TheAtlanticCities

"Architecture against drones is not just a science-fiction scenario but a contemporary imperative," writes Asher J. Kohn.

Kohn, an American law student and editor of The Tuqay, a website covering "Central Asia and its hinterlands," has recently put forth a theoretical proposal for a city built to passively shield its residents against this ultramodern tool of warfare -- a drone-deflecting city. He created it for a class he was auditing in extreme architecture, and it has since been picked up for discussion by several websites.

Kohn’s envisioned drone-proof community, which he calls “Shura City,” is a thought experiment, a provocation (shura, Arabic for consultation, is a word associated with group decision-making in the Islamic world). It’s a self-contained environment with elaborate architectural devices designed to thwart robotic predators overhead. Minarets, along with the wind-catching cooling towers called badgirs, would obstruct the flight path of the drones. A latticed roof, extending over the entire community, would create shade patterns to make visual target identification difficult. A fully climate-controlled environment would confuse heat-seeking detection systems. He has not included any anti-aircraft weapons in this scenario.

Shura City’s design looks like a sci-fi riff on Middle Eastern building traditions. Yet the circumstances Kohn is responding to are no futuristic construct. The drone war is a very real fact of today, coming under increasing international scrutiny. Just this week, NBC News released a U.S. Justice Department white paper it had obtained detailing the government’s legal justification for the use of lethal force against U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of being top Al Qaeda agents – attacks that in practice are almost always carried out by drones.

And of course, U.S. drones don’t just target U.S. citizens. Hundreds of drone attacks have been executed in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia since the practice began under the Bush Administration in 2002. These forays have proliferated under President Obama’s tenure. The United Nations is just now launching an investigation into the practice of targeted killing by drone strike and other means, but critics say it won’t go far enough.

Reports on the number of people killed vary widely, because the drone war has been shrouded in secrecy. But the independent Bureau for Investigative Journalism in the United Kingdom estimates numbers as high as 3,461 in Pakistan, 1,112 in Yemen, and 170 in Somalia — including hundreds of civilians, many of them children.

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