Fear and mistrust are the main generators of design in Jamaica. They cause houses, neighborhoods and whole cities to cellularise and turn in upon themselves.

If the predominant cause of this introversion and segregation is cultural and ultimately political, the architectural effect is dramatic, and resolution a social imperative. To ignore the issues, or to give into the obvious response to threat, will result in the transformation of each place into a prison, each social, bureaucratic or commercial ritual of exchange into and absurd and convoluted dance through elaborate architectural systems of control and exclusion. As soon as architecture becomes merely a vehicle of security and introversion, we know we must be at war. How long before the cities of the West will themselves look like the cities of their most violent former colonies?