Towards a New Blast Zone: Washington D.C.’s Next-Generation Hunting Forest

[arcadian]

Towards a New Blast Zone: Washington D.C.’s Next-Generation Hunting Forest

Deborah Natsios

Using rhetoric rooted in Cold War narratives, municipalities along the Interstate-81 (I-81) corridor in Northern Virginia’s rural Shenandoah Valley 75 miles west of Washington D.C. are marketing their region as “just outside the blast zone” to federal security agencies who are relocating -- for post-September 11 security reasons -- from the capital region’s core to its distant borderlands. Within view of the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains that mark the western fringes of Greater Washington’s advancing metropolitan sprawl, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), United States Coast Guard (USCG) and unidentified intelligence agencies are seeding bucolic apple orchards with buildings “studded with security cameras and bollards” -- the signature apparatus of contemporary anxiety.

The development of a security armature along the Interstate-81 corridor suggests a geopolitical futurity emerging from the intersection of post-September 11 security discourses and Greater Washington D.C .’s real estate exigencies. Expanded perimeter security requirements for government structures; a subordinate periphery removed from the symbolic capital’s high-value targets; and cheaper costs -- are conflating in rural greenfields, shaping an automobile-and-commute dependent security aggregation of as yet undetermined morphology along the metropolitan margins due west of the capital.

The post-September 11 territorial reordering at I-81’s western security fringe is developing in co-evolutionary relationship with antipodal Washington D.C.’s urban core of governance 75 miles to the east – the centroid of state-centric power whose vulnerable inside-the-beltway icons were demonstrated on September 11 to rank high on the targeting lists of the global insurgency’s annihilative masterplan of contra-urban design. In order to reassert sovereignty and deflect centralized risk, the capital -- whose utopian masterplan claims to embrace democratic ideals of transparency and accessibility -- is infiltrating the arcadian margin with an opaque doppelganger of shadow governance.

more at link:
http://cartome.org/blast-zone/Towards-a-New-Blast-Zone.pdf