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

Introduction

Imagine yourself on a street in a downtown area just moments after a major earthquake has hit the city. A peculiar blend of post-disaster stillness and sounding alarms and sirens characterize the atmosphere around you. From your vantage point, you see cracked buildings, curved lampposts, and piles of concrete rubble. A few steps away you see flames and smoke coming out of a broken window. Down the street, a man is lying on his back on the pavement. The lower part of his body seems to be stuck under a car, as if he was busy repairing it when the quake started. At the farther end of the street, a desperate cry for help sounds from somewhere underneath a huge pile of rubble. You look around for people who might assist you in saving the injured. Now, imagine that the scene just described is not for real but an artificial environment, created and designed to convey the feeling of being there when the Big One has just struck your city. Thus, a realistic full-scale simulation of a downtown street as it may appear a few minutes after a major earthquake has taken place. Imagine, further, that this artificial full-scale representation of a disaster-struck neighborhood is contained within a spectacular building, an extreme architectural construction comparable to existing futuristic landmarks, such as Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan, or Paul Andreu’s National Grand Theater in Beijing.

What we are being introduced to here, and what will be further explored in this paper, is a specific configuration of material and immaterial elements, practices, and techniques that serve to evoke particular affects assumed to enhance individual preparedness in the event of future disasters. Concretely, the paper presents an analysis of a unique empirical phenomenon labeled here as “public simulation centers”. Accordingly, through the case of public simulation centers I explore, alluding to Kraftl and Adey (2008, 226), how affect is design(at)ed to operate in many ways, and how architectural design operates via discourse and practice, materiality, and immateriality, to evoke particular affects.

Public simulation centers are publicly operated facilities, free of charge and open to everyone, with the aim of providing disaster education and training to specific target groups (e.g. schoolchildren) as well as the public at large. Training is provided through full-scale simulations of a disaster-struck urban area, in which participants may practice appropriate response behavior. The main purpose of the simulation, however, is to enact or “play” potential emergency futures so that participants may get a feel, in advance, of what these futures might be like (Adey and Anderson 2012; Anderson 2010; Anderson and Adey 2011; Aradau 2010; Collier 2008; Lakoff 2007). In this sense, public simulation centers can be understood as a novel form of physical location or space, created in response to the problem of governing present action in relation to future emergencies.

Of course, scholarly interest in how possible future emergencies are governed and intervened on in the present is not new. In particular, during the past decade, we have seen a vast number of detailed explorations into the anticipatory logics, practices, and techniques for making futures affectively and materially present in organizational and professional contexts. For example, the emergence of the “uncertainty-based” logic of preparedness, as supplementing the “risk-based” logic of calculation, has been thoroughly described by Collier (2008) and Lakoff (2007, 2017), and later summarized by Aradau and van Munster (2013), O’Malley (2013), Samimian-Darash and Rabinow (2015), and Samimian-Darash (2016), to name but a few. Common to this body of literature is that it takes its principal starting point in Michel Foucault’s lectures and writings on biopolitics as a form of governance. As noted by Samimian-Darash (2016), sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics all developed in response to specific governmental problems, and was enacted to achieve certain aims through determinate practices. Biopolitical security, then, emerged in response to the problem of circulation and freedom, that is, to the need of securing the unhindered movement of people, goods, money, ideas, etc. and thereby to foster and secure the welfare of populations (Samimian-Darash 2016, 361). Mirroring the (intentionally crude) risk/calculation–uncertainty/preparedness distinction above, Collier and Lakoff (2015) distinguish between two principal forms of biopolitical security, namely population security (which addresses regularly occurring events that are distributed over the population in predictable ways) and vital systems security (which deals with events whose probability cannot be precisely calculated but whose consequences are potentially catastrophic). In vital systems security, anticipatory knowledge of potential future emergencies is thus generated primarily through practices and techniques of imaginative enactment and simulations (Collier and Lakoff 2015, 22).

Drawing on this broad stream of literature, this paper suggests that public simulation centers can be understood as an emerging technology¹ of security which articulate specific relations between governments and populations (Deville, Guggenheim, and Hrdličková 2014), and in which futures are made present through affects (Anderson 2014, 2015; Anderson and Adey 2011), sensory experience and atmosphere (Adey 2014), and material design (Kraftl and Adey 2008). Acknowledging that the field (of anticipatory techniques for governing uncertain futures) has reached a certain maturity, I nevertheless maintain that there are important additional contributions still to be made. This paper advances the existing literature in three distinct ways.

