Abstract
Criminology has long adhered to two-dimensional, superficial, lazy, taken-for-granted and often quite frankly boring ways of thinking about urban space. From Guerry and Quetelet’s 19th century cartes thematiques and the Chicago School’s iconic ‘concentric zone’ model, to the latest developments in digital crime mapping, criminological conceptions of the metropolis have long exemplified what Michel de Certeau (1984) famously described as the ‘concept city’: the city as it is ‘seen by planners, developers, statisticians … distilled to leave only quantitative data, demographics and rational discourse’ (Hayward, 2004: 2). All too often, criminologists have tended to regard the urban mise-en-scène of crime and social control – the built environment of the city – as an empty container, ‘an inert material backdrop, or an aesthetic surface upon which criminal activities can be mapped’ (Campbell, 2013: 18; Hayward, 2012). As a result, criminological understandings of urban space – at once the immediate, physical and phenomenological context of crime; increasingly a medium of social control; and repeatedly the object of political struggle – remain fundamentally underdeveloped and inadequate.
In the last decade, criminology has embarked on something of a ‘spatial turn’, in which a range of innovative and exciting work has begun to offer more critical, textured and nuanced renderings of the lived experience, socio-cultural complexities and political dynamics of (urban) space, crime and social control (see, for example, Hayward, 2004, 2012; Campbell, 2013, 2016; Ferrell, 2015; Raymen, 2016). Geoff Manaugh, author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016), is not a criminologist, but rather a prolific journalist and essayist; an obsessive student of urbanism, architecture and technology; and is perhaps most well known as the long-time author of the architecture blog, BLDGBLOG. Yet whilst by no means an academic work, Burglar’s Guide is certainly informed by urban studies, architecture, philosophy – and even criminology. The influence of Mike Davis, Michael Sorkin, Eyal Weizman – even Deleuze and Guattari – is felt throughout, either explicitly or otherwise. Moreover, Manaugh’s book provides a vital and refreshing antidote to the kind of ‘denatured and desiccated’ city envisaged by orthodox criminology (Young, 2004: 13).
The book sets out from the premise that many of the most innovative burglaries involve infiltrating, manipulating, reconceptualising, reconfiguring or ‘hacking’ the built environment of urban space. ‘In one sense’, Manaugh writes:
burglars seem to understand architecture better than the rest of us. They misuse it, pass through it, and ignore any limitations a building tries to impose. Burglars don’t need doors; they’ll punch holes through walls or slice down through ceilings instead. Burglars unpeel a building from the inside out to hide inside the drywall (or underneath the floorboards, or up in the trusses of an unlit crawl space). They are masters of architectural origami, demonstrating skills the rest of us only wish we had, dark wizards of cities and buildings, unlimited by the laws that hold the rest of us in. (p. 13)
Throughout the text, Manaugh compiles an extensive and exhilarating – although by no means exhaustive – list of meticulously researched case studies. We are introduced, for example, to George Leslie Leonidas – the ringleader of ‘one of the most spatially astonishing crime sprees’ in history (p. 5) – who utilised his formal training as an architect, slick social engineering and meticulous preparation (including the construction of duplicate vaults) to rob the banks of a booming 19th century New York City. Leonidas’ legacy, Manaugh concludes:
was hardwiring crime into architectural history, making burglary a necessary theme in any complete discussion of the city. Burglary is the original sin of the metropolis. Indeed, you cannot tell the story of buildings without telling the story of the people who want to break into them: burglars are a necessary part of the tale, a deviant counternarrative as old as the built environment itself. (p. 12)
Consider also, the so-called ‘Hole in the Ground Gang’, a still-at-large robbery crew, active in Los Angeles during the 1980s, ‘who, several theories now suggested, were at least to some degree professionally trained in mining’ (p. 67). The crew navigated LA’s sprawling storm-sewer network, to within 100 feet of several subterranean bank vaults, before digging tunnels through the vault walls, and using quad bikes to haul the spoil – and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash – back out through the sewer system.
