Carceral archipelago
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The concept of a carceral archipelago (meaning a prison consisting of a series of islands) appears in social theorist Michel Foucault's work on surveillance systems and their technologies over modern societies and its practice of social control and discipline over its population in all areas of social life. Taken from his work Discipline and Punish (1975), modelled on the principle of and related to the nation state, and ideally employed on the idea of an incarceration system producing society's need for prisons, it employs physical boundaries to gain control of urban space. Foucault was referring to the Mettray Penal Colony when he introduced a possible socio-cultural nomenclature to be used, "It was the most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago."
In the form of a carceral dystopia, public space is transformed into defendable space, with the installation of walls, gates, fences, surveillance cameras and security checkpoints. Such installations are meant to provide control over urban space. In these spaces, gatherings of strangers to the area are discouraged, and barricades of various forms can prevent people from entering or passing through.
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