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In Enduring Innocence, Keller Easterling
tells the stories of outlaw "spatial products"
-- resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains,
golf courses, ports, and other hybrid spaces that exist
outside normal constituencies and jurisdictions -- in difficult
political situations around the world. These spaces -- familiar
commercial formulas of retail, business, and trade -- aspire
to be worlds unto themselves, self-reflective and innocent
of politics. But as Easterling shows, these enclaves can
become political pawns and objects of contention. Jurisdictionally
ambiguous, they are imbued with myths, desires, and symbolic
capital. Their hilarious and dangerous masquerades often
mix quite easily with the cunning of political platforms.
Easterling argues that the study of such "real estate
cocktails" provides vivid evidence of the market's
weakness, resilience, or violence.
Enduring Innocence collects six stories
of spatial products and their potential predicaments: cruise
ship tourism in North Korea; high-tech agricultural formations
in Spain (which have reignited labor wars and piracy in
the Mediterranean); hyberbolic forms of sovereignty in commercial
and spiritual organizations shared by gurus and golf celebrities;
automated global ports; microwave urbanism in South Asian
IT enclaves; and the global industry of building demolition
that suggests urban warfare. These regimes of nonnational
sovereignty, writes Easterling, "move around the world
like weather fronts"; she focuses not on their blending
-- their global connectivity -- but on their segregation
and the cultural collisions that ensue.
Enduring Innocence resists the dream
of one globally legible world found in many architectural
discourses on globalization. Instead, Easterling's consideration
of these segregated worlds provides new tools for practitioners
sensitive to the political composition of urban landscapes.
Keller Easterling is Assistant Professor
of Architecture at Yale University. She is the author of
Organization Space (MIT Press, 1999).
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