First, it fills a gap by focusing explicitly on the public. Concretely, the paper provides an empirical example of how the public gain access to advanced forms of simulation-based preparedness exercises – an area that has typically been reserved for experts, leaders, officials, and other types of emergency “professionals” (Lakoff 2007, 265). Previous research in the field has for the most part drawn on empirical studies of simulation-based exercises and similar anticipatory techniques in various organizational settings. Well known examples include Anderson and Adey (2011, 2012) and Adey and Anderson (2012) on anticipating and governing emergencies, and security affects, in the context of U.K. Civil Contingencies; O’Grady (2016, 2018) on anticipatory governance through digital representations of potential emergency futures, and their role in the design and performance of exercises, in the context of U.K. Fire and Rescue Services; Samimian-Darash (2016) on exercises in the context of Israel’s National Emergency Management Authority; Aradau (2010) on exercises in the context of the U.K. National Counter-Terrorism Security Office; and Kaufmann (2016) on the interplay of affect and action in the context of a cyber-security exercise conducted by the German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance. Indeed, Kaufmann (2016) explores the exercise as a route to foster resilient subjects; however, the exercise itself is still conditioned by and performed within an organizational setting, implying that it is not intended to involve the “non-professional” public (which is precisely the stated purpose of public simulation centers).

Second, by affirming this novel way of involving the public in security practices independent of its prevalent organizational and professional contexts, the paper highlights the specific techniques employed for making futures present in these centers, namely imaginative enactment and simulation (Anderson 2010; Collier 2008; Lakoff 2007). Now, as Kaufmann (2016, 100) rightly suggests, the involvement of citizens into security practices is nothing new. What is new in connection to the emergence of public simulation centers is the accessibility for all citizens to advanced simulations for the specific purpose of training emergency preparedness. Traditionally, the involvement of citizens into security practices has been limited to educational campaigns and school programs (Collier and Lakoff 2008; Davis 2007), including drills and movies (like the famous Duck and Cover cartoon in the 1950s, which taught American children what to do when they saw the flash of an atomic bomb) (DHS 2006), or the exhortation to report suspicious behavior (Kaufmann 2016, 100; Aradau and van Munster 2013, 100), hence without access to advanced simulation exercises. Simulation-based exercises, as noted, has been mostly reserved for “professionals” in various organizational settings, like the military and civil defense, rescue services, and civil contingencies (Lakoff 2007). Accordingly, the case of public simulation centers becomes a current example of how existing techniques for governing future emergencies migrate between sectors, and are being redeployed and applied to new target groups (Adey, Anderson, and Graham 2015).

Third, public simulation centers constitute physical locations, and spaces, for making futures affectively and materially present. That is, they are buildings, in terms of architectural design, as well as producers or enablers of security affects. In this sense, the present paper aims to answer the call to “attend to the ways in which those affective potentialities are negotiated in and through practices of inhabiting buildings” (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 228), and to contribute to discussions on the spatialization and aestheticization of uncertain and potentially threatening futures (Aradau and van Munster 2012, 2013; O’Grady 2018).

Hence, in this paper, my aim is to explore architectural design and affect as elements of a novel security technology intended as a response to the governmental problem of securing the welfare, freedom, and circulation of citizens by fostering a prepared and vigilant public. Thereby I do not consider it within the scope of the paper to investigate or determine the possible advantage of public simulation centers over traditional “cognitivist” preparedness campaigns intended for the public. Rather, the two interrelated issues I analyze and account for boil down to the following questions: first, how do public simulation centers produce and enable security affects and, second, with what (material and immaterial) means do these centers attract and involve citizens in security practices? The paper is structured as follows: After this introductory section, I provide the paper’s empirical and methodological background, and then I present its theoretical orientation. In the main section, I analyze and discuss the elements of affect and architecture in the context of public simulation centers. In the concluding section, I reflect on the outcome of the analysis and discuss some implications of the paper’s theoretical approach.

The emergence of public simulation centers

This paper builds on an empirical case consisting of three public simulation centers, of which two exist as physical buildings and one exists in multiple versions as an architectural imagination.² Of the three, the first actual operative center, inaugurated in 2010, is the Tokyo Rinkai Disaster Prevention Park (2021a) (hereafter the Tokyo Center). This facility is located on the artificial island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay. The second actual operative center, inaugurated in 2013, is the Bursa Disaster Education and Training Center (2021) (hereafter the Bursa Center), which is located in Bursa City, the fourth largest urban center in Turkey. The Tokyo and Bursa Centers contain – in addition to the full-scale simulation mentioned in this paper’s vignette – a number of exhibition spaces, lecture halls, 3D-cinemas, libraries, and cafés.

The third center, the Istanbul Disaster Prevention and Education Centre (hereafter the Istanbul Center) is an, as yet, unbuilt facility with a planned location next to the former Istanbul Atatürk International Airport. The Istanbul Center exists in the form of digitally rendered images and sketches, which served as project proposals in an architectural competition announced and decided in 2011. At present, there is no indication that the facility in Istanbul will ever be built.

