OUTLAW TERRITORIES AISHWARY KAUSHAL (20188220)

It is hard not to have an intimate understanding of just what Scott has in mind with
this term. Examples like the mobile encampments of resistance to state-sponsored
ecological violence in the Dakotas, airports as sites of mass political activism,
sanctuary cities defying federal mandates, but also ‘hospitality centres’ whose illegal
detention practices generate collective forms of resistance or the stranded migrant
vessels in the Mediterranean selectively ignored by NATO patrol craft: all such
‘outlaw territories’ are sites produced through a partial suspension of the law, either
as a means of taking direct action in space or as a result of the intentional, localized
withdrawal of the law as a form of subjugation – or sometimes both.

Yet we may also find it is lurking behind the colourfully rendered architectural
projections of a future world: Take for example Peter Thiel’s Seasteading Institute,
a stateless, floating city project of neoliberal entrepreneurialism and techno-futurist
climate survival.

Even the ongoing project, Rebuild by Design, an initiative to make greater New
York City ‘resilient’ to climate change in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, has at its
core a kind of outlaw territory; its proposal to implement vast eco-cybernetic
infrastructures and technologies of population management opens a process whose
design schemes operatively pre-empt the redesign of law itself.

SCALAR DIFFERENCE: FROM THE CITY TO THE INTERIOR