Michael Zinganel
We are building security!


Crime does pay!

In Stuart Gordon’s film “Fortress” (1993), the conventional state is replaced by a privatised totalitarian business empire, which punishes even the smallest offence with heavy prison sentences. Delinquents are brought to a desert in the fenced off cargo area of a huge lorry, from there they are taken to an underground unit, to the supposedly most secure prison in the world. A central lift tower takes the prisoners through a circular shaft down to one of thirty-three levels, where they arrive at a surrounding gallery via an automatically extending and retracting bridge. From there they enter their cells, which are open to view from the front, not for patrolling guards, but for remote-controlled video cameras which circle the gallery on rails. At night when the lights are out, deadly laser rays block the open side of each cell. The architecture of this prison is completely subordinated to its function, the permanent supervision of the prisoners. It is supplemented by a yet more perfidious system of inspection. “I will always be with you!” is how the prison director welcomes the arriving prisoners via a video monitor. He is right, as after the body search a sensor is forcibly implanted in the mouth of each prisoner, which transmits each movement to the supervisory centre. The sensor can hear and read the thoughts of the prisoners. By crossing either the yellow or red warning strips which are mounted everywhere on the floor, “bad behaviour” and inadmissible thoughts are immediately punished by these sensors. Yellow means pain, red, death. It gives the prisoner varying degrees of electric shock, according to the seriousness of the offence. As a self-igniting detonator, it can also induce the death of prisoners, a surveillance system from which there is apparently no escape. During the implantation of the sensor the prisoner looks at a blinking display screen, “Crime does not pay!”, it is supposed to teach him a lesson. Wrong, wrote Karl Marx 130 years earlier in ironic imitation of a middle class economist, who tries to prove that the capitalist society is so far developed that it even knows how to make use of its enemies. Crime does pay very well, not always for “the criminal” or his unlucky victim, but probably for “society”. As according to Marx “the criminal” does not only produce crime itself, but also all the measures created to counteract that crime. The police, criminal law, justice system and prison, all forms of criminal report – whether in the “fine arts”, in scientific publications or in the mass media. 1 Marx refers not only to the academic and artistic discourse which is in a position to free “crime”, or to measures to catch and discipline “criminals”, but also to their specific function as disproportionate factors within the capitalist societal structure, whose job it is to continually upset the balance, to give “ the producers a kick”. Crime drives the productive forces to innovate; it generates an excess of productive development which can go far beyond mere control techniques against crime. An example is the “standardising” function which criminals have on the majority of the population; every control device needs an occasional infringement. This is achieved through the repeated reports of deviation, pursuit and punishment, previously in stories and songs, today in mass media such as papers, films and TV. What is inadmissible becomes understandable, able to be criminalised and has a disciplining function. Only the standard banishment of deviants creates our own desired normality. The “criminal” then, is at the same time a preventive and a deterrent, and so serves – if unwittingly- a stabilising and controlling function of the ruling moral ideas and economic power relations. As a further example for this could be cited the central importance that crime has for the perception of the growing modern metropolis. The thrill of the crime becomes a central selling point in a profit oriented cultural industry, in the daily press, wax cabinets, detective novels and later in film and TV. “Crime” however, at the same time serves common “reality” and identity establishing conversational topics for an anonymous big city public. The representation of crime in the mass media helps the estranged, spread out residents of a metropolis to a sense of imagined community. Previously unknown, empty space without experience is filled and so is opened to the public, even if mostly as a place of accident, suffering or crime. 2 Even the methods of the newly emerging city sociology borrow police methods. 3 For amateurs as well as experts, the tools to perceive the metropolis are accordingly led by the driving force of crime. But not only the driving force of crime influences the perceptive tools of the metropolis. Experiences of, or reports on crime, threatening scenarios, even the possibility of becoming the victim of a crime oneself, eor traces of disorder on building sites or in public space which may be read as signs of decay, spread feelings of the uncanny, insecurity or anxiety. Mastering “subjective” fear or the minimising of “objective” risks represents an essential source of modern architecture and city philosophy, which until now has not been adequately or fully represented.

