Stanza of the self-imposed siege

In the Middle Ages it was fear to allot allotments inside fortified walls for growing food during assaults.

Today new forces attempted to siege the city — but from within.

Today it is the time of sustainable gardens to reincarnate the new spectres of siege — and the ‘moral equivalent’ of war.

The pacified horizon of sustainability manifests like a wartime without war, the hostility of a silent Ghost Army.

The patriotic war for surplus has indeed moved its home front to the inner front.

The patriotic war is now the war on surplus: on the individual calculation of energy, water, proteins, and any social appetite.

As there is no longer an outside, within the ideology of degrowth we have established the borders of our own siege.

Urban cannibals — eat the rich!

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 12

Stanza of the ternary dance

Life is a ternary movement far from equilibrium.
‘We parasite each other and live among parasites’.

We inhabit the perennial genesis: — natura naturans, the never-ending chain of organisms devouring one other right down to the invisible ones:

‘The fruit spoils, the milk sours, the wine turns into vinegar, the vegetables rot... Everything ferments, everything rots, everything changes’.

Microorganisms take our dead body back to the soil — putrefaction is still life.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 6

Stanza of the organic bunkers

Weed, beasts, insects, birds, and legions of organisms unseen: the most promiscuous republic ever declared was here in the urbanic air.

Even plague and pox were never passive folks: invisible architects, they redesigned streets and houses, shaping also our institutions, the form of hospitals and prisons.

Any wall is populated and consumed by the invisible food chains of microbes and mould, where the border between organic and inorganic life blurs.

Buildings breathe and ferment — architecture is the bunker of life.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 4

Stanza of the inorganic life

Urban cannibalism emerges from the biomorphic unconscious of the metropolis.

Innervated by flows of energy and matter, the urban landscape is alive.

Hydraulic forces ebb and surge through a tangled skein of canals and sewers, flowing water the main metabolism of the city.

But also buildings are liquid strata of minerals — just very slow.

It was eight thousand years ago: the city was born as the exoskeleton of the human, as the external concretion of our inner bones to protect the commerce of bodies in and out its walls.

As our bones absorb calcium from rocks, the inorganic shell of the city is but part of a deeper geological metabolism.

Fossils crushed and concealed within building’s bricks, organic memories of prediluvian beings petrified in the modern maze of concrete.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 3