The Town Hall square’s new amenities riff on the idea of revitalisation by water and fluidity. The Ocean music venue has an educational facility called Rising Tide and a bar called Aqua; The Technology & Learning Centre’s internet terminals give local people (of fixed abode) a chance to surf in the space of flows, and the HTH2 online forum about developments in the square was created by a trans-disciplinary network called F-L-U-I-D.

Picking up on the latent seaside connotations, the architects Gross Max have proposed a boardwalk-style ‘special pavement’ for the square, an effort to bring an ambience of play and sociability to this stony slab of municipal space. But if the ‘urban beach’ semiotics don’t convince then the TLC’s glass facade and networked heart at least embody the centrality of sand to the whole package. Silicon implants are intended to turn the frumpy old square into a nexus where desiccated flows intersect.

Beyond the cloying hydraulic rhetoric, the real effect of this flood of culture is a creeping desertification. The official sites of education and entertainment that promise to compensate for gentrification actually contribute to the social cleansing of the area. Flushing out undesirable elements, from the homeless to the hooded youth, the square’s well-policed makeover begins with the economic, semiotic and physical dissuasion of the poor and ends by sucking in a flood of new consumers better able to afford and enjoy the rehabilitated space.

The Hackney Zone of Exception continued the square’s fixation on fluidity, materialising the metaphor with displacements of its own. The HZoE ‘decanted’ the inhabitants of this promising residential area for a 15-day trial period and helped move key siege stakeholder Eli Hall to ‘a better place.’ As council housing stock is privatised or demolished many other local people, in particular elderly tenants, have already been definitively relocated.

The siege was not just about moving people out of the area, though. Complementing the spatial sterilisation of the square already achieved by the PFI projects, the siege’s police cordon delivered instant crime reduction through ‘total restriction’. The ability to suspend local citizens’ right to freedom of movement for an indefinite period renders all criminals, both potential and actual, equally immobile. No more flow for them.

While the HZoE was only a pilot, plans to apply the same ‘urban quarantine’ approach on a city-wide scale are already well under way. As part of the wider regeneration project known as The War on Terror, the government is planning to introduce total urban lockdown, with whole cities sealed off in the (non)event of a possible terror threat. The liquefaction of urbanism paradoxically coincides with the attempt to place entire cities under arrest.