Architecture of Fear

Fear, evoked through real or imaginary crime is not only formed in preventive engineering or electronic details, (Marx himself referred to the productive competition between the arts and crafts, and that of the burglar, reciprocally pushing each other to maximum performance), but also in more wide-ranging architectural and city building measures. The supposed “crime” so opens up a considerable market, it contributes, according to Karl Marx, more towards increasing national wealth than many respectable businesses. And if “crime” were to disappear, it would have to be reinvented. In addition to a general power, the dominant elements of a society or the defendants of morality, there are concrete, definable beneficiaries of this driving force who have an interest in propagating fear. This includes representatives of criminal justice, the police, populist politicians, but also architects, city and country planners, the housing industry, the building materials, security and insurance industries. Women are also included, who take on the discourse of fear with feminist arguments and finally win increasing public attention– and modest market shares. In this they enter a problematic alliance with civil defence, the police and the security and insurance industry, who all have their specific requirements of a “safe” public space, who try to implement building regulations and technical standards, (which are at least now being synchronised throughout the EU). 4 Two contradictory strategies of prevention are competing on the market, which in their pure form are luckily neither financially viable nor politically desirable. The first strategy is to “secure” buildings, as is currently technically possible, in order to isolate individuals or groups with identical interests in complete security. The threshold between inside and outside are secured by surveillance cameras and guards, (reinforced concrete and tank glass are preferred), the model of a city of bunker architecture, within which private, and between which public security services patrol. The second strategy is to see every individual aa a risk factor, who should be hindered from breaking any of the rules through his visibility. Passive surveillance through complete transparency from all angles, elimination of all hiding places, illumination of the whole city area, also in the country: in cellars, underground garages, the underground and the like. This utopian model of the “secure” city consists of glass and light, the security service is taken over by the whole population. In the USA and Great Britain crime prevention in building techniques was established early as an academic research area and as a practical planning task: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a contra-strategy to traditional reinforcement architecture. It is based on research by Jane Jacobs (1961) and Oscar Newman (1973). 5 In addition to access controls and police presence, this strategy relies on social controls to create a defensible space. The key terms of the CPTED are territoriality, small overseeable units, surveillance, insight into all areas, image, artistic upgrading and increased identification with the neighbourhood, environment and communities of interest. The animation through users and their identification with the neighbourhood should make strangers immediately recognisable as intruders. According to US American preconceptions settling like-minded people together is the only possibility to form communities in solidarity.6 A criminological argumentation developed out of the security discourse, which reached perfection in the gated communities.7 A prerequisite for the effectiveness of this driving force is the consistent demonisation of dangerous subjects, groups or whole areas: The promise of a paradise marked out by radical homogeneity and boundless security, is described as the opposite of the hell of the inner cities sought out by crime. Images of the American city are actually defined by ruin, de-concentration and suburbinisation, they are images of a fragmented patchwork of high security areas and ghettos.8

Traditions of Exclusion

These discourses may only be applied in a limited way to the European city. The inequality of city development in Europe and the USA and the very different “responsibility” of the inhabitants towards their city or community are rightly cited as reasons by European experts for this. In contrast to the USA, city development in Europe was and is the understood as a continual process of condensation, stemming from the city’s history which will be upheld in the future – despite contrary tendencies. It is known that the current city centres developed for hundreds of years on constant foundations behind the old city reinforcements. Today historical elements can be seen in the city: the walls of the early Middle Ages with the former moat (for example in Vienna today one of the most expensive inner city shopping streets) the bastions of the Renaissance with its wide undeveloped sloping banks (the Ringstraße in Vienna) and the external reinforcement rings that also surrounded the suburbs and today ring-shaped motorways or traffic veins (the Viennese belt). Outside the walls settled only those who couldn’t find a place on the inside, or were not wanted: Institutes for leprosy and plague patients were set up as early as the Middle Ages on what used to be free space far away from the gates to the city. Since the 17th century hospitals, hospices and poor houses, since the 18th century insane asylums, prisons, barracks and unpleasant smelling businesses. Public execution places were also moved ever further from the edges of the growing city. In Vienna at the beginning of the 18th century, for example, from the inner city on an open square immediately in front of the bastion, the Rabenstein at the Schottentor and after 1786 to a large field outside the external reinforcement wall to the spinner at the cross on the Wienerberg – not only to finally push the “evil” out of the centre of the city, but also to cope with the enormous mass of public interest 9 that the torture, the display of the delinquents on the pilliory, above all to highlight the spectacle of the public execution, the last of which was carried out in Vienna in 1868. 10 However not only the “sick” and “evil” were pushed out of the city, but whole population groups: for the Jewish population of Vienna for example, who had previously lived in an equally shut off ghetto in the inner city, were taken to unprotected country in the Schwemmland of the Donau in the 17th century making a completely city area, before they were banished to the country boundary and the “Jewish city” was renamed “Leopoldstadt” in honour of the Kaiser Leopold I. 11 Until the 18th century a majority of middle class and traders had to yield to the new social strata who dominated the residence city of the Kaiserreich. To achieve enough living and working space within the protection of the walls and security forces for the clergy, the urbanised aristocracy and the new state officials who formed the court state, middle class house owners were expropriated and pushed out into the suburbs together with the market traders. 12

