"Crime is a way to use the city." My thesis, succinctly put of course, by someone else (Geoff Manaugh)

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/crime-is-way-to-use-city.html

Also see very good post "Nakatomi Space" that precedes it, considering the ways Die Hard and the Bourne Movies use space.

Okay, but the next question is then: for what?

Put differently, crime is a way to use the city differently than it is habitually used. To use roofs as streets, windows as doors, walls as passageways, etc.

See also Eyval Weizman's "Lethal Theory," on the IDF's practical uses of critical theory to determine, for example, that it was expedient to blast "overground tunnels" through buildings in Nablus rather than taking streets.

Okay, maybe there are two guiding assumptions of this project: "Crime is a way to use the city" and, Will Straw's accent of Simmel: "secrecy magnifies space."

What Manaugh side-steps is the crime he is referring to is fictionalized crime, not crime as police, crime-victims, or everyday practitioners of socially defined crime activity experience it. It is different from "law and order" rhetoric the emerges out of political discourse. This crime is also different from "true crime" - the pulpy, Dateline NBC private "crimes of passion" and love triangles. There is then, a particular kind of crime - which is an interruption of space - heists, car chases, cons, pick-pockets, theft, hostage situations, kidnapping, chase. This is the fictional topography of crime-exceptional in the everyday world-- around which representational codes and conventions develop. This is architecturalized crime, concerned with spatial operations, agents, time-tables, communications, visibility/invisibility, disguise, sleight of hand, sleight of body, illusion.