The very first center of this particular kind was the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution (DRI 2021) in Kobe, Japan (hereafter the Kobe Center). Although not part of the empirical material for this paper, I wish to mention the Kobe Center briefly as part of the historical context. This center was established in 2002 in commemoration of the 1995 Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake, with the aim to educate citizens in disaster preparedness, based on experience of the 1995 earthquake (Cabinet Office, Japan 2015, 56; Murata 2005, 106; Nishikawa and Yukinari 2015, 21). The Kobe Center’s goals are presented on its official webpage:

Our goals are to ensure that the lessons of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake are never forgotten. Big-screen footage and soundscapes are used along with recreations of the earthquake using special effects and computer graphics to let visitors experience the terrifying power. Moreover, we offer games and experiments so that visitors can learn about natural disasters and how to minimize risk and damage in [the] future. (DRI 2021)

As can be discerned from the quote, the Kobe Center employs an advanced edutainment approach in order to attract visitors and to train their skills in disaster preparedness. The 1995 earthquake is recreated as an educational sensory experience, a simulation made possible through the assemblage of construction materials, films, images, and audiovisual effects. Preparedness skills and knowledge are taught and assessed through games and experiments.

Streets after the quake

One of the more innovative features of the Kobe Center is the creation of a particular section called “Streets after the quake”. This section consists of a full-scale, three-dimensional, realistic reproduction of a typical downtown neighborhood as it may look after being struck by a major earthquake. The purpose of this section is to let visitors experience the feeling of being in the midst of an urban space moments after a quake and to practice appropriate post-disaster behavior. On the center’s official webpage, this particular section is introduced with the statement: “Relive the earthquake with a full-scale, realistic reproduction of the devastation” (Figure 1 below).

Figure 1. “Streets after the quake”. Source: Screenshot from the Kobe Center’s webpage.

In this paper, I explore the “Streets after the quake” section of the Tokyo and Bursa Centers. At the Tokyo Center, this particular section is called “the 72-hour tour” (Tokyo Rinkai Disaster Prevention Park 2021b) and at the Bursa Center, it is called “the earthquake debris corridor” (in Turkish: deprem enkaz koridoru) (Güvencem 2021a). On the Tokyo Center’s official website, the 72-hour tour is introduced as follows:

It is said that organized rescue efforts are usually performed seventy-two hours after an earthquake occurs. So, how would you survive during those seventy-two hours when rescue is difficult? This tour allows you to experience the flow of events starting with the [outbreak of the disaster]. In a diorama where you experience repeated aftershocks through sound, lightning, and imagery, you will make your way to an evacuation area while asking a quiz with a portable game machine. (Tokyo Rinkai Disaster Prevention Park 2021b)

The Bursa Center has no corresponding element of gaming, which the Tokyo Center has, where you are asked to complete a quiz on a Nintendo game console during your visit in the post-earthquake environment (Figure 2 below). On the Bursa Center’s website, the debris corridor (Figure 3 below) is introduced as follows:

Figure 2. Guided by the game console (the Tokyo Center). Photograph by author.

Figure 3. “The earthquake debris corridor” (the Bursa Center). Photograph by author.

[It is] a corridor where damaged buildings with various ruins can be seen after an earthquake, an observation corridor prepared with light, sound and different building materials is established and aims to provide the visitors with the post-earthquake situation. Realistic images are obtained using various wood, plastic and construction materials. The debris corridor is constructed by benefiting from the images of the earthquakes that have taken place before. In the earthquake, the people who are under the debris are trained in how to rescue and how to help. (Güvencem 2021b)

As stated in the quote, the debris corridor trains visitors how to help their fellows who may be injured or trapped in the rubble. At the Bursa Center, visitors are accompanied by an instructor who guides the participants through the simulation, asking critical questions, and providing hints on appropriate ways of dealing with various problems. At the Tokyo Center, visitors are guided mainly by the Nintendo game console. In addition, attendant personnel engage in role-play and perform in the role of rescue workers (Figure 4 below). The kind of full-scale realistic representation of a particular environment or milieu as described here is by no means unique to disaster education and public simulation centers. This type of simulation, intended for experiential learning and entertainment, has been around for a long time in museums and similar exhibition contexts, such as theme parks and historical reconstructions. Think, for example, of the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum, which features an indoor full-scale reconstruction of a 1950s Japanese urban food district, complete with restaurants and corner shops. Or, imagine the Maréorama, a full-scale replica of a cruise ship, which was exhibited in the amusement section at the 1900 Paris Exposition. To render the sense of movement and navigation, the ship’s deck was mechanically agitated, while changes of day and night were represented in a synesthetic form that included sound, light, smell, and sea breeze (Bruno 2002, 183). What is new, then, with public simulation centers is the use of simulation-based techniques, not for the sole purpose of entertainment or education in a general sense, but for the possibility of experiencing future emergencies in advance, and thus to reduce the surprise when something actually happens. Accordingly, with the migration of existing simulation techniques, from areas like national defense, professional emergency- and disaster management, and the edutainment- and experience industry, into the area of public preparedness and resilience, it becomes important to unveil and describe emergent forms of relations between individuals (or target groups) and government agencies (as operators of public simulation centers). We will return to this issue in the theoretical section below.

