In an interview on Divided Cities

What would be your reading?

One of the problems with Horowitz is that, in spite of his subtextual analysis, which is pretty good, he still accepts ethnic conflict as ethnic conflict. I don’t accept ethnic conflict as fundamentally ethnic.

What do you think ethnic conflict is at a more fundamental level?

Well I think it’s usually something much more ordinary, something less exotic. I think if you look carefully, which we tried to do with the five cities we examined, you see unfair allocation of resources. Essentially a Marxist dilemma. You see people of all different ethnicities in the working class who are being mistreated and exploited. And before their grievances can crystallize into a push back against the owners – the owner’s class as I very crudely understand it – they were beaten to the punch by those same owners that were making life disproportionately hard for them. And I think it would be fair to say that the ethnic component was provoked on purpose and by design by the people who stood to lose a lot through a class based confrontation.

So your critique of urban partition is a Marxist critique?

Yes. And it’s not at all original, it’s all borrowed. But what I found most interesting in my research was that [Marxist/economic] reinterpretation of ethnic conflict. And there are people who have spent their whole careers critiquing the ethnic paradigm and doing it very beautifully and thoughtfully. So I’d like to finish up with just two more authors. First Diana Markides, who wrote this wonderful thesis, which landed up becoming a book on the true origins of the Cyprus problem, which are not what they are claimed as being. She’s a Cypriote, born and bred into that world, and a highly trained scholar. Her book is totally obscure. I’m quite positive you couldn’t find it on Amazon, and it’s brilliant. And Morris is something quite different. His book is a survey book of urban form. It would seem to have nothing to do at all with divided cities, except that he shows that cities have always been paranoid, security obsessed places and walls and cities have always gone hand in hand. Not walls within cities of course but walls around cities. That’s the earliest form of city. Morris provides the deep, deep background of how cities have always fundamentally been about a fortress mentality – and there’s just a slight tweak on that to get us to divided cities. And then there’s Markides, the opposite of Morris’s world view, who goes deep, deep, deep into one particular scenario, into one place. Morris’s book is graphically beautiful. It’s just plan after plan of cities from the earliest known archaeological remains of any city anywhere – prehistory – through to the renaissance. When he says urban form that’s exactly what he means. The first city nuclei were castle keeps. As the community was attacked it became tiresome to run inside the keep and so they just decided to just stay inside the walls. So walls and paranoia and security. He doesn’t assess it, he just lets us watch it.