The megalopolis of the excluded

In fact, after the pluralist era of sustainable staying-put in the different neighbourhoods of registered urban land – a form of stationary settlement that once in antiquity, introduced the notion of 'citizenship', as deriving from political localization, and with it, ultimately, of the 'legally constituted state' of nations – the era of habitable circulation is now dawning with the transpolitical delocalization that is now overturning the geopolitics of settlement in the age of globalization. And this is happening at the precise moment that the teletechnologies of information are ensuring that sedentary man is at home everywhere, and the nomad nowhere, beyond the provisional accommodation offered by a now pointless transhumance. That transhumance is now taking place, not only from one country to another. Now people are displaced within their very homeland from their heartland to some vague territory where refugee camps have not only taken over from the shanty towns of days gone by, but from the towns. The megalopolis of the excluded of all stripes, pouring in from all sides, has now come to rival the all-too-real megalopolis of the included, the ultracity.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 2-3