Carceral Archipelago

Definition

The Carceral Archipelago is Edward Soja's name for the fifth of his six discourses on the postmetropolis: the postmetropolis as an archipelago of carceral cities — "an archipelago of 'normalized enclosures' and fortified spaces that both voluntarily and involuntarily barricade individuals and communities in visible and not-so-visible urban islands, overseen by restructured forms of public and private power and authority" (Soja 2000, p. 299). Borrowing from Foucault's carceral continuum in Discipline and Punish, the discourse answers a simple question: "what has prevented the postmetropolis from exploding more frequently and more violently than it has?" — and answers it with the intensification of social and spatial control through the "privatization, policing, surveillance, governance, and design of the built environment" in response to Mike Davis's ecology of fear.

No single text dominated a discourse as completely as Davis's City of Quartz (1990) dominates this one — Soja quotes it extensively: "we live in 'fortress cities' brutally divided between 'fortified cells' of affluent society and 'places of terror' where the police battle the criminalized poor"; the merger of "urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single, comprehensive security effort"; security as positional good, a "prestige symbol" measured by "personal insulation" rather than safety (pp. 300–301). The archipelago's islands: Skid Row as "a lavishly financed, minimum security prison… without physical walls" (p. 306); Flusty's interdictory spaces (stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly, jittery) and his mutant typologies (the Blockhome, the Luxury Laager, the Pocket Ghetto); the panopticon mall and the "Haagenization" of South Central; the LAPD as Space Police (the helicopter Astro program, Nightsun spotlights, painted rooftops); the Forbidden Downtown with its "postmodern Bastille," the Metropolitan Detention Center; and the Homegrown Revolution of HOAs, CIDs, and gated communities — the "association-administered servitude regimes" (p. 316) whose "little tactics of the habitat" (Foucault) govern parking restrictions, paint colors, and basketball hoops. Soja's corrective beyond Davis and the Blade Runner scenario: public/private is not a clean binary; public space has always been a fully lived space; and the same enclosure has bred "a new synekism of identity, resistance, and struggle in the concentrated enclosures of the poor" (p. 322).

Key Thinkers

• Edward W. Soja — the discourse's architect and corrector: beyond the Blade Runner scenario (pp. 319–322).
• Mike Davis (referenced, not paged — see log) — City of Quartz (1990): fortress L.A., the "rhetoric of social warfare," sadistic street environments, the Homegrown Revolution; Beyond Blade Runner (1992); Ecology of Fear (1998).
• Michel Foucault — the theoretical source: Discipline and Punish; the "little tactics of the habitat"; power as both repressive and enabling ("an admonition that is often lost when our visions of its enforced enclosures become too monolithic," p. 311).
• Steven Flusty (referenced, not paged — see log) — Building Paranoia (1994): interdictory space and the mutant typologies.
• Steve Herbert (referenced, not paged — see log) — Policing Space (1997): the normative orders of police territoriality.
• Evan MacKenzie, Edward Blakely & Mary Gail Snyder, Dennis Judd (referenced, not paged — see log) — Privatopia, Fortress America, the CID/HOA/gated-community literature.
• Thomas L. Dumm (referenced, not paged — see log) — "The New Enclosures": racism in the normalized community; the politics of deterritorialization and reconnection.

Related Concepts

• panopticon — the surveillance diagram the mall, the housing project, and the jail each re-instance.
• gated-community — the archipelago's most visible island-type (Blakely & Snyder's Lifestyle/Prestige/Security Zone triad).
• interdictory-space — Flusty's design taxonomy of interception and repulsion.
• ecology-of-fear — Davis's endemic condition the archipelago answers.
• privatised-public-space — the "destruction of public space" thesis (Davis, Judd) and its restructuring critique.
• hostile-architecture — the "sadistic street environments" and "bum-proof" devices the wiki already holds.
• discipline, governmentality — the Foucauldian frame.
• postmetropolis — the fifth discourse.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — chapter 10, "The Carceral Archipelago": the conceptualization (pp. 298–300), Fortress L.A. (pp. 300–303), the destruction of public space and interdictory space (pp. 303–307), policing space (pp. 307–309), the Forbidden City (pp. 309–312), HOAs/CIDs/gated communities (pp. 312–319), and beyond the Blade Runner scenario (pp. 319–322).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Soja's corrective insists power is "not only repressive but also potentially enabling and liberatory" (p. 311) — can the archipelago's enclosures be read simultaneously as prisons and as incubators of the "synekism of identity, resistance, and struggle," or does the ambivalence dissolve the critique?
• Davis versus the postmodern Left (Jameson at the Bonaventure; Dumm's Foucauldian correction) — is the Carceral Archipelago best read as class war, normalization, or both at once?
• What is the carceral interior: the Metropolitan Detention Center ("Can you imagine the mindfuck of being locked up in a Holiday Inn?") is the concept's room-scale limit case — does the wiki's interiority cluster need a register for designed interiors of confinement?