Assembling the case of public simulation centers

The research on public simulation centers carried out in preparation for this paper involved two rounds of fieldwork and an extensive document study. Fieldwork, with a particular focus on the 72-hour experience and the debris corridor, was carried out at the Tokyo Center in July 2014 and the Bursa Center in November 2015. This work was largely informed by the methodological ideas of sensory ethnography, as developed by Leder Mackley and Pink (2013) and Pink (2015).³ The empirical material assembled during this phase consists of field notes, informal interviews, photographs, and video clips from approximately 30 hours of participant observation. In addition, I have collected and systematized a considerable amount of internet-based material, such as news articles, blog posts, video clips, and websites associated with the Tokyo and Bursa Centers. On site, I participated in pre-booked training sessions along with various groups (such as primary school pupils, people with functional diversities, and office employees), along with informal drop-in sessions intended for the public at large. In a subsequent phase, during 2017 and 2018, I supplemented the exploration of the Tokyo and Bursa Centers with an internet-based document study of the unrealized Istanbul Center. The remainder of the present section provides an account of the Istanbul sub-case.

Figure 4. Personnel acting as rescue workers (the Tokyo Center). Photograph by author.

In February 2011, an international architectural competition was announced for a design idea regarding a disaster prevention and education center in Bakırköy, Istanbul. Conditions for the competition were developed jointly by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and the promoters of the award, ThyssenKrupp Elevator. The objective of the project was, as stated in the Competition Brief and Conditions:

… to establish a technology centre, which shall be an example of the “Edutainment” approach and equipped with adequate infrastructure to conduct educational activities towards preparing the visitors against disasters [and] to create a state of the art design which aims to contribute to Istanbul’s urban context. (ThyssenKrupp 2011, 3)

Hence, among the most important criteria on which the jury had to decide was “the visual and scenic character of the design and its integration into the townscape aspects and urban and environmental context” (ThyssenKrupp 2011, 9). At present, the site of the proposed center, which covers approximately 27,000 square meters, is a vacant lot used as a car park (ThyssenKrupp 2011, 3). The purpose of the competition, in other words, was to explore the possibility to “transform a desolate site into a vibrant new center for a wide range of civic, cultural, and entertainment [and educational] activities” (Webber 2001, 100), in order to “supply the possibilities of learning, rest, play, or protection” (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 227). Eventually, nearly 190 proposals submitted by architects from 59 countries were examined by the jury (Meta 2011). As part of the research preceding the present paper, a dozen proposals were selected for further investigation and analysis. In order to assemble images, sketches, and other types of information about the contributions, I turned to architectural sites on the internet, including ArchDaily, Archiscene, Architizer, Designboom, and World Architecture, which had all reported on the competition itself and contributions to the competition.

Once a planned architectural project has been realized, the epistemological focus shifts (Grosz 2001, 129), which allows for investigating the frictions between visualizations and material outcomes of architectural plans (Balke, Reuber, and Wood 2018; Michalowska 2015). This aspect is not considered in the present paper since, at the time of writing, the centers analyzed were either still at the planning stage (the Istanbul Center) or fully established as physical buildings (the Tokyo and Bursa Centers).

Theoretical orientation

From the existing literature on anticipatory governance and preparedness techniques, we have acquired detailed insights into the ways in which futures are made present through affects and materialities, as well as how affects are produced and mediated through sensory experience and atmosphere. In this paper, I wish to contribute to and advance these insights by shifting the empirical focus from typical organizational and professional settings, to a setting whose main purpose is to involve the public in security practices. Thinking of public simulation centers as a form of biopolitical technology – one that redeploys existing anticipatory techniques and put them to work in the field of public preparedness – it appears an important task to articulate the subtle shifts in relations between governments and populations that may (be assumed to) occur as a result of this process. The limited space allows for nothing more than a small attempt; however, drawing on the previous literature I will say a few words on this aspect in relation to this paper’s empirical basis. Furthermore, without making myself guilty of too much repetition, I will discuss briefly how architectural design and affect can function as elements constituting a technology for managing the governmental problem of creating a prepared and resilient public. Accordingly, in the present section I turn first to the shifting relations between governments and populations, and second, to the elements of architecture and affect.

