a love letter to alleyways
the most recent time I was followed by the cops, they were in a very large car. Given they were in a car and I was on foot, no way I could outpace them. however the area this happened in is full of alleyways, some of which have branching paths and provide pedestrian access between places which require a circuitous route to drive between. Alleyways are the enablers of freedom in the anthropogenic-urban habitat.
They are aware of this. From Andy Merrifield's The New Urban Question:
The breadth of those new boulevards [in Paris] would, it was thought, make future barricade building trickier, a more onerous and protracted ordeal in the heat of any revolt. Besides, "the new streets," says [Walter] Benjamin, "were to provide the shortest route between the barracks and the working-class areas." Hence the forces of order could more quickly mobilize themselves, more rapidly crush a popular insurrection.
when our places are master-planned from the top down, the very morphology of them inherently bolsters its planners. This does make me wonder if perhaps the insistence on breaking-down and rebuilding and developing, rather than repairing and retrofitting, is in part motivated by a desire to open up these areas to top-down influences...
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