The Defamation of Poverty

The middle class reports in scientific publications, police reports, court protocols, in the daily press and above all in literature did not tire of covering the “dangerous class” of the suburbs with systematic suspicion. In the place of the actual world of the suburb, in place of factory workers, craftsmen, shop girls and home workers comes stereotypes of prototypical trouble-makers, potential revolutionaries, vagabonds, criminals and an ambivalently occupied cosmos of female sexuality in the form of frivolous, immoral girls and professional prostitutes, as Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner write in their book “The Anarchy of the Suburb”. 13 Through these imaginings the suburb is even more divided from the centre, as it is placed in the separatist architecture of the Ringstaße.14 And these imagined divides seem to have been inscribed in the minds of the Viennese citizens, even partly up to the present day. Above all the prostitutes hold on stubbornly as a metaphor for the moral decay of “the other”. In his reminiscences of his youthful years in Vienna, published in 1942, the writer Stefan Zweig for example draws a sexual topography of the city in which he unequivocally places the prostitutes in the suburbs. “He called this (the suburb) but not as such, rather says only, that it was completely outside his conscious perception of those areas where previously in the middle ages were the gallows, a hospital for leprosy or a churchyard, where the freemasons, the hangmen and other socially despised could find shelter. Areas, then, which the middle class preferred to avoid for the past hundreds of years. 15 The arbitrary displacement of the “other”, the supposedly “evil” and “criminal”, but also the sick, the poor and defenceless, the lower social classes or other races, as well as their criminalisation are in no way a privilege of the American city. Also in European cities there is a long tradition of this, which does not limit itself to the times of absolutist regime. The social differences worsened in the struggles which came with industrialisation, and seemed for many to represent unconquerable boundaries which finally were the reason that they sought their luck as emigrants in the “new world”. 16 Whilst in the USA neither city traditions nor nobility, clergy or an old ingrained middle class hindered the development of the liberal city, in that according the German sociologist, Hartmut Häußermann – the “market” alone formed the city “and not a collective subject” 17 is that “self understanding of the inhabitants of the European city to be inseperably bound to the political, economic and cultural emancipation of the feudal dominant powers (Herrschaft) The European city becomes ( seen from a Eurocentric view, which for eg also Häußermann represents), read as successful result of middle class creative power, as attempt to channel the social contradictions and to claim a city area which remains inhabitable (by all?). “The middle class attempted to rebuild the city, to adapt and modernise, did not however choose to leave it.” 18 Certainly the development in Europe did not run so smoothly (until it had found this supposedly “collective subject”, which should have made the comparatively harmonious city society possible) as the proponents of a middle class civil society would like to believe. Tendencies of radical social segregation through denunciation and criminalisation of political opponents may also be seen in the modern European city. For the construction of such a less friendly image of the “middle class” city it is insignificant whether the measures were actually immediately effective, for example through resettlement, or if the images, through repetition, are conveyed or even fixed in the imagination of the reader, the visitor but also the inhabitants of the city.

(Re-)Militarisation of the Cities

Enemies who threaten the city are normally divided into two categories: enemies from outside, against whom walls, moats, and bastions are built, and enemies from within, (who are supposed to have replaced the former) against whom access controls and preventive surveillance measures are taken, through police presence, city illumination, video surveillance and through building measures, outside are not only strange hordes, but also those who (through high taxes and protective tolls demanded at the city gates) were already successfully kept out, or driven out of the city (see above), who have now however by the inclusion of the growing suburbs and the falling of the old bastions become inner enemies. Those initially excluded return to the lap of the city. The following three cases illustrate three developments in how the historical lines of demarcation have been adapted to serve defensive purposes again and what special functions are intended for them: beginning with the threat of the crown of the sovereign over the national state institutions up to the symbols of international capital.

