The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century [Hardcover]

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came to symbolize the dawn of a new era of openness and connectivity. Yet today, the world is ever more divided, demarcated, and  quite literally  fortified. We are living in a guarded age.

Why and how has this happened? Where will it take us? In this book, David J. Betz explores the expansion of fortified physical infrastructure at every level of the global political economy. In cities, where security is increasingly designed in to public buildings and spaces as they are reshaped to mitigate mass terror attacks. Within corporations, who are burying their electronic assets in deep underground caverns and behind the leaded walls of ex-nuclear war bunkers against a range of threats and feared contingencies. In many urban areas, where the default condition of civil life is to be walled, gated, watched, and guarded. Year after year, hundreds of miles of linear obstacles  walls, ditches, and watchtowers  are added to national borders. Practically everywhere you look there are signs of innovative fortification, often designed to be overlooked.?The Guarded Age?reveals the barriers which most have observed but few  until reading this book  have truly seen.

Betz manages to unearth a transformation under our noses: even as castles and fortresses become tourist spots and museums, the world is growing more thoroughly fortified th