The book thus reads in parts like a kind of non-fictional architectural thriller, inciting the reader to imagine, in the theatre of their own mind, a blockbuster heist movie written by Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges – set design by MC Escher. Of course, the vast majority of real-life burglaries are unimaginative, opportunistic, unsophisticated, unexceptional, often bungling – not to mention invasive, violent and frequently traumatic crimes (of which more later). However, this is fundamentally to miss the point of Manaugh’s book, which invites the reader to see architecture anew, through the lenses of infiltration and fortification – crime and control. The book’s eponymous ‘burglar’ is thus an archetype: a conceptual persona, a literary device, a real-and-theoretical composite character, a symbol and a metaphor – more than any actual existing housebreaker. Accordingly, the titular ‘burglar’ encapsulates a self-proclaimed master cat burglar, safecrackers and bank robbers, as well as LAPD helicopter patrol pilots, law enforcement ‘rapid entry teams’, avowedly law-abiding ‘lock sport’ (recreational lock-picking) hobbyists and even the state-sanctioned break-in teams of ‘alphabet’ intelligence agencies – all of whom we meet throughout the course of Manaugh’s Guide.
In some ways, then, this is not really a book about burglary per se so much as it is about the alternative, esoteric, illicit or otherwise secretive spatial knowledges, skills and imaginations held by certain individuals and groups. As my own research has shown (Kindynis, 2017a, 2017b), graffiti writers, urban explorers, shoplifters and countless other individuals engaged in spatially transgressive deviant and illegal practices all reinterpret urban architecture and objects in ways that subvert fixed ideological categorisations and perceive alternative meanings and uses, beyond those which are normatively constructed (Kindynis, 2017a; see Bavinton, 2007).
Throughout the book, Manaugh also develops an extensive and spatially evocative conceptual vocabulary in thinking through how ‘burglars’ move through space: ‘burrowing’, ‘perforating’, ‘infesting’, and so on. At the same time, the infrastructure and architecture of the city are presented as labyrinthine, ambiguous, fluid and malleable rather than a fixed, unequivocal and ordered terrain. In this sense, much of the book calls to mind both poststructuralist relational or ‘topological’ approaches to space, according to which geography is conceived as non-linear, ‘folded, twisted, stretched, continuous and entangled’ (Campbell, 2016: 78), as well as recent work that endeavours to rethink the materiality and politics of urban space in terms of verticality and volume (see, for example, Graham, 2016; Weizman, 2002)
In this vein, I particularly enjoyed Manaugh’s idea of ‘Nakatomi space’ – apparently the author’s own riff on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) often overlooked notion of ‘holey space’. All good heist films, Manaugh writes, ‘depict space as deeply infested with routes and openings’, invariably presenting ‘two competing methods for the use of architectural space … the linear versus the nonlinear, the direct versus the indirect, the geometric versus the fractal’ (pp. 226–227). Perhaps nowhere is this better illustrated than in the 1988 action blockbuster, Die Hard. Here, the film’s protagonist, John McClane, moves through a high-rise office building – Nakatomi Plaza – ‘in what seems to be every conceivable way’:
He traverses the tower via elevator shafts and air ducts, crashes through windows from the outside in, and shoots open the locks of rooftop doorways. If there is not a corridor, he makes one; if there is not an opening, there soon will be. (p. 226)
McClane’s actions can be seen, Manaugh suggests, to ‘reveal a new type of architectural space altogether’ – a condition he describes as Nakatomi space, ‘wherein buildings reveal near-infinite interiors, capable of being traversed through all manner of nonarchitectural means, with their own exhilarating forms of boundless fluidity’ (p. 228).
One predictable, yet certainly valid, criticism is that a book such as this one runs the risk of romanticising, even glorifying burglary – an often violent, intrusive and traumatic crime. Fortunately, this is a charge that Manaugh anticipates and acknowledges. Much of the book’s final chapter is given over to reconciling the author’s personal experience of the brutal reality of burglary with the beguiled vision of burglars as mystic geniuses established throughout the preceding text. And Manaugh rightly concedes that burglary ‘loses any sense of architectural glamour when you call it a home invasion or when you witness the violence of a smash and grab’ (p. 264). Yet, as noted above, although this is a worthwhile caveat, A Burglar’s Guide to the City is not intended as a criminological overview of the lived reality of domestic burglaries, but rather as a lens through which to see the relationship between crime, control and the city anew. It is a lens through which many criminologists would do well to momentarily cast a gaze.