Vienna after 1848

The Ringstraße in Vienna, a broad boulevard on which wide-ranging parks, representative buildings of the constitutional monarchy and the enlightened culture, such as the parliament, city hall, theatre, museums and the university as well as the palaces of the new middle class establishment are lined up, undoubtedly shows one of the most significant topographical turning points of the European metropolis grown into the image of a city. That in Vienna such a large area of open land was available near the centre was a result of its “historical retardation”. The reinforcement walls were kept in Vienna long after they had been remove din other European cities. The old bastions built between 1641 and 1672 and the undeveloped bank (up to 350 m broad) around them which once protected the city from attacks from outside (eg from the Turks), should now form the prerequisite to create measures to now also successfully advance against the enemies from within. As the building of the Ringstraße was not only for the middle class need for representation, but also led by military strategic deliberations. After the revolution of 1848 the military tried to improve their measures against future civil uprisings. In order to guarantee the implementation of their demands, officers were bound up in the preparation and decision of the competition of the rebuilding of Ringsraße. The core of their strategy formed a “fort triangle” 19 made out of two defensive barracks on each end of the Donau canal: the Franz-Josephs-Kaserne on the Stubenring (1854-1857) and the Rudolfskaserne in the Rossau (1864-1870), as well as a new double barracks opposite the Hofburg, which however could not be put through. Moreover, the weapons warehouses in the inner city, which during the year of the revolution had fallen into the hands of the “inner enemy”, were condensed into a large central arsenal (1849-1855) which now formed the point of the fort triangle and which reached into the centre with its modern artillery. Also, the external castle gate should be armed. Two additional guard houses each half way to the defensive barracks at Schwarzenbergplatz and at Schottentor – there where the Ringstraße changes its direction – should guarantee the visibility between the individual military units all around the ring. The whole boulevard could have been under fire, if “rebellious masses from the suburbs” tried to push into the inner city. A high iron fence protected the external castle yard area. The width of the boulevard was the same as the width of an ordered marching battallion; the street was at the same time flanked by allees to ease the passage of the advancing cavalry. 20

London after 1992

In London the borderlines between the historical inner city and its suburbs are not nearly so significant as those in Vienna. The old city is the goal of city tourism just as in Vienna, the most expensive consumer zone and financial centre- in this case one of the most important in the world. In April 1992 a lorry bomb tore two office buildings apart in just that area: the Baltic Exchange, in which the world leading market for shipping trade was settled, as well as the Commercial Union building. Although the 30-year war of the IRA was directed against the British crown and the state institutions, yet with this attack they hit the Achilles’ heel of the British metropolis – above all international financial services companies felt particularly hit by the series of attacks. Since the City of London threatened to migrate to another metropolis if their security could not be guaranteed, they had to react immediately. Now it no longer only concerned the symbolic damage done to the attacked institutions in a civil war breaking out of its narrow boundaries. London’s status as an economic location, as a global city also suddenly seemed to hang in the balance and with it the economy of the whole nation. “No one should be in any doubt that we are locked into a struggle with terrorists for the City of London and it is a struggle that we, the nation (not just the City of London), cannot afford to lose.” 21 The financial district in the City of London had to be extended into a high security zone, where improved fortification systems of the individual buildings, a comprehensive video surveillance system and the complete reorganisation of the traffic system of the city attained an important role. 22 The number of access streets was reduced to only seven, all equipped with control gates where video surveillance cameras recorded the number plates of the incoming cars as well as the faces of the drivers, and could compare them with data from the police computer system. After the IRA attacked another building in the financial district in 1996, the surveillance ring was expanded in 1997, in order to include other important companies who until then had felt unprotected. After the expansion, the outgoing streets are now also supervised with the same system and the automated system of examination of the recordings is so perfected that it only takes four seconds for a reply with data on the vehicle and its driver to come back from the central computer. The name of the project, the Ring of Steel, is in sharp contrast to its subtle presence in the city. It is supposed to remind one of the place where the Britons got their know-how, of Belfast, where in the middle of the 70s all the roads into the city centre were blocked with steel fences. 23

