Read Dec 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Often I find non-fiction books too long and wished they were shorter. This book, however, did not really have too many repetitions and was interesting throughout. I did, however, read the first half, then had a month long break, then read the second half.
Interesting things were in particular the way to see architecture, buildings and infrastructure with new eyes. That a door is a heavily reinforced thing but the plaster wall next to it could allow for easy entry. That you can think about accessing a hotel room or office also vertically. That urban planning and architecture often follows design principles to allow for easier policing.
It makes you in equal parts exciting about watching a good heist movie (i.e. being basically on the side of the intruders) and makes you paranoid and uneasy about the people exploiting given infrastructure, whether it be burglars or law enforcement.
Some excerpts:
Indeed, escalators reveal one of the casino world’s preferred tactics. Subtly guiding people onto an escalator almost immediately upon entering a casino might seem to be an example of bad architectural design, but it works as an ingenious security protocol. Nearly every visitor to the building dutifully lines up to have his or her picture taken, not just once but multiple times, from nearly every conceivable angle, as people are carried from the entrance to the gaming floor. (…) Every escalator ride gives them thirty more seconds to take pictures of you.
In an assay called “Lethal Theory” by Eyal Weizmann - an Israeli architect and prominent critic of the nation’s territorial policy - we find an inadvertent but spatially extraordinary perspective on the misuse of the built environment. (…) Weizman describes the movement of the IDF through the city of Nablus as a tactical avoidance of everything we think we know about architecture - that walls are barriers, that doors are openings we’re meant to pass through. The Israeli battlefield commanders decided instead to use “none of the streets, roads, alleys or courtyards that consistute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors”. It was a three-dimensional movement through walls, ceilings and floors, he writes. It was an infestation - a choreography that Weizman calls walking through walls.
Despite these hacks and spoofs, the power to control a city’s traffic usually lies firmly in the hands of the police, with their arsenal of blockades, traffic stops, and road closures. Police powers are increasingly woven deep into the fabric of the built environment and will only grow more pervasive as “smart city” technology becomes widespread. (…) Evgeny Morozov (Belorussian technology critic) has written that the surveillance powers of the state are so dramatically amplified by the ubiquitous sensors, cameras, and remote-control technology associated with the smart city that urban space risks becoming little more than an inhabitable police barricade.
About redesigning Paris in the 1800s:
He ordered the demolition of entire neighbourhoods, the erasure of whole streets from the center of Paris, and the widespread replacement of them both with the broad, leafy and beautiful boulevards Paris known for today. This was not motivated by aesthetics, however, but was explicitly a police project, a deliberate - and quite successful - effort to redesign the city so that the streets would be too wide to barricade, the back alleys no longer winding or confusing enough for insurgents and revolutionaries to disappear or get away.