The collective towns in Iraqi Kurdistan embody how the design of the built environment performs as device for political action. Imposing the idea of homogenized modernisation without any historical perspective they crop up as the materialization of the totalitarian state apparatus for infuse political plans on the ground. Setting terms and conditions over populations, design featured a key role applying political control based on territorial management, successive land reforms, massive relocation of resources, complex production structures and strategic enlargement of reproductible schemes followed by several organized layout systems of collectivisation.

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. Collective towns are still organised around a perpendicular grid as they were initially designed by Saddam Hussein. Photo: Leo Novel

Designing a model of state-owned land and forcing Kurdish tribal population—geographic and economically based on agriculture— to drift from their hamlets towards the urban areas, the Iraqi government ensure an atmosphere of dependency, of mandatory essential state-supply, dismantling local communities and production networks. Thus, razing Kurdish culture and local praxis through systematically destroying villages while enforcing evictions and depopulation, the modern rhetoric of optimization and services emerged as “solvent” reorganization, where entire communities previously settled on the mountains, had been relocate to settlements on plain lands, without agricultural and farmland activities. Drawing an homogeneous landscape of territorial units —designed on modulated patterns, gridded with perpendicular roads, uniformed neighborhoods, regular plots and generic typologies— called Mujamma’at (gatherings places) or Collective Towns, totally dependent from the State.

Although the Iraqi government claimed to have set services and supplies for them, the Kurds already had those facilities on their villages and rather than to stay in the new towns, they preferred to go back. It was after this first generation of massive relocated people “inspired” by progress and other rhetorics of a modern lexicon, that the second generation of Collective Towns — envisioned now as a political tool for struggle — became, according to Francesca Recchia, a new kind of “open air prisons”, due to its isolation by a buffer zone and strict clampdowns to go back to their native villages. In physical terms, the urban design was focused to encourage control and reorganisation, and since that moment became an imperative, destroying thousands of villages and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians to towns which facilitate the control by military tanks, to patrol over straight streets (where visibility and surveillance are clearer than on steep road hamlets). Thus, design boost rural communities transformation into easier urban targets.

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. Collective Towns have now become fully urbanised and fully serviced with electricity and sanitation. Photo: Leo Novel

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. A man stands at a wide crossroad in the collective town of Daratoo. Photo: Leo Novel

As explained on Leo Novel’s photo essay, authoritarian systems enforce order through urban design, but it’s on the daily interactions, cultural expressions and activities, where the possibility of subversion relies. Recently, the expansion of Collective Towns into urban cores is encouraging upcoming scenarios for Kurdish urban development. Architectural variations start appearing overlapped into the original homogeneous, standardized housing systems. Organic and spontaneous alleys and labyrinth street systems are internally recolonizing the urban space, slipped into the regularity of the grid. And people are reoccupying the street by recovering their traditional behaviour and ways of inhabiting. Sometimes subversion starts by the simple means of taking home activities outside, to make them visible on the public sphere. This simple gesture enhances the possibility of sudden forms of spatial negotiation. Instead of massive changes, small actions. No political submission but collective subversion.

Collective towns where initially disconnected from main cities; the fast pace of contemporary urbanisation, however, is turning them in important urban cores. Photo: Leo Novel

Francesca Recchia wrote: “The design of space is neither neutral nor innocent”. It is a political operation.

—Leonardo Novelo, architect and founder / editor at INPUTmap.

/// Book review and reflections based on Devices for Political Action.: The Collective Towns in Iraqi Kurdistan, by Francesca Reccia and Leo Novel [dpr-barcelona, 2014]
/// More about Francesca Recchia’s work at kiccovich.net
/// Mora about the photographic work of Leo Novel at leonovel.com

Why, then, would the Mandatory Government go through all the trouble over a tiny piece of land? Palestine’s importance, in the eyes of the Empire, was clearly not an idealistic one: This old-new land was nothing more than a key strategic point, guarding the access to the Suez Canal [which offered the shortest and cheapest route to bring troops and trade to and from India], and would therefore not be given up easily. In October 1936, the brief hiatus from the Arab Revolts provided the fallen British Police a chance to start anew; a radical new project for the protection of the “hinge of the empire” was about to commence.

Enter Sir Charles Tegart: An awarded Irish-origin British officer, who spent thirty years successfully suppressing the Bengalis in India [including narrowly escaping six assassination attempts]. Tegart’s expertise in the fight against rural rebellions was to be implemented in the complicated geo-political landscape of Palestine. After a tour of the colony, Tegart realized the problem is a systematic, and had to be dealt from the very core of itself —and to the fullest extent; in that sense, the idea was that the land has to be re-conquered, for good.

Map of Israel locating Tegart Forts distribution (marked as P) alongside intersection and major towns. Source: Kroizer, Gad: ‘The Tegarts’ 1938-1943, (2011)

On the period of the the Arab Revolts, between 1936-1939, Tegart proposed —and designed— the establishment of a network of 77 fortified police stations, to be constructed next to large towns and major crossroads throughout the land. All of the forts were built as a bombardment-resistant concrete enclosure, which was self sustained and equipped with water cisterns to withstand a month-long siege. The stations were designed not only to provide a tactical and logistical base for operations, but to also house the officers and their families, thus separating the controlling forces from the citizens they guarded [a “fortress mentality” imported by Tegart from his days in the Irish Police]. Two years, three phases and 3.5 million British Pounds later, 66 Tegart Forts were completed.