Foucault (2007) elucidated important aspects concerning the governmental use of technologies within the framework of biopolitical security. As a contemporary liberal response to societal problems, security is a positive or productive form of governing. Security does not aim to restrict the freedom of individuals. On the contrary, the unhindered circulation of people and things and the entrepreneurial self-sufficiency of individuals is the very foundation of security power. At the same time, governments need to avert or neutralize threats to the free circulation of individuals and things. Hence, citizens become involved in this effort as active co-producers of security. However, when thinking of public simulation centers, and their self-presentation on websites and in leaflets, their target audience (e.g. the public, visitors, participants, citizens) seems to consist of a merging of two entities: the individual and the population. Concretely, these centers are established to reach the population as a whole but are, reasonably, visited by specific groups (such as schoolchildren) and individuals. As noted by O’Grady (2018, 89), there is a dynamic at play here between subject (the individual citizen) and object (the aggregation of individuals, the population, the public) since “it appears as if the pursuit of the object of governance is enacted through attempts to know the subject itself” (89). Foucault discusses this merging of the subject-object of governance in relation to sexuality (2003) and societal unrest (2007). In analogy with his discussion on sexuality, we may say that preparedness “exists at the point where body and population meet” (Foucault 2003, 251–252). Accordingly, when analyzing public preparedness, one have to take into account the dual perspective of individual and population.

Deville, Guggenheim, and Hrdličková (2014) provide an example thereof in their study of concrete shelters. More precisely, they show how relations between governments and populations shift with the introduction of new shelter-building programs. In some countries, the state extends its reach by claiming responsibility for its citizens in relation to specific disasters (187), while in other countries, the state makes no such efforts, leaving the responsibility of shelters to the individual (190). Insisting that buildings can have a mediating effect on the relation between a state and its population, one may ask what kind of subjects are constituted simply by residing in different types of buildings. A shelter typically constitutes the target subject-object as vulnerable and in need of protection (Deville, Guggenheim, and Hrdličková 2014), while public simulation centers, by contrast, constitute the target subject-object as resilient and capable of protecting others aside from oneself. Much of what has been written on architecture, space, and spatial design from a Foucauldian perspective has centered on questions of symbolism, power, state control, and surveillance (Abramson et al. 2012; Huxley 2008; Piro 2008). However, from his Collège de France lectures and onwards, Foucault pursues a more complex discourse on these matters, which does not replace but supplements earlier discussions (Fontana-Giusti 2013). As noted by Schuilenburg and Peeters (2018) there is a material-spatial aspect inherent in biopolitical security that can be articulated in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Strategies of exclusion involve measures for inhibiting circulation of people and things like, for example, guarded gateways, roadblocks, fences, and walls; that is, physical design intended to reduce people’s access to public and urban space (Schuilenburg and Peeters 2018, 2). In contrast, inclusive security enhances urban safety without reducing accessibility. To a lesser extent, strategies of inclusive security focus on measures such as defense and surveillance, and instead operates by “scripting the use of public space by designing in new defaults for behavior” (Schuilenburg and Peeters 2018, 2). Public simulation centers, accordingly, can be thought of as architectural renderings of inclusive security. In order to make sense of and articulate how affects emerge and mediate “preparedness” in the context of public simulation centers, I will now draw on existing literature to highlight a few important aspects, which may help us to formulate more precisely what is going on in the 72-hour experience and the debris corridor. The three aspects briefly considered below are: relations between affect and action; relations between affect and (im)materialities; and, the multitude of possible affects.

To paraphrase Kaufmann (2016), public simulation centers can be studied as a governmental program that “affectively modulates a population’s relationship to emergencies” (103) and, thereby, opens up citizens to act in the face of unexpected events. In this Spinozian-Deleuzian-Massumian-influenced line of reasoning, affect is to be understood broadly as “the capacity of the body to effectuate change” (103) and as “the property of the active outcome of an encounter [that] takes the form of an increase or decrease in the ability of the body and mind alike to act” (Thrift 2004, 62). This potentiality of the body to act arises in the precise moment between an encounter (that is, some form of contact between individuals or between individuals and their immediate environment) and the reaction to that encounter. Affect, thereby, emerges as relational and inter-personal in the sense that our own affects depend on the nature of the external object or body that affected us, just as external bodies may be affected by us as well (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 215).

Moreover, affects emerge in relation to materialities and non-material sensory impressions. This is particularly clear in the simulated post-earthquake environment of the 72-hour experience and the debris corridor. In the simulation, the affectual experience of being there, in the midst of emergency, is produced through an assemblage of construction materials, objects and props, moving images on television screens, and other audiovisual effects. As noted by Anderson and Adey (2011, 1102–1103), visual and audio materials are part of staging the site of the simulation, by expressing specific affective qualities normally connected to urgency and peril. O’Grady (2016) talks of these materials and techniques in terms of esthetics, referring to both “the set of techniques through which different events can be rendered, imagined and experienced” and “how such events are produced through and beheld upon sensual registers” (O’Grady 2016, 496).

