Of roads and walls
A few days ago, a friend and I were walking to the hill west of Port Meadow. After making our way over small rivers and fences, we finally came across an impenetrable obstacle: the western by-pass road. Of course it was not the road itself that blocked our path, but the constant stream of cars driving at speeds that did not allow us to slip in between them. But to think about modern streets without cars would be the same as to think dams without water. Interestingly, if one looks at a map of Oxford (or, for that matter, most relatively big towns or cities), one finds that they are surrounded by a ring road. While this ring road does little to protect the inhabitants from armies, it fulfills another purpose city walls had in the past: to control the flow of people not only from the outside to the inside, but also the other way round: As James C. Scott put it with reference to the Great Wall(s) of China: “they were built quite as much to keep Chinese taxpaying cultivators inside as to keep the barbarians (nomads) outside” (Against the Grain, p. 138). While modern cities are hardly as good at this as walls, they nevertheless fix the points of entry and exit to those created for precisely this purpose: roads that connect the inside from the outside. But this inside and outside is – in the absence of walls – a product of these same streets. While connecting cities to other cities, they thus, if frequented sufficiently, equally prohibit movement orthogonal to them. The state imprints itself into the landscape not only through the paths it creates but, at the same time, through those it destroys (which are, usually, much more). Instead of looking at a map and seeing streets connecting places, one can equally see patches of land cut off from one another through the modern-day equivalents of walls.
Contributed by NiklasHartmann on 12/02/2022
