jonny (good kind)You wont believe the number of stormtroopers theyre deploying against unarmed students unless you see it. This is just one side: at least 7 police departments with at least two layers at every point of egress, with several layers in back for rear control and rotation. They've got the army out against your kids for having the audacity to do whatever they can to stop a genocide
This police state is your police state. This police state stands between you and any brighter future you might imagine. This fight is your fight
Ryan Randall@jonny Furthermore, this particular campus was designed as a series of chokepoints in the wake of 1960s student uprisings.
Its campus design highlights how much of the last 60+ years of American built space is a physical apparatus for the police state & social control.
bdonnelly@ryanrandall @jonny Yeah, I did undergrad at SUNY Purchase which was built in the 70s. The entire campus architecture was built around not allowing the students to seize buildings and creating choke points for students and access points for large groups of riot cops
PedestrianError 
@Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny Not just campus design, the whole US built environment. Every modern suburban neighborhood is designed for limited ways in & out and to virtually require car ownership to access anything. “Urban renewal” projects bulldozed neighborhoods where protesting residents could block off a street and have multiple escape routes for highways and buildings like these campuses.
sidereal@PedestrianError @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny And they built elevated freeways through many of those neighborhoods so the military could deploy through and above them, and control the high ground in riot situations.
Every aspect of American society is about control.
Zagone@sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny
This is an interesting take on the elevated highways.
I've always heard it described as White suburban commuters having no respect for the now Black neighborhoods they fled decades earlier.
@zagone @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny
It's been more than a decade since I've relevant stuff by folks like Mike Davis, Edward Soja, or Samuel Delany, but there's almost certainly multiple people who've written about the material & planning histories of this part of the built environment.
You definitely might look to things on Robert Moses's changes to NYC transportation as a start: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/05/887386869/how-transportation-racism-shaped-america
Folks like Nick Mitchell and others have also done a lot to connect how campuses & suburbs & prisons work as "warehousing" of people treated as surplus.
Here's a conference panel I desperately tried to type notes on: https://www.ryanpatrickrandall.com/our-conference-notes/2015-05-21-cultural-studies-association-2015-opening-plenary-panel/
I've also heard good arguments—again, can't remember exactly from where—that whiteness was reinforced/encouraged by the production of suburbs. Making people isolated & structurally encouraging housing to be treated as an investment reduces social ties and makes it harder to organize unions or other working political groups.
FoolishOwl@ryanrandall @zagone @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny It's struck me how most workplaces I've been in are designed as fortresses, with walls and controlled points of entry with guards. And somewhere I read an article about how the "corporate campus" was designed to isolate workers, so they don't leave the work site even for meals.
@foolishowl @zagone @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny Many workplaces are totally designed as fortresses, self-contained little citadels! Higher education campuses often are, too!
Mike Davis's book _City of Quartz_ talks about the idea of "Fortress LA", which is sort of that same logic but expanded to neighborhood and city-wide scales.
I remember him (or maybe Frederic Jameson?) talking about how common it is for business architecture to have basically 1 or 2 stories of effectively ramparts at ground level in cities, with few or no windows. That might be in Davis's book _Ecology of Fear_?
Davis's writing really sticks with me, so if you like reading, he's a great author to consider. I think he also did a bunch of interviews and podcasts in the last 10 years or so, before he recently passed away.