From previous studies, we know that the affectual reactions produced in emergency simulations can be completely different from those intended. Preparedness exercises may produce stress, fear, and anxiety, as well as boredom, fascination, or joy (Anderson and Adey 2011; Anderson 2015). According to Kaufmann (2016), affect is a pre-conscious incitement, which may lead to different kinds of actions and emotional responses in different individuals (103). In line with this, Anderson (2015) has observed that “affective effects can never be guaranteed in advance” (273). Accordingly, public simulation centers may strive to reach “the whole population” as a homogeneous unit, assumed to experience more or less identical affects in the simulation, when, in fact, it is individuals who participate, with their individual affective experiences, and their individual responses.

Governing through architecture and affect

Now, let us return to the empirical material to look in more detail into some of the ways in which security affects emerge in public simulation centers, and with what material and immaterial means these centers attract and involve citizens in security practices. Following this introductory note, the remaining section will be structured into two subsections, each elaborating on a salient aspect of this paper’s theme. In the first subsection, I describe a set of affectual experiences that, together, are assumed to bring into the present a sense of future emergency. This part of the analysis builds on fieldwork and participant observation in the Tokyo and Bursa Centers. Accordingly, descriptions of situations, including examples of how affects emerge in this setting, are taken from my fieldnotes. The affects encountered in the simulation turned out to be “typical” security affects in the sense that they are supposed to operate on a negative register to make people act in the face of unexpected events (Kaufmann 2016, 103). In the second subsection, I describe how we, through affectual experiences emerging in encounters with architectural design, are assumed to feel incited and invited to visit public simulation centers. This part of the analysis builds on a selection of architectural sketches and descriptions regarding the planned Istanbul Center. The analysis, thus, moves from the inner workings of the center itself and outwards, to involve the exterior environment. Implicitly throughout both subsections, I reflect on how visitors may perceive the emergency futures presented to them, and how these particular futures are (assumed to be) acted on in the present.

The will to affect

Analysis of the empirical material uncovered three principal affects that are produced and mediated within the context of the 72-hour experience and the debris corridor, namely: stress, surprise, and vigilance. As noted previously, these are typical (negative) security affects in the sense that they have been described in previous studies as exerting a negative incitement or pressure to act. Hence, future studies may perhaps be able to demonstrate other, positively charged, affects in similar settings. Stress is the first affective condition you encounter at the Tokyo Center. Upon entering, you are placed by personnel in a mock elevator, descending from the tenth floor of a terminal station building. Suddenly, the elevator starts to twitch and the lights go out. The long-feared earthquake, the Big One, has suddenly hit Tokyo. Accompanying children, even though they understand that this is fake, seem to be genuinely scared by the simulation. Stress, accordingly, emerge in this situation as a an affectual experience originating, in part, from the inter-personal relations among participants (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 215), and, in part, from relations between individuals and their material surrounding (for example, a non-functioning elevator). Finally, down on the ground floor, we evacuate at a slow pace, crouching our way out of the building with the help of emergency exit signs and fluorescent stripes on the floor. Outside, we find ourselves on a devastated downtown street. Personnel acting as emergency workers (see Figure 4 above) gather the group and, using a megaphone, tell us about the disaster. Behind the emergency worker, a brick wall gradually cracks. The whole building seems to be about to collapse on top of a car unfortunately parked in front of the house. The second affective condition encountered in the simulation is that of surprise. We, a random mix of participants, are scattered along the street, each of us immersed in the havoc induced by the earthquake. On its official website, the Tokyo Center presents the 72-hour experience as a “diorama”, and I have therefore expected the scene to be static. However, as I raise my eyes towards a facade, I realize that this is more than the frozen time–space of a diorama. Things actually happen here: an air-conditioner suddenly comes off its attachment, in another building, the interior seems to have caught fire. Red flames and smoke can be glimpsed behind the curtains of display windows. Surprises such as these are staged to open up my awareness to the risks caused by the disaster. The affectual experience of surprise thus emerge from relations between myself and the material and immaterial elements, or esthetics, that are part of staging the site of the simulation (Anderson and Adey 2011; O’Grady 2016). The third affective condition is that of attentiveness or vigilance. Again, this affectual condition emerges in relations among people, and between people and things. This is illustrated by the following two examples from the debris corridor in the Bursa Center: (First) suddenly, the instructor makes a halt in front of the car sales (referred to in the paper’s opening vignette), quietly turning my attention to the diversity of impending dangers: the car, the advertising sign about to slide down, the crumbling building, the torn electric wire … The man stuck under the car is in immediate danger of being hit by the falling objects and must be brought to safety. I tell the instructor that the best thing to do here is calling for help so that several people can join forces and get the car out of the way. “Quite right” he says with a serious face, “but first … ”: He points at the electric wire cutting through the scene. Without words, he shows me how to remove the wire using some non-conductive material, like a piece of wood or a rubber tire, before helping the injured person. (Second) at the farther end of the alley, a desperate cry for help sounds from somewhere underneath a huge pile of concrete and steel. The scene invites us to imagine a woman trapped in the rubble. In the present situation, attention is focused on the audible rather than the visual. The immediate threat (of being crushed or suffocated) is out of frame, and the imaginative action goes on in a negative space, inaccessible from my current position. Accordingly, the scene aims to enhance my vigilance and, thus, to make me observant and ready for things that cannot be perceived directly by sight.

