As promised, Davis rolls out the opposite polarity to Planet of Slums: the inverted slum or gated Emirate.  His description bristles with empirical insight, but the rhetorical antithesis between the 'global slum' (analysed from an 'objective' distance) and gilded/fortified hyperluxury (apparently experienced firsthand) remains problematic, especially as Davis is admirably insistent on the antislum's dependence on cheap indentured labour inside it. 

What mutations in the circulatory logic of capital and spectacle have occurred since September 11th? In their 2005 book Afflicted Powers: Capital in a New Age of War, Bay Area collective Retort argue that neoliberalism has moved from an era of austerity programmes and agreements to one of all out war – over air, land, and media. Here Anustup Basu reviews their book and traces the demise of a Kantian modernity based on ‘enfranchisement and eternal peace’ and the rise of one based on ‘weak citizenship and perpetual conflict’

After the Iranian ‘revolution’ in 1979, film became public enemy number one. Viewed with suspicion, this infidel medium became the target of state repression and, at the same time, the site of a necessary and astonishing inventiveness. As a result, (some) Iranian cinema has been subject to widespread celebration throughout the film festivals and art house cinemas of the West. Mute asked the journal Melancholic Troglodytes – which has consistently covered Iranian politics, history and culture – whether western support for dissenting Iranian voices is not also a form of ‘imperial grooming’; the neoliberal cultivation of liberal opposition to fundamentalism for its own ends.

The Conundrum

In commissioning an article about ‘imperial grooming’ and Iranian cinema, Mute magazine has posed Melancholic Troglodytes an interesting conundrum. The problem as we understand it, is as follows:

David Mandl reports on the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), yet another perverse Pentagon brainchild

The Bush II administration, with an agenda that makes Ronald Reagan look like a Naderite, and a collective attitude that is a perverse reinterpretation of the situationists’ injunction, ‘Be reasonable – demand the impossible’, isn’t easily cowed by whining opposition liberals. So all eyes were riveted to the Pentagon when negative publicity on an arcane Defence Department programme caused the project’s plug to be yanked within minutes, its website to be wiped clean, and its mastermind John Poindexter – a convicted felon who had previously enjoyed unwavering support from the White House – to be sent packing.

National outrage can be a trigger for an eloquent art show. With a catalogue entitled LAND GRAB, Israeli architects Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal secured the cancellation of their architectural project, 'A Civilian Occupation: the Politics of Israeli Architecture', as Israel's official entry in the World Congress of Architecture (Berlin, 2002). It was banned by the same Israeli Association of United Architects who had commissioned it. Here, as one of several other participants in the Territories exhibition in which Weizman and Segal took part, Kate Rich asks how, and why, their use of aggregated data is so devastatingly effective in a contemporary art setting.

(Some points of reference. 80% of architectural work in Israel goes on in the Occupied territories. The IAUI claims flatly a position of neutrality on the occupation issue. The West Bank is described as the most intensively observed & photographed territory in the world.)

According to Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, cities have always reflected the dominant military techniques of their times. With the demise of the linear warfare between nation states and the advent of non-linear wars waged against internal ‘terrorists’, cities have become our primary ‘battle spaces’. Here, Phillip Misselwitz talks to Weizman about the (mis)uses of the urban fabric by the military, and the premeditative assimilation of planning into the choreography of war.

As ‘urbicide’ and ‘designed destruction’ become default global strategies in which the city is turned against its inhabitants, architects and planners face a minefield of new ethical dilemmas. Eyal Weizman is co-author of A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, Verso 2003, with Rafi Segal. See Kate Rich’s review of Weizman’s contribution to the show Territories, Kunstwerke, Berlin, in next week’s Webexclusive

Zoe Young explores post-war issues in the Middle East

In 1996, a family of squatters died, demolished along with their Beirut home by the private company reconstructing the post-war city.

‘There’s nothing here, no McDonalds or anything,’ said a US soldier six years later, heading for Baghdad past Uruk, site of the first city. Another: ‘Me and my boys are going to take a bite out of Iraq’. Some say West Asian (Middle Eastern) protests against this invasion reflect the Ummah, the body of Islamic believers, ‘manifesting her deep feeling for a part of her body, which is in the process of being severed’, as Yusuf Patel described it on Khalifa.com, to be subsequently quoted by Jonathan Raban in The Guardian.

Joyce Song investigates strategies of land representation and administration in the occupied territories of Palestine, where strategies such as the non-recognition of villages, and the placement and building of settlements, roads, and walls, she argues, advance political decisions under the guise of ‘innocent’ urban planning

Nat Muller talks to Palestinian filmmaker Azza El Hassan. Based in Ramallah since 1996 her films include The Place, Sinbad is a She, Title Deed from Moses, Arab Women Speak Out and News Time.

Palestinian filmmaker Azza El-Hassan (1971-) grew up in Lebanon and Jordan and moved to Ramallah in 1996. She holds an MA from Goldsmith College (London) in Television Documentary Film. Her films include The Place, Sinbad is a She, Title Deed from Moses, Arab Women Speak Out and News Time.