num_pages: 0
description: In Enduring Innocence  Keller Easterling tells the stories of outlaw spatial productsresorts information technology campuses retail chains golf courses ports and other hybrid spaces that exist outside normal constituencies and jurisdictionsin difficult political situations around the world. These spacesfamiliar commercial formulas of retail business and tradeaspire to be worlds unto themselves self-reflexive and innocent of politics. But as Easterling shows in reality these enclaves can become political pawns and objects of contention. Jurisdictionally ambiguous they are imbued with myths desires and symbolic capital. Their hilarious and dangerous masquerades often mix quite easily with the cunning of political platforms. Easterling argues that the study of such real estate cocktails provides vivid evidence of the market's weakness resilience or violence.Enduring Innocence collects six stories of spatial products and their political cruise ship tourism in North Korea; high-tech agricultural formations in Spain (which have reignited labor wars and piracy in the Mediterranean); hyperbolic forms of sovereignty in commercial and spiritual organizations shared by gurus and golf celebrities; automated global ports; microwave urbanism in South Asian IT enclaves; and a global industry of building demolition that suggests urban warfare. These regimes of nonnational sovereignty writes Easterling move around the world like weather fronts; she focuses not on their blendingtheir global connectivitybut on their segregation and the cultural collisions that ensue.Enduring Innocence resists the dream of one globally legible world found in many architectural discourses on globalization. Instead Easterling's consideration of these segregated worlds provides new tools for practitioners sensitive to the political composition of urban landscapes.
language: English
title: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades
publisher: The MIT Press