City of panic

"City of Panic" takes the reader on a journey across the airy boulevards of Paris and into the crypt of its Metro.

For Virilio, whose sense of cities was formed by earlier wars, Paris is both the City of Light and the City of Panic.

Written in the shadow of war, "City of Panic" argues that cities everywhere have been the dedicated target of political and technological terror throughout the 20th century.

The wanton erasure of the past, the construction of identikit places, the proliferation of gated-communities, the ever-widening net of surveillance, the privatisation of what was public...Now every metropolis is a war zone and every metropolis is the same.

In this globalized and militarized everywhere, all citizens are becoming one citizen - saturated, standardized and synchronized - ever-more reliant on a media fabricating a world of fear.

For the panic of the 21st century is simply the final phase of the pincer movement.

Place-less, media-fed, panic-struck - welcome to the desert of the real.