“Yes, you read that right: Chicago is spending $33 million to build fake housing and commercial buildings in an overpoliced community that could really use their actual, real-life equivalents. No Cop Academy organizer Destiny Ball laid it out plainly to Block Club Chicago: “To find out that they’re building a scenario village when there are thousands of people, homeless, with nowhere to go … it’s sickening.”
Architecture sometimes lays bare the contradictions in urban life, but rarely does it do so this explicitly, if not mockingly. A first phase of the training campus is nearly done, and the “tactical village” will begin construction this summer. The campus, which rises on the site of a former rail yard, will replace seven facilities currently in use. The second phase will be built by a joint venture of Berglund and Brown & Momen. The City’s website lists the design architect as DLR Group. The company recently published a blog post in which Andrew Cupples defended its work on juvenile justice systems, claiming that DLR remains “undeterred in the belief that design excellence contributes to better outcomes for youth who enter the justice system.”
“Justice system,” to this critic, reads as a remarkable euphemism for a place to detain children. Incredibly, the City lists the project as part of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s INVEST South/West platform which seeks to direct about $1.4 billion in funding to previously underdeveloped neighborhoods.
The City neglects its citizens—especially its Black and Brown ones—before policing them with militarized tactics. This is, after all, the police force that was found to be using “black site” tactics—essentially kidnapping and torturing civilians at Homan Square, a property it owned on the West Side—until an exposé in The Guardian in 2015 spelled its demise. This is the police force whose officers shot 13-year-old Adam Toledo to death in 2021 and paralyzed another unidentified 13-year-old boy just a few weeks ago. These are the law enforcement officers who have made arrests in only 6 percent of rape cases. Per Alex Vitale’s book The End of Policing, this is the police department that arrested 8,000 Black schoolchildren, more than half of whom were under 15, in 2013–14 alone.
Chicago suppresses funding for housing, schools, environmental remediation, public health, and transit, but it generously funds cops. This is not only ineffective, given the statistics and reality of police brutality, but immoral.
Any architect who participates in realizing the carceral program of police surveillance and terror is complicit. Architects often characterize their work as impartial, but the reality is that the form of the built environment is regularly weaponized by those in power. Architects are moral actors who have the agency—individually, but especially collectively—to see a project like this and decline to participate.
At times, activism comes in the form of saying yes to certain advances, but in this case it more powerfully comes in saying no. This denial of service can come in the form of whistleblowing to journalists, organizing political resistance among your peers, or finding a new job. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, when Michael Ford (the hip-hop architect) learned that his then employer SmithGroup was to work on civic buildings with holding facilities, he left. In the fall of 2020, AIA New York attempted to discourage members from working on spaces of incarceration. The work of Colloqate explicitly demands the end of architects working on behalf of police and provides alternative solutions for reallocating police funds toward endeavors rooted in community building and racial justice.
Architecture exists at the all-important nexus where political ambition is given form. Resistance to terrible carceral projects from architectural firms matters—if no one draws the plans, the efforts stall. Sure, someone else can do it, but the broad systemic woes of capitalism don’t excuse us—mere individuals—from living ethical lives. It is unethical to work on a project that will be used to oppress and terrify Chicagoans, just as it is a project of criticism to be explicit about architecture’s role in surveillance, police expansion, and, by extension, urban policies that govern by force, not by support. So, to the leaders of architecture offices who are currently overseeing construction documents for a fake strip club in western Chicago, I see you. The architecture world sees you. You can and should do better than this.”
-Kate Wagner is an architecture critic and a journalist.
i know theres like. the whole queen thing rn but i do want people to know that in the US a federal judge ruled that mandated coverage for HIV PrEP is against religious freedom because they don’t want to encourage “homosexual behavior”
The only thing an insurance company believes in is money and finding any excuse to deny coverage and save it. Nobody has a religious right which entitles them to violate the right of others to access life saving medicine. The preservation of human life supersedes the fake right to be a bigot which does not actually exist no matter what any illegitimate judicial body may proclaim. HIV is a disease which can afflict absolutely anyone the opinion that it is restricted to the LGBT community is not based in fact and so has zero standing in a court with a moral if not structural obligation to pursue truth. For the stupid notion that a company’s ability to deny PrEP coverage is protected by an absurd religious right to be a homophobe to be grounded in reality HIV would have exclusively affect gay people. But in practice this factually harms everyone’s including straight monogamous couple’s ability to have safe sex which is then rationalized under a further stupidity that the only straight people who’d ever catch an STD must be promiscuous sluts who therefore deserve to suffer which is another supposed religiously protected sentiment entitling someone to make other people suffer. But this line of arguement skips an important point and presents it’s objection from another angle out of a timid desire to evade a controversy: no “stakeholder” has a right to have rights which violate the other more fundamental rights of another “stakeholder” such as the rights to life and liberty in the face of which the prejudiced sentiments of homophobes are not legitimate and do not matter. That fact sparks protest because in the abstract it can seem ambiguous what rights are more fundamental but if we consider a concrete example the fog clears: the slave owners of the south had no actual right to own black people as their claimed property because this practice infringed upon the later groups inalienable right to own themselves. It does not matter that the rulings of the corrupt courts bought off by the southern plantation owners sanctioned this tyranny prior to the civil war it means that as an insitition standing in defiance of universal human liberty and negating the dignity of black people as equals to white people the courts had no right to make the rules which is to say to exist at all. That after the war the former slave masters were compensated for their “loss of property” is a repulsive putrid vile utterly wrong perversion of all that justice is and means and if righteousness had prevailed in this country back then the whole lot of them would’ve been dispossessed of everything they ever built atop the enslavement of other human beings and the cruelest among them all would’ve been put on trial by their victims and executed for unforgivable crimes against humanity. No reconciliation with demons would’ve ever been sought during reconstruction there only would’ve been an iron fist to eternally smash the influence of the former tyrants beyond all repair and so the social disease of racism would’ve been swiftly put to the grave a century and a half ago. Now all of that is a seperate matter but the lessons of it all apply to this situation here.