Genoa 2001

In no way the seat of the height of international finance, Genoa was in 2001 the victim of pressure of a representative city competition after Italy’s head of government Silvio Berlusconi had the idea to present himself and the current gentrification of the harbour city in a media-friendly way with a meeting of the most powerful – in a mega-event whose extraordinary production in the end seemed to get out of control. The harbour and narrow alleyways of the old town were declared a high security zone for the duration of the summit and were completely cleared and systematically blocked off. Whilst the heads of economy and state of the eight most powerful countries of the world conferred on 20 rented (cruise) ships in the harbour, private boats were banned and had to find another place to anchor during the summit. 30,000 inhabitants of the old town were reviewed and registered. No one was allowed to enter the zona rossa without special permission. The access streets and alleyways to the old town were blocked off with two metre high steel nets. Where space allowed it, dividing walls of stacked up porta-cabins were set up, as if trying to recreate the city wall of the Middle Ages. On the occasion of the G8 summit, a ring of steel was actually set up, which was supposed to divide the red high security zone from the yellow danger zone. The potential enemies here were neither rebellious proletarian masses as in Vienna of the Kaiser, nor nationalistically motivated freedom fighters or terrorists like in London, but around 200,000, critics of the politics of the western business powers (who were now organised world wide). Like in the film “Fortress”, infringement of the spatial borderline would be punished with corporal punishment: yellow means pain, red, death. The tragic evidence of this, the death of the young demonstrant Carlo Giuliano, who was shot by the Carabinieri.

State of emergency

With the G8 in Genoa it came to light for the first time that the defence of meetings of government representatives and heads of business through the state power is experiencing a radical expansion (also on European soil), characterised by massive interventions in city planning and utilization as well as in civil rights. A flexible city develops, which must, if necessary, completely subordinate itself to the representative and protective needs of representatives of the government or business powers. De-territorialisation and re-territorialisation of affected areas of the city can apparently be ordered at will. The citizens of the city are temporarily shut out or expelled for a certain time. The state apparatus puts an entire city into a state of emergency; it demonstrates its military readyness as much through its ephemereal building measures which through its martial appearance challenges the contradiction on the side of the winner. On a symbolic level then an unequivocal evaluation is made, the people to be protected are become more important and the excluded, presumed aggressors are demonised. Actually, it was already attempted in the Italian government representatives’ official press conference to denounce the organisers of the demonstration as criminals. And also the massive use of force on the side of the police seemed to have had political cover, blessing and encouragement. 24 The threatening scenario was not only pre-produced in the media but also set up by the powers that be, in order to be able to hit back even harder against the demonstrators. They needed violence in order to be able to answer with violence, the police argued, according to reports of the district attorney's office against 148 police officers. It would be proved however that the majority of the accusations by the police against the demonstrators, with which they legitimised their use of excessive force, were lies and falsified. 25

