Steps (4): Walls. With openings.  [nederlands]

"Walls, with openings." said Rutte recently, and although you would rather forget his words, the cadence has settled in the core of your sense of well-being and it will never go away. Many walls have openings, and usually there is something blocking the free passage: we call them doors, windows, fences. Exterior walls, especially if they do not close off a space, but represent a border and thus block that same border, are actually a strange phenomenon.
So you are outside and want to get from A to B. Then suddenly there is a wall. You want to walk around it, but it soon turns out that the wall is kilometers long. The wall is topped with excessive barbed wire, so you can't just go over it. You should also be able to climb well for that, not everyone can do that. So you walk and walk, mile after grueling mile, your pack scraping, the kids crying and how do we get past this wall? In the end there is a passage, which is blocked with heavily armed soldiers, and a lot more barbed wire and concrete blocks and you can't get through. The walls would provide a form of security for the people on one side of the wall; those on the other side of the wall are excluded from it. Own people first.

Here in the photo an innocent wall, which must guarantee the safety of everyone: behind the wall is the metro track. You don't want people to be run over and/or electrocuted. And to keep the track accessible for workmen or in case of calamities, there is an opening, in this case a door. The difference in height made a staircase necessary, and they even thought of a handrail for even more safety. To make it not too cozy, that staircase ends halfway up and someone can still fall a fatal fracture. But of course people don't want graffiti and... oh, wait. The pink ghost grins a bit awkwardly, as if it ended up there more or less by accident. Perhaps it was put in place to give the prisoners in the prison that until recently stood on this side of the wall a more pleasant stay.

The number above the stairs suggests that there are at least 2,092 such openings in walls and fences in this district alone, as it has been there for years, and has never been replaced since the overhaul. Multiply that by 12 and there would be at least 25,000 openings in these kinds of walls and fences throughout Klotestad. I assume that they all use the same key, otherwise security is still a long way off.