The will to attract

Moving from the interior environment of public simulation centers to their exterior, I would now like to shift focus from the production and mediation of affect within these facilities to the affective experiences emerging in relation to the facilities as buildings, or articulations of architectural design. Public simulation centers make use of their material appearances, including their exterior environments, to attract visitors. This is particularly obvious at the Tokyo Center. Adjacent to the Tokyo Center is a large public park that, according to two leaflets about the center, serves a dual purpose:

When a major earthquake or other disasters occur in the Tokyo metropolitan area […] the entire park will function as the command headquarters. During normal times, the park offers a large space perfect for various usages from resting and relaxing to doing light exercises and picnics. (Tokyo Rinkai leaflet 2021a)

These “disaster prevention parks” are important open spaces to save our lives in the event of an earthquake disaster. But most of the time they show their other face as Metropolitan parks that make our cities pleasant and stately and give us the places for relaxation and recreation. (Tokyo Rinkai leaflet 2021b)

In other words, for the most part, the exterior environment surrounding public simulation centers is used for leisure activities. Furthermore, the exterior environment, as a place for relaxation and recreation, is positively highlighted for its accessibility and proximity to various urban attractions, as exemplified on the official webpage of the Tokyo Center: “The park [surrounding the Tokyo Center] is also an attractive area that takes advantage of urban concentration and ability to attract visitors to the Tokyo waterfront subcenter” (Tokyo Rinkai Disaster Prevention Park 2021c). This is in line with the objectives of the architectural competition for the Istanbul Center, which states that, in addition to providing “educational activities towards preparing the visitors against disasters” the center shall “contribute to Istanbul’s urban context” and also become “one of the prominent tourist attractions in the city” (ThyssenKrupp 2011, 4). In this context, we encounter one of the major themes emerging from the analysis, namely, that of form vs function. As noted in previous studies, contemporary architectural projects characterized by grand(iose) ambitions (that is, buildings that are planned to become “iconic”, “spectacular”, “landmarks”, and so on) often experience conflict between form (or esthetic qualities) and function (Shiner 2011, 31). This has been found in empirical studies of, for example, office towers (Grubbauer 2014), sports arenas (Tamari 2019), concert halls (Balke, Reuber, and Wood 2018), and art museums (Shiner 2011). In light of these studies, one may speculate, based on the considerations and priorities required, whether or not the Istanbul Center will ever come to actualization. In other words, how should the educational activities be optimized without compromising with spectacular design? In comparison to the iconic (according to the design proposals) Istanbul Center, the architectural design of the Tokyo and Bursa Centers is anything but spectacular (Figure 5 below). The latter appears to be a traditional, modernistic institutional and public structure, where form characteristically follows function (Milne 1981, 132). The Istanbul Center, on the other hand, presents itself as a vibrant public space (thus facilitating the smooth circulation of knowledge, people, and things) as well as a landmark within the urban context of the Istanbul metropolis.

Figure 5. The Bursa Center (Bursa Valiliği Afet Eğitim Merkezi). Photograph by author.

Among the design proposals, the will to attract visitors is articulated in various ways. A recurring theme linked to the above discussion is that of the prospective facility’s geographic placement and social function within the wider context of Istanbul’s urban space. Apparently, to attract visitors to the facility, the Portugal-based architectural firm OODA aims to satisfy not only the formal criteria stated in the Competition Brief and Conditions (ThyssenKrupp 2011, 4) but also a number of informal ones. As stated in their proposal:

Conceptually, the building (Figure 6 below) assumes its own identity on the city and stands as a new-age landmark that captivates tourists to its content and also attracts all the local people in case of real natural disaster in Istanbul having the new landscape the ability to become a major emergency shelter – earthquake or flood – and the building to work as a guiding focal reference. (Furuto 2011a)

Accordingly, OODA’s proposal seeks to bring together various aspects of architectural theory and practice. The facility is “iconic” in the sense that it is expected to become a visually and symbolically significant landmark for the region (Balke, Reuber, and Wood 2018, 999). Furthermore, with its pretension to function as a major emergency shelter, OODA’s proposal is an example of a particular type of architecture, which serves to protect (some) people from harm and preserve (valued) life in extreme physical circumstances (Deville, Guggenheim, and Hrdličková 2014, 183; Schuilenburg and Peeters 2018, 6). Likewise, the Spanish firm Leon11 suggests an innovative approach to the creation of a public space as a way to attract visitors to the prospective facility. As stated in their proposal:

Figure 6. Design proposal for the Istanbul Center. Source: OODA.

