private but shared The eighteen-foot Common Border is essentially invisible. Quick growing vegetation like hawthorn or blackthorn were typically planted in hedgerows, their density blocking livestock from crossing between fields. Of course, a line of hawthorn would also conceal lower activity within the border zone. Above these shrubs, trees like ash, elm, and oak were planted for firewood, and lines of these trees would screen the borders’ upper reaches. The planted border, because it is hidden, is distinct from the surrounding fields. Importantly, visual openness was not only a feature of agrarian landscapes but also a design goal for landscape architects of the time. Raymond Williams, for example, argues that the control of views was integral to the physical structure of the new agrarian capitalist economy: ‘The clearing of parks as ‘Arcadian’ prospects depended on the completed system of exploitation of the agricultural and genuinely pastoral lands beyond the park boundaries. There, too, an order was being imposed: social and economic but also physical. The mathematical grids of the enclosure awards, with their straight hedges and straight roads, are contemporary with the natural curves and scatterings of the park scenery. And yet they are related parts of the same process – superficially opposed in taste but only because in the one case the land is being organised for production, where tenants and labourers will work, while in the other case it is being organised for consumption – the view, the ordered proprietary repose, the prospect.’
While we are pushing the plausibility of this fiction, let us imagine that the error in measurement leaves eighteen feet between each property in the parish, the difference between one Irish chain and the English. The former boundary line between properties becomes an occupiable area bordered by two parallel hedgerows. Thus, while the traditional commons were enclosed, a new linear territory was formed, the Common Border. This border zone is unique in two ways – it is private and it is interconnected. This combination enables us to imagine a common private space – private, not in the sense of being individualised, but in the sense that decisions and actions are taken beyond the reach of the public sphere and the influence of the market, and communal meaning that resources are shared beyond the typical familial unit.
Visibility meant control, and landholders were determined to actively observe their property from their estates. To be provided privacy, therefore, was to be granted freedom. Of course, the now well-known inverse condition was being formulated around the same time by Jeremy Bentham. His model of the Panopticon, described in the 1791 publication, Panopticon; Or, the Inspection House , imagined an architecture that policed individuals’ actions by forcing them into a space of constant observation. Thus, to grant privacy means both to be hidden from view and to be beyond the reach of systems of social and economic control. Today, more and more of our interactions are mediated and observed by corporations and the state. In a coffee shop or across social media platforms, we make visible our actions and interactions. Popular films like Jeff Orlowski’s (2020) The Social Dilemma shock us by demonstrating our lack of privacy, especially when it comes to our technology use. We modify our digital behaviour after watching such films to regain privacy, but where do we go to find physical spaces where our behaviour avoids observation? Traditionally, it has been the bedroom, yet our communications technologies are highlighting what authors like Ulrich Beck have previously warned: ‘The private sphere is not what it appears to be: a sphere separated from the environment… Anyone who does not see this misunderstands an essential and basic characteristic of social ways of living in the phase of advanced modernity,
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 17
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