Smart Expulsion Techniques

In the preceeding examples, the term “criminal” was intentionally overstretched: instead of “usual” criminals incontestably push the development of security techniques, architecture and city planning, the deviations here are those which from the viewpoint of the sovereign questions the current political power relationships – among others in that they tried to enter areas from which they had been excluded due to their “dangerousness”, but also while these are areas which should be reserved as a representation of a symbolic economy of the dominant forces of the society to controlled use and protected representation. The symbolic economy of contemporary city marketing and modern housing investment has brought forward new categories of criminal deviance, which remind us of the other images of enemies of the 19th century, the poor, homeless and migrants. If spatial formations are regarded exclusively as investions which as consumer zones throw out profit or can be sold with profit, if even cathedrals of traffic become cathedrals of consumption, where not only the goods, but also the architecture itself always has to seem brand new, as if it had been built yesterday, then there is no space in this “overpowering image of the new” for the “old, shabby, the used up”. 26 This also applies to those who hang around there, or want to enter. Among the undesirables here are usually individuals who in the view of the owner of the space threaten to disturb the joy of the majority in consumption or who through their presence as inhabitants of the same neighbourhood lower the level of the land prices. In contrast to the fortifying of military bases, finance services enterprises, international airports or the living spaces of the rich; access to the various areas in everyday life is regulated by economy. Even when most people happily subordinate themselves to the boundaries either chosen for them, or which they have made themselves, for many the thrill of city life lies just in crossing these boundaries, and entering forbidden areas despite them. The presence of martial security troops (as obvious physical barriers) can do just as much to reduce consumer pleasure as the view of social deprivation or posing youths, so constant video surveillance is used to identify them, where their expulsion is not only achieved by purely physical methods. At train stations the constantly patrolling cleaning troops follow “undesirable” individuals so long through the station and through constant cleaning everywhere the undesirable goes, and annoy them until they leave the area, worn out. Sometimes the building technology itself takes the place of the security and cleaning personnel in the task of expulsion: In the toilet facilities not only are special black light lamps installed, which makes veins unrecognisable on blue-white naked skin, so junkies can’t shoot up, but the floor is also intentionally cooled rather than heated or the air humidity is raised to make an “inappropriate” stay e.g. by the homeless, unbearable. In the newest German shopping centres the air conditioning can create strong drafts or cold gusts of wind as required, in order to “blow out” “undesirables” who only want to warm up rather than buy anything. Or the consumption and appetite encouraging Muzak music 27, which is supposed to suggest joy, cheer and security to the customers, and stimulate them to load up their trolleys, which is swapped for empirically proven “unbearable” music in the areas where “undesirables” are hanging around, until the area has been cleared in just a few minutes. Austrian folk music has proved to be very effective, according to German experts 28 e.g. Hansi Hinterseer, Du ich mag Dich, BMG Ariola, 1999 produced by Karl Moik.


