playing by the rules - an inside out guide to behaving in the square mile

8/3/2019 Playing by the Rules - An inside out guide to behaving in the Square Mile

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Originially published in:London +10, ed. Carlos Villanueva Brandt, London: Architectural AssociationPublications, 2010.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/London-10-Rowan-Moore/dp/1902902831


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Playing by the Rules: An Inside Out Guide to Behaving in the Square MileNicholas Simcik Arese

March 31st, 2009. All is orderly in the Square Mile today. Around the Bank of Englandhigh risk shop windows have been boarded up, squadrons of the Forward Intelligence

Team have scouted appropriate street corners for documenting individuals with theirlenses, and stop-and-search jurisdiction has been approved for the area.1 Tomorrowpeople from all walks of life, ideologies, and demands will test the working definition ofpublic order in London by demonstrating against the G-20 summit.

A ten-minute walk east of the Bank of England, at a City of London Police CommunityService Officer meeting for the Mansell Street Housing Estate, straddling the wealthiestand one of the poorest boroughs in England, discussions are underway over whether agood behaviour zone should be reinstated across the estate. In a good behaviourzone, police are given the authority to move any group of two or more from the estatefor twenty-four hours if exhibiting anti-social behaviour. Refusing to disperse is a crimeand may result in arrest, even if no other actual crime has been committed.

Order is historically central to the civic and democratic project of the city. Any politicalartifice charged with enforcing order depends on its logical normativisation for thepurpose of assuming and leveraging the weight of equitability. Yet, perhaps as a result ofthe localised trans-national exigencies and splintered socio-economic territories of a so-called Global City, the perception of dis-orderly nooks and crannies fragmentsinstitutional interpretations of everyday civic acceptability.

Bureaucratic references to public order, good behaviour and anti-social activityrepresent divergent scales for what is considered to be acceptable civic participation inthe city. Though grounded in national legislation on Anti-Social Behaviour, zoning bybehaviour is strategically ambiguous as an extra-legal system. Enforcement via dispersalrather than arrest, while retaining the threat of arrest for refusing dispersal, amounts tolegal recourse by transitive property, where the extra step (dispersal) between a actionand arrest is specifically designated as a window for procedural interpretation.2

To draw a line between good and bad in such circumstances, officials rely on notionsof the common sense in the cultural and economic terms of local communities,electorates and property owners. Each localised definition lies at the cusp of afundamental debate between protecting the freedom to engage in an activity or thefreedomfrom being affected by that activity, while spectrally expanding the debatessubjectivity. The multitude of definitions are instilled and then re-applied territorially,giving civic order a dimension of selectivity and width according to ward and boroughboundaries and propelling potential discord between institutional and popular

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The Forward Intelligence Team (FIT) is a police unit which practices counter-demonstration through theovert surveillance of activists . Common tactics include intimidation by close-proximity photography and

direct confrontation with personal information, such as an individuals name, university, and source of

employment. Activist and anarchist friends have described returning from demonstrations around Europe

and being approached on London streets by plain-clothed officers welcoming them back to London by

name and walking away. During my purely academic investigations of legal demonstrations, I have been

repeatedly photographed and reminded of a file under my name.2

This exceptional logic systematically operates via the following Kafkaesque loop-hole: Sir/Madame, youare not being arrested for what I (the Officer) personally deem to be your non-good behaviour. You arebeing arrested for refusing to disperse from the entire area when I (the Officer) personally deemed yourbehaviour to be non-good.


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understandings. As localities shift (cyclically in the course of a day or over many years)a temporal mismatch distances the definitions of order from whom they most affect, and,in cases like the City of London, can be deceptively instrumentalised by those entrustedwith maintaining civic order

The Kaleidoscopic Manifestations of Defining Order Locally

Within the territory of a semi-autonomous City of London, delineations of appropriatecivic conduct depend on an exclusive understanding of the user as financial-sectoremployee. This guild-like population is bureaucratically recognized as the legitimateinhabitant of the area, separating popular civic demands from civic accountability.Employees in the City have the legitimacy to make demands, as the concernedcommunity, without incurring any of the everyday costs involved in urban policy thatspread beyond the specific exigencies of commuting to work in the financial district. Thisfeedback between a ghostly community and local policy makers reinforces The Citysexceptional status. With its own police force and ability to regulate resources, the SquareMile should be understood as a streamlined testing ground for techniques in localterritorial regulation and integration.

