Description

From the first utopian impulse of Plato's Republic to today's global border controls and public space surveillance systems, there has always been a tyrannical aspect to the organization of society and the regulation of its spaces. Tyranny takes many forms, from the rigid barriers of military zones to the subtle ways in which landscape is used to 'naturalize' power. What are these forms and how do they function at different scales, in different cultures, and at different times in history? How are designers and other disciplines complicit in the manifestation of these varying forms of tyranny and how have they been able to subvert such political and ideological structures?

LA+ TYRANNY asked contributors to consider how politics, ideology, and technology manifest in our landscapes and cities in ways that either advance or restrict individual and collective liberty. The result is a compelling collection of essays from an impressive list of contributors including geographers Matthew Gandy and Erik Swyngedouw, historian Chang-tai Hung, urbanist Stephen Graham, semiotician Patrizia Violi, sociologist Mona Abaza, planner Rodrigo Firmino, architects Jim Kennedy and Steve Basson, and landscape architects Christopher Marcinkoski, Casey Brown, and Nick Pevzner, among others. Feature artists for this issue are Hasan Elahi and Jesse Krimes.