Segment of the hand-drawn matrix catalogue of the fortified stations, drawn by British Mandate architect Otto Hoffman (retrieved from Israel’s National Library)

It was said that Tegart Forts could never be conquered. To the local communities, their ubiquitous presence had symbolized, more than all, the foreign, patronizing conqueror. In the following years, the desire to defeat the imperialist rulers became the leading motivation for the Jewish paramilitary organizations in Palestine, who planned and executed numerous attack on the prestigious British forts. The attacks proved unnecessary: Less than a decade after they embarked on the ambitious project, the British Police gradually withdrew from their costly stations. Both Palestinian and Jews took over the deserted structural treasures —then the largest, most efficient buildings in the land.

“Every place you walk, you see a Tegart Fort” says Dr. Gad Kroyzer, whose PhD at The Bar Ilan University provided an in-depth analysis of the project. Collective memory long forgotten, the British stations are now barely affiliated with their original owners, and serve the Israeli and Palestinian law-enforcing facilities. Today, 19 of the remaining forts are Israeli police stations, 16 serve the IDF as bases and training grounds, 10 were redirected as prisons and 10 are used by the Palestinian authorities in Gaza and the West bank; only eight of them remain abandoned and five were demolished in various rounds of fighting. Some other functions include museums, one university campus and  even one (oriental) restaurant.

Various Tegart Forts in their original state: 1940′s

Various Tegart Forts now with added ornaments, stone cladding, occupation iconography and various systems: 2000′s

In some cases, Tegart Forts became the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Ramallah’s monstrous Tegart Fort, which was used as a Jordanian prison in 1948, turned into an Israeli occupational stronghold in 1967 and finally transformed into the Mukataa: the Palestinian authorities headquarters and Yasser Arafat’s Compound. When the Jewish settlers moved into the West Bank after 1967, their first home was the Tegart fort, taking advantage of its residential abilities. In the 1980’s, these residential characteristics were used again in the the Katra fort near Gedera, in order to absorb and house the masses of immigrants that were arriving from Ethiopia.

The iconic Tegart watch tower was adopted as the symbol of the Israeli Border Police

Functionalism aside, the most interesting adaptation of the Tegart Forts, and perhaps a proof of the confused historical narrative of the local geo-political conscious, is the presence of the Tegarts not only in venues, but as symbolism: The Israeli Border Police, the militarized division which guards the infamous checkpoints in and out of the West Bank, are all proudly carrying a Tegart tower on their chest, now their official symbol [though doubtful many of them know its origin].

Like the forts of the crusaders, the amphitheaters of the romans and the relics of the babylonians, the Tegart Forts —the British-mandate forts— are now a monument to a lost empire, interwoven into the local conflicts and adapted, reinstated and seared into the geopolitical subconscious, inevitably affiliated with power, law enforcement, and oppression.

—Gili Merin (1987). Architecture student, journalist and photographer, currently living in Rotterdam.

/// Header photo: Abandoned fort in Gesher, the Jordan Valley, 2013. Gili Merin.
/// Gili Merin writing and photos have been published in various online and print publication including ArchDaily, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Detail and Frame. Gili’s research on the Tegart Forts and their adaptive use in the Israeli built landscape is conducted in the framwork of the Post-Brutalism unit at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Jerusalem) lead by Prof. Zvi Efrat and architect Natanel Elfassy. Follow Gili’s blog here: gilimerin.telavivian.com

From this collaborative approach, they have just released [IN]VISIBLE SITES, part of “an extended and ongoing excavation about empire and urbanism.” in their own words. The text was commissioned by Joseph Redwood-Martinez for The Exhibition of a Necessary Incompleteness, a photo-, text-, and video-based investigation into varied articulations of incompleteness and vertical phasing in the built landscape internationally. This project by Redwood-Martinez is, in turn, part of Timing is Everything, an exhibition curated by Michelle Y. Hyun which explores the ways that built space situates us in time. They add at UCSD:

“The Exhibition of a Necessary Incompleteness is an investigation by Redwood-Martinez into the broader implications of deliberately postponed construction. The project thus provokes alternate understandings and experiences of time, in space that is always being built. If conditions of past, present, and future become less distinct, how does this affect our notions of history – “time” in the collective singular?”

Villa Mella, Santo Domingo. Joseph Redwood-Martinez

The Exhibition of a Necessary Incompleteness is focused on the broader implications of deliberately phased construction which allows for the occupation of buildings or activation of structures that appear to be continually in the process of becoming. In this context, Redwood-Martinez asks: How can we read these objects in a different way? How can we understand these objects freely, allowing ourselves to use a multiplicity of vocabularies and points of reference?

Following you can read DEMILIT’s answers in the form of a fiction:

[IN]VISIBLE SITES by Quaderns

/// More info about DEMILIT at their tumblr-blog or in twitter @demilit
/// About the work of Joseph Redwood-Martinez, here and his forthcoming film One day, everything will be free.