Of course the framework of rights is an inherently flawed lens to navigate justice with which is always confined within the boundaries of abstract bourgeoise concepts. This is made apparent by how in practice rights don’t actually matter or mean anything substantial the only thing palpable is power. A court may not have moral right to make judgements nor slavers to possess another human being but when these groups are armed with guns it matters little what *should* be. Only what destructive capacities of your own you can muster to rival theirs and assert your own interests is a subject worthy of consideration. For that’s all that politics after the illusions are shattered really is just groups of people threatening to hurt one another to get one’s way so in a word: barbarism. The point is to end it forever by bringing about the conditions which make it unnecessary which make it obsolete the material foundations to enable the fulfillment of this task are already here.
The bombing of La Moneda (seat of the president in Chile) on 11 September 1973 by the Chilean Armed Forces.
On September 11, 1973, the US government helped orchestrate a coup that desposed of democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. The coup lead to dictator Augusto Pinochet’s military officers seizing power. The military established a junta that suspended all political activity in Chile and repressed left-wing movements, dissolving congress and outlawing enemy parties. The military government also took control of all media, including the radio broadcasting that Allende attempted to use to give his final speech to the nation. Allende’s death occurred in the presidential palace after he gave a final speech. One of the first measures of the dictatorship was to set up a ‘national youth office’ as a way of mobilizing support for it. Pinochet rose to supreme power within a year of the coup and was formally declared President of Chile in late 1974, leading the Nixon administration to recognize the junta government and support it in consolidating power. In the first months after the coup the military killed thousands of real and 'suspected’ Chilean leftists or forced their “disappearance” in which they were tortured or killed. The number of dead and disappeared citizens soon reached thousands. Torture and detention centers were established.
Pictures of people missing after the coup.
The CIA helped justify the coup in propaganda to Chilean citizens, pushing a conspiracy theory that they were in fact anticipating a self-coup (Plan Zeta/Plan Z) that Allende’s government or its associates were preparing. The theory was later discredited and officially recognized as political propaganda.
Decades before the coup, the US intervened in Chilean politics pushing anti-communist ideology, which influenced the Chilean Army.
Both at home and abroad, labor is the ghost in the machine. The supply chain is really just people, running sewing machines or loading pallets or picking tomatoes or driving trucks. Sometimes, it’s people in the workforce bubbles of foreign factories, eating and sleeping where they work, so companies can keep manufacturing sneakers through a Delta outbreak. The pandemic has tied the supply chain in knots because it represents an existential threat to the lives of the humans who toil in it. The fact that Americans now can safely go on vacation does not mean that people half a world away can safely make new bathing suits for them. The normalcy sought by consumers was created by all of this hidden work, and that normalcy has always been threatened by dangerous working conditions. No one can expect things to go smoothly until everyone is protected.
The world has gone back five years in terms of human development, according to a new UN report.
For the first time in its 32-year history, the UNDP Human Development Index – which measures a nation’s health, education, and standard of living – has declined for two years in a row, with human development globally falling back to 2016 levels.
At the same time, without a sharp change of course, we may be heading towards even more deprivations and injustices, warns the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The latest edition of the report, which came out on Thursday, highlights the “devastating impact” of the last two years for billions of people around the world, with the global COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine, sweeping social and economic shifts, and dangerous planetary changes.
“We have experienced disasters before, we have had conflicts before, but the confluence of what we are facing today is a major setback for the development of humanity," Achim Steiner, UNDP administrator, told AFP news agency.
"It means that we die earlier, that we are less educated and that our incomes drop. With these three parameters, you can get an idea of why people are starting to get desperate, frustrated, worried about the future.”
