Each neighbourhood has territorialities, zones, spaces full with meanings and its associated signifying individuals. Each neighbourhood has residential territories of different classes, supermarkets with differentiated meanings and essences. You can’t sleep in the temples of consumerism where one buys everything they need during a week, you can’t walk in the rivers of transit of deadly transport machines. These meanings are disturbed from time to time: a supermarket may be where a flashmob takes place, a road may be where a demonstration takes place. But these disturbances end in an instant, and the neighbourhood gets back its interior and exterior delimitation lines.
These territorialities change frequently. A lot of workers’ neighbourhoods have suffered gentrification and have become higher rent neighbourhoods, with the transformation that it carries over. Industrial zones have been reduced, razed and transformed to form residential zones, old buildings have been demolished to make high rent apartments.
Maybe the reterritorialization most harmful and totalizing is that produced by civilization and its ecological effects. Both in a national and local scale, civilization expands and eliminates its enemies, conquers spaces for its benefit and destroys all that isn’t herself. Due to its definition, it generates “civilized” zones, that is, zones where things function how they should, where there is an apparent social and civil peace, where problems are solved through the channels civilizations wants them to be solved. As a logical consequence it generates barbarous zones, where things don’t work, where the long civilizing arm of the law has to be present to control them and eventually destroy them, enemy zones that must be fought to protect the civilized world. All these significations are nothing more than the mediatic invention of civilization and its defenders.
The present state of private property, of the repressive forces, of the mediatic control over information… is only the culmination of the historical process of the civilized mode of production. The consumption temples called supermarkets, the burning of agrarian production because of the dictates of the European market, the dominance of work and work-related travel in our schedule, institutionalized slavery, the financial exploitation that trade with housing… all of this is the culmination of the repressive mechanisms that the most benefitted by civilization have created for their own protection. Our mode of live, civilized, is only another mechanism. We live under the dictates of the market, under the respect for private property, under the cultural supremacy of patriarchy and under the respect for the new God in the form of State and Citizenship.
Since the separation of city and countryside, since the separation between human and natural, there have been rules. Since the first fence separating cattle or garden from wild nature the number of borders has grown incessantly. To every border there’s always bound a written, implicit or physical rule, marking who can and who cannot trespass the border. Where the fences of Neolithic gardens differentiated between human and non-human, now locks and intercoms differentiate between able and unable to cross. You cannot enter the metro without a ticket. You can’t enter a home without a key. You cannot get out of prison without the consent of the state. Rules limit access according to the function of the space: when you buy a ticket you admit that you are going to use the metro to travel, when you sign up for school you consent to respect up the school norms and the principles teached.
These norms have only been disturbed by force. The functionality of asphalt has been challenged through demonstrations, the private property of a bank has been challenged through squatings, the free market has been challenged through stealing and crime. This does not mean that the law is civility and the opposition to law is immeasurable violence, but the contrary, that every rule is violence and that all restrictions bring a punishment.
The separation of the neighbourhood in borders, private spaces, doors and fences… alienate the neighbour, expel the racialized, eliminate empathy and destroys the personal meanings of neighbours towards the neighbourhood. The solution to the discontents brought about by civilized territorialization will not come through new distributions of properties, redistributions of spaces with bureaucratic boundaries or through the creatin of production and distribution centers. The solution to the problems brought about by borders inside the neighbourhoods comes from the destruction of said borders: the solution to civilized territorialization is deterritorialization.
Do you want something? Go and take it! Alone and collectively break down the barriers between yourselves and what you need. There are people without homes and homes without people: break the lock and get in! Squat and fight back! Once you ignore the sacred property of the bank over housing you destroy the border between housing and neighbourhood, between the house and the inhabitants. In jumping over the metro fence you refuse the physical limitation between you and your desires, you satisfy your libidinal desire of movement. In jumping over the school fence to meet up with your friends you refuse the state-capitalist curriculum that is imposed over all decent member of society, you separate yourself from the child-prisons and the educational-industrial complex.
Do you want to stop depending on supermarkets and having money in order to eat? Grow your own garden, organize with your friends, loot you supermarket and take the seeds off the vegetables. Destroy the city/countryside division, destroy the work/play division. With time, and once climate collapse and the contradictions of capitalism start allowing more and more action, we will break the locks, tear up the asphalt, open the prisons and burning down banks. And once we have destroyed the local and national borders and we have once again a rewildened word we will have the time and weapons to face the ecological problems we have inherited from the civilized system.