2. Vgl. Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities. Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Berkeley 1998.
3. Actually at first the work of the city reporter, who borrowed the work of the police detective. Vgl. Rolf Lindner, The Reportage of Urban Culture. Robert Park and the Chicago School, Cambridge 1996.
4. The brochure of the womens’ office of the city of Vienna guidelines for a safe city (1995) developed into a reference work in the urban safety discourse and its intiator Eva Keil was chosen in the EU Standardisation Commission for “Safety in Public Space”.
5. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, London 1961 Oscar Newman, Defensible Space. People and Design in the Violent City, New York 1972.
6. Barry Poyner, Design against Crime. Beyond Defensible Space, London 1983.
7. Gated communities are closed residential areas set up by private investors, normally single family or terraced house settlements, which through the high rent or house prices as well as leisure facilities and design (e.g. in the form of theme parks) guarantee a certain homogeneity of the residents, and which are closed off like fortresses from the outside by fences, walls and private security services.
8. The lacking social cushioning for the many who were made redundant with de-industrialisation, predominantly afro-American industry workers on the one hand led to a rise in crime, on the other to strengthen the economic crisis through the insecurity of the predominantly white middle class and their escape into supposedly “safe” estates, whose value constitutes their only remaining political engagement. Comp. amongst others. Mike Davis, City of Quartz. Excavations of the Future in Los Angeles, Berlin 1994. 9. “The place was roomy and deserted. It could contain several 1000 people and was also suitable for funerals. There was no disadvantage for the public, as the place was easily accessible. 9. December 1803: Report on the suitability of a new place of execution, Memorabilia of the Vienna criminal court 1613-1850, Vienna, document book B, 23; cited after Gerhard Fischer, Hg., The flowers of evil. A story of poverty in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Trieste in the years 1693 to 1873, Vienna 1993, 554.
10. Comp. also Harald Seyrl, Hg., The memories of the Austrian executioner, Wien and Scharnstein 1996, 130-135, also Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner, The Anarchy of the Suburb The other Vienna around 1900 Die Anarchie der Vorstadt. Das andere Wien um 1900, Frankfurt am Main u. New York 1999, 113-114.
11. Already “in the Middle Ages the Jews were pushed out of the role as money lenders in Christian society, as they evaded the Christian interest ban. The sovereign profited most from this, under whose protection the Jews were directly subordinated. For this they had to give up a substantial sum of their interest earnings in the form of a so-called “Jew Tax”. Money could only be lent against corresponding security. If a large number of the population was in debt to Jews, then their possessions were also pawned to them accordingly. If a majority of the homes were in danger of falling into Jewish hands, they were denounced as criminals, attacked and finally driven out – with the happy (in the view of their clients) side-effect: their complete freedom from their debts. Comp. Joachim Hainzl, The criminalisation of undesirables and its effect on the Graz city image, manuscript of a presentation at the technical university, Graz of 15. December 2000.
12. “The middle-class population (businesspeople and traders) constituted in the middle of the 18th century only around a third of the estimated 40.000 inhabitants of the city two thirds were made up of members of the nobility, clergy, the royal court, state officials and city guards” Elisabeth Lichtenberger, Vienna. Between extreme Borders and Midpoint situation: the Middle Class in the City 1997, H. 2, online under http://www.lpb.bwue.de/ aktuell/bis/2_97/bis972d.htm
13. Maderthaner u. Musner, Anarchie, as stated. 10, 87.
14. Ebd., 88.
15. Ebd., 93; the Zweig citation comes from Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers, Frankfurt am Main 1987, 106.
16. Between 1840 and 1860 4,5 Million Europeans reached North America. Many of these landed from the chaos of the European revolution directly into the American Civil War. In the second wave of immigration from 1880 to 1910 18 Million Europeans reached the USA.
17. Hartmut Häußermann, Amerikanisierung der deutschen Städte. Divergenz und Konvergenz, in: Peter Neitzke, Hg., Centrum. Jahrbuch Architektur und Stadt 1997-1998, Braunschweig u. Wiesbaden 1997, 94.
18. Ebd., 93.
19. Vgl. Kurt Mollik / Hermann Reining / Rudolf Wurzer, Planung und Verwirklichung der Wiener Ringstraßenzone, in: Renate Wagner-Rieger (Hg.), Die Wiener Ringstraße – Bild einer Epoche, Wiesbaden 1980, 164.
20. Ebd., S. 164.
21. A police spokesman immediately after the Bishopsgate attack 1993; cit. after Jon Coaffee, Fortification, Fragmentation, and the Threat of Terrorism in the City of London in the 1990s, in: John R. Gold / Georg Revill (Hg.), Landscapes of Defence, London 2000, 123.
22. Ebd., 114-129.
23. The attacks have in addition also brought forward their own branch of business and type of building : Business Continuity Services, which are data backup centres, which in contrast to the representative addresses of the companies intentionally set up in anonymous camouflaged buildingsfar ouside the metropolis and are completely lacking in symbols, in order to not offer themselves as targets for attack. In these “parallel” architectures, as Martin Pawley called them, the company should be able to carry on its business undisturbed in the case of a catastrophe.Comp. Martin Pawley, Parallel Architecture, London 1998.
24. Massimo D’Alema, former Minister president, cited in: WochenZeitung Nr. 31 vom 26. Juli 2001.
25. The occasion of the attack on the Pascali-Schule, the press office of the social forum which organised the demonstration is supposed to have previously made guaranteed dangerous weapons. The molotov cocktails produced were however found at another place in the city and also the supposedly prepared picks stored ina locked room, which was first broken into by the police themselves. Right wing thugs and some policemen were planted in the left wing black block who were then obviously allowed to run wild unhindered in front of the martially armed police: display windows and furniture from 34 banks, 126 shops, 6 supermarkets and 9 post offices were destroyed, 226 cars were set on fire. In this they did not even try to push through to the red zone, but ran wild in the outer districts and so gave the police the welcome reason to advance against many thousand demonstrators. In this the police only interfered after the thugs had retreated, not one of whom was arrested, to the amazement of the demonstators. Hans-Jürgen Schlamp, V-Männer im schwarzen Block, in: Der Spiegel Nr. 36 vom 2. September 2002.
26. John Fiske, Lesarten des Populären, Wien 2000, 52.
27. Muzak is a secial kind of music which is supposed to positively influence consumer behaviour. It is named after the American record company, formed in 1934, which transmits its programmes over the telepone cables. 300 new titles are arranged and produced per week. The German daughter company alone supplies 7000 businesses with 8 hours daily.
28. Rainer von der Mühlen counts in German-speaking countries as the expert for subtle access control and security techniques, according to Dr. Peter Jedelsky, leader of the criminal police advisory service of the Vienna police, unpublished interview with the author on the occasion of the event Real Crime, Vienna 2000.