In the weeks prior to 2009s G-20 demonstrations, the entire spectrum of spatially andtemporally applied regulatory structures were imposed on the Square Mile, prioritizingthe right of City citizens to be free from the demonstrations over the freedom of intrudersto communicate in public space. One structure used is dubbed the kettle - a strategicform of containment in which a circular chain of officers prohibit entry to congregationsof people while allowing individuals to exit after an extended period of time, subjectingthem to a stop-and-search procedure when they leave. The kettle, or kettling, representsthe height of selective time-space notions of acceptable behavior. As temporaryarchitecture, the movements of the officers bodies themselves delineate a territorialjurisdiction that only applies when the circle is closed. Kettling can only operate under awide variety of legal conditions, applied by ward or borough for periods of months (in thecase of a high terrorism alerts) or weeks around specific sites (to target an expected eventsuch as the G-20). The imposition of such jurisdictions are constantly fluctuating andtheir limits on the ground are constantly moving.

Five months since the G-20 demonstrations, a new regulatory mapping has beenimplemented. On September 14th 2009, over forty percent of The Square Mile wasdesignated a dispersal zone until mid-December 2009. Citing community concernssuch as rough sleepers and begging, dispersal policies have been imposed across sevenof the Citys twenty-five wards.3 The dispersal zones are legally identical to goodbehaviour zones, and buffer The City from Tower Hamlets borough to the east, coverthree of four bridges into The City from the South, and buffer the core of the City fromHolborn borough to the west. If one were to walk or cycle to the Bank of England (as wasthe plan of the 2009 G-20 Meltdown demonstration), considering that the monolithic

Barbican Centre lies in the gap between dispersal zones to the north, only London Bridgeand three streets adjacent to Finsbury Circus are viable passages to The City core fromthe rest of London free from dispersal policies and a more ambiguous definition of civicorder.

3Ironically, the policy aims to explain to people that it is not safe to sleeping out on the streets by

dispersing them to different streets. 10 September 2009, accessed 15 October 2009.


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It is the first time in the history of London that behavioural zoning has been applied onsuch a wide scale, explicitly reinforcing bureaucratic and socio-economic lines. The verynature of such a circumspect control evokes the long established urban tradition of

dealing with extreme urban poverty by moving it out of sight. In the shadow of G-20

however, blanket anti-terrorism stop-and-search powers were used throughout the

demonstrations, raising questions about the intersection of dispersal powers over a largelynon-residential area, with the freedom of public expression at symbolic public locations.In a city where local jurisdiction can influence the meaning of orderly behaviour viaselective enforcement, the citizen inevitably struggles to keep up with kaleidoscopic

frames of reference.

Dispersal zones are a territorial manifestation of the varied definitions of acceptableaction by virtue of the severity of mandated re-action. As exercises in re-definition, theyare also approximations in the vocabulary of urban rule-making, and through a territorialspecificity, grammatically delineate rule based-perimeters. Set time-frames of regulationdistance the definition from its true community in the form of spatial metaphors. As ofOctober 15th, 2009, one month since the dispersal policy has been in effect, signs havestill not been put up along the dispersal buffers perimeter. Such spatio-temporal shifts

directly raise the problem of their fair representation to the urban citizen while exploitingan information gap to secure possibilities of enforcement.

Playing by the Rules

If rule-based perimeters are metaphors for definitions of order, how can one re-framethem to positive effect? If order is selectively re-defined by authority as a necessarymechanism of control, and is dependent upon particular urban contexts and events, thenthe definition of what constitutes order could respond to the requisites of an intruder.To problematise this praxis architecturally, potential lies in articulating the physicaldimensions of temporal jurisdictions and in an active play with the physical domain ofterritorial designations. From the fleeting kettle, to the barricade, to lasting buildings,

urban logics such as dispersal zones must grapple with the varied impermanence oftheir surroundings in order to be implemented effectively. The correspondence betweentemporary jurisdictions and the degree of an architectures temporality indicates that theformer can be affected through the strategic manipulation of spaces shiftingrepresentational and congregatory potential.

Crucially, the inherent dualisms of borough-scale exclusion zones and enclaves could bere-framed from excluding certain activities to enabling activities by protecting them. Ifnotions of order or acceptable behaviour are derived from a true local community,then the spatial mechanisms of exclusion can become operational activators of thecommunity that is the excluded. This flip in meaning, or manipulation of syntax,undermines the institutional logic behind borough-scale behavioural zoning by

recognizing that borderlines have a physical and social width, the everyday dimension ofwhich could be articulated and inhabited.

