Fenced Off
On November 5, 2020, students woke up to see temporary fencing criss-crossing the grounds of their residence complex at the University of Manchester in England (Figure 1). An outbreak of COVID-19 had made national headlines and kept infected students confined to their rooms. Other residents were free to come and go, but the fencing, which the university justified as a movement-controlling measure in reaction to the national lockdown announced the day before, made them feel “penned in like animals.”[1]
Figure 1. Tweet sent November 4, 2020 by @gbareli with video shot from within a student residence showing fencing already in place and being erected in the grounds of Fallowfield Campus, University of Manchester. Reproduced with permission of @gbareli.
On June 18, 2020, fencing was erected around a tower block site in Göttingen, Germany (Figure 2). Random testing had identified an outbreak of COVID-19 among residents. Göttingen is a university city, but these residents were not students. They were poor and socially marginalized families; many were immigrants. The fence marked the edges of a sealed zone, within which all of the approximately seven hundred residents were quarantined by the city authorities for seven days.
Figure 2. Groner Landstrasse 9, Göttingen, with fence erected on 18 June 2020. Photograph: Michael Trammer.
The cordon sanitaire, widely used to combat cholera and other infectious disease outbreaks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has made a comeback during the 2020-21 pandemic.[2] The cordon sanitaire has historically taken many forms, and often involved the repurposing of defensive structures and large open landscaped glacis areas; the cordon sanitaire as a tool of racist segregation in colonial urban contexts has a long and troubled history. COVID-19 cordons have consisted largely of regulations and spot checks, reinforced by occasional road blocks, or by the "digital fences" created by mobile tracking technology. Continuous, purpose-built physical barriers have been rare. For the first months of the pandemic, Wuhan's inner city was divided into neighborhood zones with rows of six-foot high yellow plastic barriers, snaking down city-center streets. In September, near Gütersloh, Germany, a complex of multi-story blocks was temporarily fenced off when several of its residents, most migrant workers at the local meat processing plant, tested positive.
This kind of intimate cordoning, or penning, by means of a wire mesh fence, carries a particular charge. These fences are ubiquitous in the urban environment: panels fixed in portable concrete blocks, flexible, quickly erected and disassembled. They keep people safe by keeping them out of construction sites; in German they are Bauzäune. Their banal familiarity turns dark when instead of keeping people out they keep them in, visible in their captivity.
The Göttingen authorities fenced off the tower block site to prevent "escape" and the breaking of the quarantine, which itself was meant to interrupt chains of transmission. Like the migrant workers in Singapore Jennifer Ferng writes about, residents were caught in a vicious circle: the overcrowded living conditions which led to the outbreak meant that much of life was spent outside of the home, in public space, in others' homes, and in shared workplaces, and therefore they could not be trusted—in the minds of the public health authorities—to stay at home.
There were also explicitly spatial factors at play. Imagine a situation where the COVID-19 outbreak took place in partially gentrified nineteenth-century tenement buildings.
The population is less knowable, integrated with a more empowered community that would make politicians balk at the idea of fences. The space itself is integrated into the urban fabric, not containable by a fence. The possibility of a ring of fencing depends on the morphology of the architecture it surrounds. In both Göttingen and Manchester, the sites were (soft versions of) the tower and slab architecture of the postwar estate (Figures 3 and 4).[3] These are self-contained complexes with dense cores and relatively open surroundings, or at least a void in which a fence can be inserted. The fencing is also responding to the fact that the complexes are connected to their surroundings by multiple exits and paths, rather than a single access point.
Figure 3. Groner Landstrasse 9, Göttingen, view of whole complex. Google Earth. Image Landsat/Copernicus.
Figure 4. Aerial View of Student Dormitories, Fallowfield campus, University of Manchester. Google Earth. Image Landsat/Copernicus.
Students and migrant tenants are, or are perceived as, transient and mobile groups, inhabiting these spaces for a limited period of time with their permanent residence outside of the city or even outside of the country. This is reflected not only in where they live (student dorms on campuses and housing estates with few or no local inhabitants) but also where they study and work, socialize, as well as how and when they move around. The parallel existence of urban “Others” is normally overlooked: their patterns of circulation within the city are only highlighted when an unforeseen event (a strike, a natural disaster, or, like in 2020, an epidemic) radically rearranges them. In the everyday, the Other is disproportionally out of sight; during extraordinary events, it becomes disproportionately marked out and attended to. This is when transport, communication and working conditions of “non-resident” groups of people in the city become visible, often for the first time. COVID-19, undiscriminating in its ability to be transmitted from one body to another, is taken up as a reason to not only functionally but also physically contain and separate them. Fences become both thinkable and unthinkable: resorted to by the city council and the university Estates department, experienced as an outrage by those finding themselves within them.
It is not so much the reactions to the fences as the impact of those reactions that reveals the important differences between the two types of mobile Other. On the evening of the day the fences appeared, over a thousand Manchester students staged a protest and physically tore down some of the fence panels (Figures 5 and 6).[4] Under pressure from the students, their parents and the media, the University issued an apology to the students that evening, dismantled the remaining fence the next day and launched an inquiry.
Figure 5. Students knocking down fence panels during protest on 5 November 2020, Fallowfield Campus, University of Manchester. Photograph: Joel Goodman.
Figure 6. Student protest, Fallowfield Campus, University of Manchester, 5 November 2020. Antonio Ross (@reflectionless.ross)/The Mancunion.
Not so in Göttingen: when residents of the fenced off estate likewise staged a protest against the measures and were supported in solidarity by protesters on the other side of the fence, the reaction was swift and fierce (Figure 7). Protesters threw objects at the police and tried to break through the fences, while police used teargas to beat them back. Despite the strong resistance within and outside of “the village” [Dorf], as the estate is referred to in one of the press reports, the cordoning of the estate was maintained as planned for the full week-long period.
Figure 7. Residents behind quarantine fence cheer on demonstration and are watched over by police outside of 9 Groner Landstrasse, Göttingen, 23 June 2020. Photograph: Michael Trammer.
The strict reaction of the authorities was linked to the existing social and cultural stigma of the estate—it is hard to imagine police clamping down on Manchester students in quite the same way. But even more so than cultural capital, students' investment capital in the form of tuition fees might have proved the decisive difference. During their short protest, students didn’t forget to stress that they are paying high fees to the institution that cordoned them off. Students are crucial consumers in the marketized UK university system; students’ mobility also means they might quickly opt for a different choice. For the Göttingen protesters who are not crucial consumers but expendable producers, however, their international mobility is not a bargaining chip in their favor but rather an aggravating circumstance. Their spatial and social separation from the rest of the city makes migrant workers estates the prime testing ground for new extreme measures during epidemic. “The village” was separated from the city before the pandemic; the only difference is that in 2020, its walls became visible.
Notes
[1] According to the report of an internal University of Manchester enquiry, the original plan had been for fencing to surround only the perimeter of the very large Fallowfield campus area. But “mission creep” had led to a series of fenced enclosures around the different student villages, rendering much of the common green space inaccessible.
[2] Miloš Kosec and Leslie Topp, "Infection and the Politics of Space: The Cordon Sanitaire," gta papers, forthcoming, 2021.
[3] The architectural centerpiece of the Fallowfield campus is Owen's Park Student Village, with its 19-storey tower block designed by Building Design Partnership and opened in 1964.
[4] The estimate that over a thousand students attended the protest comes from An investigation into the erection of fencing at the Fallowfield Halls of Residence on 5 November 2020, p. 3.