“Inhabiting the sky” (Figure 7 below) introduces a new concept to understand the “welcome” area of a public space, creating not a park, nor a public square, but a new kind of space where nature−human and technology works together to build up an atmosphere really authentic and related to the subject that is presented in the center. (Furuto 2011b)

In a similar fashion, the Swiss-based firm Group8 presents their proposal by stressing the center as a public space: “The epicenter [i.e. the name of the proposal] calls for a new space within the city. It is an opportunity to build a unique public space, generating a new urban landscape dedicated to the population of Istanbul and its visitors” (Archiscene 2012). Accordingly, we can assume that the buildings proposed by Leon11 and Group8 also aim to become iconic. In addition, the suggested designs can be viewed as an example of what Thrift (2008) calls “performative” architecture, by which is meant buildings that, in various ways, attempt to represent “life”, and that serve to “manipulate time and space in order to produce intensified social interaction so that all manner of crossover ideas can be achieved” (44). Consequently, by emphasizing (or reformulating) the center’s primary function as public space rather than educational institution, the design proposals by OODA, Leon11, and Group8 seem to evade the potential conflict between function and esthetic quality. Continuing the analysis through the dualism of form and function, in what follows, I will illustrate the interweaving of “the will to attract” and the anticipatory governing of future disasters. I will do this by using three proposals from the architectural competition, all of which take the human consequences of disasters as the starting point for their design ideas. Turning first to the primacy of form, I will take a closer look at the proposal submitted by Group8. In their proposal, the facility is designed as a fraction of a geographical area, disfigured by some unnamed natural disaster. Accordingly, from the initial visual contact with the center, visitors are invited to anticipate the post-landscape resulting from the disaster. As described in the proposal, “the surface of the roof functions as a new landscaped public boulevard. Recalling the feel of a post-natural disaster landscape (i.e. post-landscape), the specific landscape spreading across the roof is an experience in itself” (Archiscene 2012). Turning instead to the primacy of function, we can see that the design proposals by OODA and the UK-based firm CRAB studio invite visitors to anticipate future disasters in a completely different way. These centers do not aim to represent “life”. Similar to the surrounding park of the Tokyo Center, the latter proposals are designed to fulfill dual functions. During normal times, the facility is to serve as a public simulation center, however, when a major disaster occurs, such as an earthquake or flooding, the facility will be used as a shelter or barrier to protect the population. Hence, the protective aspect of the design is incorporated into the normal functionality of the built environment (Schuilenburg and Peeters 2018, 7). As stated in the proposal by CRAB studio (Figure 8 below), the center is “designed to resist the destructive forces of tsunamis. The building’s concrete “blades” are meant to divide the streams of water and reduce the impact of the wave” (Grozdanic 2012).

Conclusion: governing anticipation

In this paper, I explored how public simulation centers work to enhance preparedness in citizens through affectual experiences and architectural design. These centers present themselves as a physical environment, a “place to visit”, intended to stimulate security practices in a positive way. Simultaneously, they do not merely target specific groups “in need” but reach out to whole populations as a biosocial entity. Hence, these centers constitute positive spaces of security that operate through strategies of inclusion. Nevertheless, due to the contemporary tendencies of neoliberal city branding and the commercialization of public space, the possibility remains that some groups in society will experience themselves as more or less excluded from these centers. The analysis highlighted these centers’ use of their material appearance, including their exterior environments, and their use of affective experiences, as technologies for governing citizens’ improvement of their own skills and knowledge in terms of disaster preparedness and response. From the perspective of the exterior, these centers strive to attract visitors through affective experiences typically valued positively. The material appearance of the buildings contributes to feelings of curiosity and fascination, and the exterior environment presents itself as a public space intended for recreation, relaxation, and socializing. From the perspective of the interior, these centers aim to produce a dynamic set of affective states in visitors in order to facilitate action, readiness, and capacity to respond in an emergency. The centers are marketed as spaces of edutainment and pleasure; however, for the 72-hour experience and the debris corridor, the most significant affects were those of stress, surprise and vigilance. Together, the elements of architecture and affect constitute a biopolitical technology for enhancing the resilience of populations.

Figure 7. Design proposal for the Istanbul Center. Source: Leon11.

Figure 8. Design proposal for the Istanbul Center. Source: CRAB studio.

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).

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.

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).