Build new cities?

We tend to think the concentration camp was something that came out of World War II. If we're a bit more versed in western history we might think of the Boer War, or even the American Civil War….

But what is a concentration camp? How is it materially different from a city?

Perhaps not a Polis, but by the time we get to early modernity cities have existed as a place where refugees from a broken countryside concentrate.

Today we have plenty of refugees. We have refugee camps. We have cities metastasizing into mega-slums.

The Future-lobby wants us to build new cities.

"It's the only way to help the poor."

Really?

At what point does any of this movement stop being a mechanism of destruction and become anything other than humanitarian only in name?

"We must do something!"

Yea, that's always the push isn't it?

"Sign here!"

"Do it now!"

"Before it's too late!"

These are the tactics of the hard sell. They are employed – and they tend to work – because they push us into a binary position. They stop any possibility that we may actually stay with the question and see through the traps being laid for us and they work as thought-stoppers. Caught up in the rush of urgency we're ready to sign-on. Reluctance, the whiff of futility in the air, all swept aside as we eagerly add our bodies to the fire.

All of it held up by a framework of lies.

Lies we want to believe.