Governing (through) anticipation, architecture, affect

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I analyze the use of architecture and affect as means for ensuring a prepared and resilient population. I do this by exploring an empirical case of public simulation centers, which are an emerging type of educational facility with the purpose of training the public for future emergencies using advanced simulations. Accordingly, existing anticipatory techniques are being redeployed and applied to a new target group, the public, which calls for renewed engagement with the use of space, physical design, and affect as means for involving and fostering the public in societal preparedness. Drawing on literature on anticipatory governance, I focus on two questions, elaborating first how public simulation centers produce and enable security affects and, second, exploring the means, material and immaterial, by which these centers attract and involve citizens in security practices.

KEYWORDS:

• preparedness
• simulation
• anticipation
• disaster
• architecture
• affect

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ridvan Bilgin and the staff at Bursa Valiliği Afet Eğitim Merkezi, and to Mikiko Kashiwagi at the Japan International Cooperation Agency, for their generous assistance during my stay in Bursa. I am also grateful to architectural firms OODA, Leon11, and CRAB studio for letting me reproduce their images. I thank Anna Olofsson for her comments on an early draft. Finally, I thank the reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lakoff and Collier (2010, 244) define the term political technology as “a systematic relation of knowledge and intervention applied to a problem of collective life. In this case, the political technology of preparedness responds to the governmental problem of planning for unpredictable but potentially catastrophic events”.

2 Similar existing centers not included in the research are the Boramae Safety Experience Center, the Daegu Safety Theme Park, and the Gwangnaru Safety Experience Center in South Korea, and the Chengdu Disaster Preparedness Learning Center in China.

3 The basic idea of sensory ethnography is to “rethink ethnography through the senses” (Pink 2015, 6), to “self-consciously and reflexively attend to the senses throughout the research process” (Pink 2015, 7). This means that, when engaging in participant observation, I was at the same time engaged in self-observation, carefully noting my own experiences, actions and reactions for further grounding the interpretation of the observed (Flick 2006, 216).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mikael Linnell

Mikael Linnell is a lecturer in sociology at Mid Sweden University and an associate of the Risk and Crisis Research Centre based in Östersund, Sweden. His current research focuses on the production of anticipatory knowledge for disaster preparedness.