As the G-20 demonstrations confirmed to the London authorities, kettling often fails byprovoking those within to concentrate their frustrations on the ring of officers as thedirect obstacle to their right to the city. If the movement of police is the closestgeographical approximation to legal paradigms constantly fluctuating around highlysymbolic places, then the officers bodies themselves can emblematize the jurisdictionsthat they are meant to delineate without signaling an escalation of control.


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Juxtaposition of the City of London Dispersal Zone Map (Valid September 14h 2009 to December 14th

2009) and a poster handed out during G20 demonstrations on April 1st 2009 demarcating politically

symbolic sites.


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What if authorities faced outwards at locals spectating rather than inwards, stop-and-searching those demonstrators entering a kettle while allowing unrestricted exit? In thisre-framing, a security perimeter is maintained, protestors remain containable andsearchable, highly controversial accusations of imprisonment in the kettle without wateror lavatories are reduced through free exit, and demonstrators are granted the respect ofbeing informed of fluctuating laws before they fall under their jurisdiction. At a very

basic level, in order to modify ones actions, one must understand when and where theyare considered disorderly. Through this re-posturing, which signals the protection of thedemonstrator as a rightful temporary community, the control measures grounded in anunderstanding of order derived from the more established City worker community aremaintained.

In this scheme, the possibility of demonstrators, particularly those bent on violence,simply leaving the presence of police officers en masse remains. Yet, demonstrations arehighly localised events, still attaining cultural and mediatic relevance through actualphysical friction with symbolic places. The economic value that the Bank of Englandderives from its iconic status is inextricable from its attraction to demonstrators.Suspending the fundamental problem of applying blanket anti-terrorism and anti-homeless policies to the whole of demonstrators, and acknowledging that the current

schematics of control have evolved out of the complexity of demands in maintainingpublic order in this context, perhaps a more efficacious approach towards protecting thefreedom to lies in tinkering with the very grammar of control. Such an appropriation of atemporary architecture does not act as subversion, but as communication towardscompromise.

At a less temporary scale, dispersal zones are drawn on a map as lines delineating limitsof jurisdiction. The lines themselves are communicated at street level by occasionalsignage on lampposts. Yet, on the ground, these lines have a thickness that grows withthe width of streets, splits over pedestrian islands and crosswalks, and shrinks as itmeanders through property lines. These lines are legal criteria, and definitions in space.Physical fluctuations in them represent opportunities for engaging with divergingconceptions of order in everyday life. An architectural proposal cognizant of the variedextra-legal/territorial realities between wards and localities, could manipulate linesbetween borders in order to contrast the gap between perception of a border and itsphysical legal reality.

If the fringe of the City of London is framed as a giant dispersal zone, then the life of abuilding on the fringe will be affected by it. Numerous developments around the Aldgategyratory confuse the relationship between the The Citys imposed boundaries and theirphysical representation. Although on the border of The City, the buildings mark theseboundaries yet are not included within the perimeter of The City and exist outside of thepolitical framework channelling a community paradigm into the logic behind an act ofbehavioural zoning.

Inversely, a proposal could reinforce the pedestrian clarity of areas that are subject tofrequent fluctuations of behavioural zoning by attracting the everyday life of a borderswith-out into the thickness of the actual border-line. For example, permitting theexpansion of a local street market into a property on the border might enfranchiseindividuals to challenge homogeneous conceptions of community which lead to a singularlocal bureaucratic normativism (and collective urban relativism) in definitions of order.Bangladeshi market vendors from Petticoat Lane Market expanded into City jurisdictionimmediately begin to undercut the political logic of a specific dispersal policy. Byacknowledging the exception in micro, everyday, and participatory ways, the urban borderbuilding has the potential to reframe those excluded as the unified non-exception.


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Tripartite negotiations of order between the enforcer (police officer), the provocateur(demonstrator), and the spectator (citizen journalist) present an opportunity to refineurban definitions by turning them inside out. As words move at the speed of Twitterposts, people follow in space, legislation quickly adapts, the city is appropriated, group-identities form, and the significance of the words themselves are challenged. The only

fools on April 1st

2009 in the City of London were those who did not participate in thegreat debate.

playing by the rules - an inside out guide to behaving in the square mile

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