ying