REVOLT AND CRISIS IN GREECE
and impersonal conditions of virtual networks of information. “The relativity of space,” writes Doreen Massey, …with the opening means that the space always contains an unexpected degree, unpredictable. So, apart from the edges that do not meet, the place always involves an element of ‘chaos’ (not specified by the system). This is a ‘mess’ created by those accidental confrontations, those random separations, the often paradoxical nature of geographical formations in which some special orbits intertwine, and sometimes interact. The space, in other words, is inherently ‘cleft.’ Perhaps, above all, given the prevailing attitudes, the space is not surface. (2001: 34)
It therefore makes sense for someone to insist on a focus on this negativity. Space is not a surface (as illustrated by Weizman) because the city is not the seat of the contract alone. Space is discontinuities, gaps, but above all, it is the very relationships that it hosts and the “chaos” resulting from them. Urban densities indicate that they give space to relationships that do not fit the terms of the social contract and for this reason they have been fought historically and continue to be so. And they seem to create their own system of law; some system that has long ago cut its ties to the natural documentation but is in no case Singular. It is a multiple law of conflict and encounter and, in this sense, a concept of law that is constantly under question and mutation. And, within the infinity of this property, the densities in question are of unique value for the oppressed. Because these densities are where “exception” eventually finds refuge; where possibility is given to “minority” sexual preferences to manifest themselves, to criminals of all types to structure their own public sphere and to political spaces to establish their own sacrosanct arenas. … AND THE EXTREME URBAN MAKEOVER
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This is the city-jungle that frightens. And in the face of this fear the bulldozer often takes charge. Either through normalising non-beneficial and non-productive conceptually empty territories in Eleonas,15 in the colonial logic of commercial gain, or through destroying buildings thanks to the unique ability of armoured D-9 vehicles (as in the refugee camp of Jenin) or simply by demolishing hubs of political resistance (see the recent example of the Ungdomshuset squat in Copenhagen). The remnants of these operations often show us that this destruction was in itself the aim, rather than a means to implement a plan (as the rubble of the demolished occupation Santa Barbara squat in Patisia, Athens, will remind us for some time to come). Urban destruction is