Squatting the Zeitgeist

For the sheer scale of its ambition, I'm awestruck and excited by this - an attempt to mount what must be the biggest squat of all time. From my friend Dan in Berlin: beginning this afternoon Berlin social movements will try to take the abandoned Tempelhof Airport, once one of the largest buildings in the world. And not just the terminal buildings: they seem to be trying to occupy its entire compound, including its twin 2km runways (partly built by American engineers to accommodate the US Air Force's C-54 Skymaster cargo aircraft during the Berlin Airlift).



I suspect they probably won't get enough people to succeed, but I really hope they do. Not so much for political reasons: I'm not sure there's particularly powerful justification for taking such a huge space (although I think more manageable squats of under-used land are often good things).

But more because I'm excited by the spectacle. Just imagine what the mad, massed sects of the Berlin underground - the punks, the skaters, the activists, the hippies, the anarchists, the Trots, the ravers, the Fuckparaders - can think up to do with a whole airport.

And partly because of the gorgeous historical justice of democratising a space that is in some respects the origin of the modern 'machine building': the massive architecture of project urbanism that characterises European and American post-war cities, and makes it difficult for real people to live there.

Originally intended for Zeppelins in the 1920s, Tempelhof's terminal buildings were apparently commissioned by Albert Speer - Hitler's architect of the spectacular - as the intended gateway to the Reich's Europe. Norman Foster, who's designed airport terminals at Stansted and Beijing, called Tempelhof "the mother of all modern airports". Tautologous, obviously. There aren't any pre-modern airports. Airports are the archetypal modern non-place: spaces, unique to modernity, that are designed purely for movement and circulation; that lack community, identity, history; that are designed actively to prevent people from actually living there. That's why, I guess, if you sit in Heathrow's Terminal 4 for any period of time you feel like your central nervous system is dying: we're literally not supposed to be there. It's a space designed to make us be somewhere else. Although it's not ostensibly its primary function, lots of other urban architecture works like this too: the narrowed streets (for driving through/(barely) walking on, not for sitting by) and fortress office blocks of most post-war European cities, in fact.

But of course there's something extra going on with airports. They're not just spaces designed to circulate, regulate and exclude humans, but spaces where this is to be done by states. Modern neoclassical airports are both grandiose, empty monuments to states; and intricate machines for states to impose their power by processing people seeking access to their space. Modernity begins with keeping people in and out of places (fields, woods, cities, countries): and although all modern states do this, no regimes have done it as nakedly and rejoicingly as the disciples to modernity who ran Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. And the Nazis' monument to a modernity characterised by state power, human regulation, and ceaseless human circulation...is Tempelhof: the first modern airport, from which all its other hateful airportlet progeny have spawned.

I can't think of anything more joyous than to take it over for "low-cost living places, trailer parks, theatres, intercultural gardens, barbecues, cultural centres, skate parks, adventure playgrounds, museums, agricultural fields". If only we could mobilise the collective anomie, rage and despair of most air travellers, we could take Heathrow next.

Find out how they're doing here.

Nice desks

I spent much of last night sweating over the fine print of the Government of Southern Sudan's 2009 budget (characteristically, I had to go to three ministries yesterday before I could get hold of a copy of what is an entirely public document. The Ministry of Finance has apparently "run out").

Tedious though it sounds, the budget document is eloquent testimony to many aspects of Southern Sudan's current situation.

Projected 2009 revenue has been halved from 2008 levels: almost entirely a product of GoSS' extreme vulnerability to the plummeting price of oil (an incredible 93% of GoSS' $1.8bn-odd revenues comes from oil).

As in previous years, nearly 30% of all spending goes on the army (and that's not counting off-budget military spending, which is probably considerable). Spending on the SPLA is about the same as spending on education, health and infrastructure combined - in a country with near non-existent road, electricity and water supply networks; where only 16% of schools have permanent buildings; and where the last household survey found that maternal mortality rates were the highest in the world.[1] If the Southern Sudanese were hoping for a peace dividend after the 2005 peace agreement, they're clearly still waiting. Looking at the budget breakdown, this is probably not because of rapacious militarisation, but simply the massive burden of having to support a vast guerrilla army that's yet to be demobilised, and needs to be kept fed if southern Sudan is to avoid yet another civil war: 87% of declared SPLA spending in 2009 - nearly a quarter of the entire national budget - is going on soldiers' salaries (most of which, nonetheless, haven't been paid since mid-January). In fact, 48% of Southern Sudan's entire budget is spent on public or military salaries. In the absence of functioning social protection mechanisms, the entire government is acting as a massive social welfare machine.

The tiny details, though, are also eloquent. Take, for instance, this gem from page 340 (detailing capital spending estimates for the national Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration Commission):

"28.2805: Furniture & General Equipment

1 Executive desk, 1 basic desk (for headquarters): 31,240 [Sudanese Pounds]"

That's about $15,000 for two, er, office desks. Looks like the DDR Commission is getting some nice desks.

***

[1] Granted, this ignores the significant funding to these sectors outside government revenue streams, from what has become, along with the rest of Sudan, probably the largest aid operation in the world.

What feels like work?

So it's creeping towards the end of the month, and as usual I'm panicking about the report I'm supposed to be writing by the end of it.

Ordinarily when this happens (my working life tends, unfortunately, to constitute a series of lurches from essay crisis to essay crisis), my ex-Catholic moral sensibility whispers constantly in my ear that every minute I'm not spending mind-melded to my steaming laptop is the equivalent of a minute spent idly murdering babies.

But on this occasion, this is supposed to be a 'fieldwork'-based report - and the unruly 'field' hasn't been obediently offering up nuggests of informational gold as regularly as I need it to. So (via Nairobi and Mombasa) I'm back in Juba, desparately trying to cook up some material as the month of May trickles away. Which means speaking to as many people as possible. So now I'm feeling guilty sat at my laptop: I'm wasting precious minutes in the 'field', dammit, and the only time I feel really calm is on my way to another meeting.

So now that 'work' feeling is bumping around uncomfortably down a dirt road on the back of a 14-year-old's motorbike. Which I know is not something I should really be complaining about.

ALSO: I'm thinking of starting a scrapbook on the seductions of modern orientalism. Submissions welcome. My current favourite is a story an NGO trainer here told me about some young Southern Sudanese trainees, enrolled in an aid agency's training programme, who were all told to go away and do an activity for half an hour, and then return to the workshop classroom. Their NGO trainer made sure they all had watches, and knew what time it was when they left. About two hours later, everyone trickled back into the classroom. It turned out that everyone was wearing expensive-looking watches - but with no hands.

I've read enough E.P. Thompson to enjoy this condescending little parable. Best of all, I noticed that the old man who guards the camp/hotel where I'm staying wears a watch - with no hands! So now I'm truly charmed - practically a whole nation languishing seductively in pre-industrial time!

Except that our guard checks the time all the time - on his mobile phone, stupid, along with the latest Chelsea scores. My (faintly disappointed) guess is that those trainees just thought the workshop sucked.