Park closed

These questions need to be asked all the more because of how diverse sentencing has become. Imprisonment is making its way back into the city in a less visible way and involves urban local authorities. Day-release schemes mean a prisoner is only imprisoned at night. Some young offenders are placed in dedicated residences rather than being detained. Electronic bracelets imprison people in their homes. Seemingly it would go without saying that offenders would prefer to live out their sentence at home rather than in a remand centre; they would not be faced with the threat of violence or overcrowding. But from a living space point of view, your private home can hardly become the cage where you are punished. A house, even a hut, is lived in. You feel safe there and above all you feel yourself, you become yourself there.

With an electronic bracelet you do not live: you are lodged in a box, like a bullet lodged in a skull, it is just a container.

The psychiatrist Jean Furtos defined home as the place where we establish our relationship with ourself, others and the world. Making a person’s home into their prison raises a difficult psychological question. Every one of us experienced this in the lockdowns throughout the pandemic: it is not easy to be confined at home, even for our own protection; so if it were a punishment…

From an urban community point of view, making everywhere into a potential prison, whilst questions around imprisonment fade from popular discourse, is a cause for greater concern when it comes to those invisible ways we restrict the human body in the city. Because, at the end of the day, the city is a collective entity which rather restricts the way our bodies move around it. Children are not allowed to leave school buildings; the elderly are not always allowed to leave their nursing home; the mentally unwell are not always allowed to leave their psychiatric institution; we tell drivers of vehicles with high emissions to leave their vans at the city’s periphery; you are not allowed into a nightclub wearing a tracksuit and trainers.

The city stops certain people leaving and others from coming back in. Parks shut in the evening; residences are blocked off by metal fencing, to the point where this generalised fencing-off of areas has become a public policy paradigm, modestly baptised “residentialisation”. This came about in the 90s, when turning these public spaces into private ones was proposed as a way of reducing the vague phenomenon of unsociable behaviour. The mistake here is twofold, on the one hand, this obsession with security only reinforces that feeling of insecurity. As the saying goes, fear does not drive away danger, but the opposite is also true: driving away danger does not diminish fear. An empty street seems more dangerous than a bustling one. Metal fences can stop unwanted trouble passing through, but they can’t stop fear. Security is a feeling.

Risk reduction is a procedure; it does not necessarily contribute to a feeling of security.

We always need more: video surveillance, weapons, panic rooms. We amass all these things in the name of protection, but they only stand to remind us of the possible existence of danger; they do not represent an inevitable march towards that sought after feeling of security. On the other hand, one urban myth would have us believe that tall towers and open spaces are breeding grounds for disease. Yet, in New York, luxury lives in the high towers of Manhattan, whilst the roughest streets in Harlem are suburbs. You have to be sceptical of these stories which prescribe moral characteristics to different urban spaces. But if this obvious twofold mistake is so widespread, it is because it must respond to urgent, pressing demands, to a pathological obsession with barriers. This need culminates with the walls we thought destroyed after Berlin and Belfast, but which have sprung up once more in Israel, on the border between Mexico and the United States and that between Turkey and Iran. This need for barriers leads to border walls yes, but it also rears its head in fenced off private residences and public spaces with set opening and closing hours. The people demand walls.

Beyond the high streets, cities are full of fenced-off areas. Accessible public space is diminishing. Pay attention: at what point on your journeys is the area open to the public smaller than the restricted spaces in residences and parks? How much of the road is reserved for cars, trams, bikes and, lastly, pedestrians?

How wide is the corridor you are permitted to move through? More than a metre?

How far can you walk or drive for before a fence is running alongside you? In some ways the public spaces in cities, which we restrict to keep traffic to the correct lane and limit collisions, have become a place of imprisonment. In the name of protecting residences, the streets have become a cage, surrounded by barriers, with more things prohibited than permitted.

Of course, these restrictions are infinitely more lenient than the prison regime, but these are two answers to Spinoza’s fundamental question “What can a body do?” and to the symmetrical question of what society can impose on a body as a punishment or as discipline. If an international e-commerce platform has become infamous for not allowing its employees time to go to the toilet, then there must be something in our social, legal, and cultural structures, the ones that tell us we may only dress in certain way and can only travel along certain routes. Our freedom to come and go does not just stop where others’ starts, it stops at a property’s forecourt, at the boundaries of an exclusive area and at social norms. Customer parking only; please do not walk on the cycle path.

“Park closed […] it’s nothing really but I make a scene anyway” Benjamin Biolay mumbles in one of his recent songs; “park closed, I don’t know where to be, I feel lost at sea” Adélaïde Chabannes de Balsac replies in the track. Here we find ourselves making pop songs about these confusing cities which block our path at every turn. It is the age of inviting cities, calm cities, green cities, child height cities and kindly cities. Yet behind this veneer of mundane, prosaic virtue, the city silently closes in around us. Like a reverse Truman Show, where Jim Carrey could never leave the fake city where he lived a life that only he didn’t know was a sham, access is becoming more and more restricted in this welcoming, fenced-off city brimming with sterilised cheer. Yet it is particularly difficult to think about this restriction when imprisonment is so absent, when invisible punishment takes place in housing, which is also a fundamental right, when institutions of imprisonment are placed far away from us in favour of restrictions on where we may go and people’s internalisation of these authorised routes.

This internalising of how watertight cities are becoming takes several forms and is affecting the most progressive movements. The Lyon branch of the environmentalist group Vélorution 2021 does not just want cycling to be possible for all, it wants other types of transport to be excluded. The movement is centred around this belligerent, border town mentality that we thought we had escaped in identity movements: “take back our territories”. Take them back from who? From what invaders? Who does said territory belong to? There is no clear answer, but one thing is clear: everything is not for everyone.

Not everybody can be Michel Foucault. It is rather difficult to consider this historical evolution of our relationship with the body. A body in which institutional dynamics seem to come less readily than following a tectonic evolution which calls for the restriction of social spaces. The solution of course does not lie in envisaging primary schools where everyone could come and go as they please, but the war between ownership by deed (the part owners of the residence) and cooperative ownership (the young people in the building’s lobby) will not be resolved by one side winning over the other.

A city cannot be carved up into elements which are all sealed off from one another, it is a system of interactions.

Like in a Manet painting, the colour of each part is influenced by what sits next to it. Renzo Piano, the architect who designed the Centre Pompidou, used to say that a city is a place where the church stands beside the brothel. At daybreak, a city is a place where the last stragglers on their way home from a night out stagger past the early birds on their way to work; it is a place where schools and administrative buildings could be open on the weekend to be used for other things. Perhaps it can be a place where people walking around in the fresh air hear the cries of prisoners locked behind bars. A place where people safe and warm inside hear the pleas of those left out in the cold. A city is a place where we must constantly question where we place these barriers, and in this we must act with care and caution.

The priest Abbé Pierre said that in every Emmaüs community there needed to be a broken window, so that they could always, absolutely always, hear somebody calling out from the other side.