| | |  | Spyware | Home » » » » Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism | | | | | | | Description: | | A powerful exposé of how political violence operates through the spaces of urban life. Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, Cities Under Siege traces the spread of political violence through the sites, spaces, infrastructure and symbols of the world’s rapidly expanding metropolitan areas.
Drawing on a wealth of original research, Stephen Graham shows how Western militaries and security forces now perceive all urban terrain as a conflict zone inhabited by lurking shadow enemies. Urban inhabitants have become targets that need to be continually tracked, scanned and controlled. Graham examines the transformation of Western armies into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces. He looks at the militarization and surveillance of international borders, the use of ‘security’ concerns to suppress democratic dissent, and the enacting of legislation to suspend civilian law. In doing so, he reveals how the New Military Urbanism permeates the entire fabric of urban life, from subway and transport networks hardwired with high-tech ‘command and control’ systems to the insidious militarization of a popular culture corrupted by the all-pervasive discourse of ‘terrorism.’ | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Stephen Graham | | Paperback:
| 432 pages | | Publisher:
| Verso | | Publication Date:
| November 01, 2011 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1844677621 | | Product Length:
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| 0.0 pounds | | Package Length:
| 8.2 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.4 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.3 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.2 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 4 reviews |
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9 of 9 found the following review helpful:
 An extraordinary exposé: A must-read for anyone interested in cities, security or militarizationMar 14, 2011
By boiledinthebag
'Cities Under Siege' is an extremely impressive exposé of how military doctrine and vague and all-pervasive 'security' concerns are starting to dominate urban life across the world. Addressing everything from 'homeland' security to military destruction of infrastructure, militarised urban video games to SUVs, and drones and robotic weapons to right-wing diatribes against cities, the book covers an amazing amount of ground. The book is informed by the latest theoretical and academic thinking. It uses this to illuminate a myriad of examples from across the world, from London's 'ring of steel' to G20 summits, counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and Israel to biofuels plantations in Indonesia . The book uses this extraordinary range to reveal many startling and poorly explored aspects of contemporary militarization. The book is a stark warning that 'security' industries are doing well out of urban paranoia, market fundamentalism and war mongering: another vision of our urbanizing world is desperately needed. 'Cities Under Siege' does a fantastic job of revealing what's at stake. It also opens up some ways forward for activism and resistance.
 The Boomerang and the MapFeb 18, 2012
By Review 31
(by Jeff Heydon, originally published in Review 31)
Living in downtown Toronto during the G20 summit in the summer of 2010 was instructive. Myriad CCTV cameras were erected, additional police were imported from multiple municipalities close to the city, and a barrier was established around the Convention Centre that would protect the leaders of nations from the Great Unwashed. A new Toronto was produced - a city where the condition of living became a process of negotiation and where attempts were made to avoid any act that would qualify as `conspicuous'.
The result of reading Graham's Cities Under Siege is an immediate reassessment of that initial reaction. In light of an overwhelming amount of research and carefully considered theoretical applications to linked trends in security and the production of the visible citizen, the events of the G20 appear to be relatively mundane. Graham's uncovering of the mechanisms being developed and the general approach to the control of urban populations - typically in political climates that are inherently distrustful of cities - opens up the question of how the contemporary condition of urbanity functions on political and sociopolitical levels.
In Society Must Be Defended (Allen Lane, 2004) Michel Foucault argued that while colonial powers undeniably transplanted their values and governing practices to the cultures they invaded, newly developed techniques of control that were the result of colonial practices would often be carried back to the domestic sphere. Foucault called this returning flow of strategies of control and domination `boomerang effects'. Graham tracks this recognition down to the current modifications taking place in the larger Western cities today. The techniques developed to manage `hostile' populations and set up hyper-controlled zones in Afghanistan and Iraq are being transferred in a very conscious way back to North America and Western Europe. Following a noticeable emphasis on technological developments in the conduct of warfare, as well as the expansion of electronic media into nearly every facet of our lives, Graham states that `[t]he writing of this book is partly motivated by the absence of an accessible and critical analysis exploring how resurgent imperialism and colonial geographies characteristic of the contemporary umbilically connect cities within metropolitan cores and colonial peripheries.' This book, then, is an attempt to draw the typically separated worlds of international political and military analysis, and domestic security and social organisation together.
What emerges very quickly here is that the divide between these areas of inquiry is much smaller than it might appear. In `three broad thematic chapters' and `seven extended case studies' Graham interrogates trends in domestic and international security, population demographics, and market-driven motivations regarding the closing and monitoring of urban space. Practices of `hyper-incarceration' currently carried out in the United States begin to bleed into the practices surrounding extraordinary rendition in Afghanistan and Iraq. The establishment of a process of removal, and the continuous threat of enacting that process of removal independent of reason or demonstrable justification, have become an international condition of governing on the part of Western powers.
The trend towards a mechanisation of all aspects of security opens up discussion as to the role of technology in the determination of the humanity of citizens. The recognition that modes of crowd control developed in Iraq have been transferred to civilian police forces for use in events like the G20 summit draws a line under the contemporary viability of Foucault's `boomerang effect'. The degree to which a regime of control is transferable from one theatre of conflict to another now seems to come down to the approach a dominant power structure takes toward its own population. Going back to the G20, the shift I noticed personally in the way an area feels, or in how I related to my surroundings, was substantial. The ease with which practices that would have been refined in the construction of the `green zone' in Baghdad were transferred to an alternate city was unnerving.
The language coming out of the police department prior to the construction of the safe area for the summit included the predictable assurances that the changes made to the area - the CCTV cameras installed across the downtown area as well as the concrete barriers placed around the property line of the Convention Centre - would disappear shortly after the event concluded. The aggressive monitoring of the area was something that was temporary. The militarisation of central Toronto, in other words, was something that could be implemented, carried out and scaled down (supposedly) according to the demands of the situation. Not only is the new military urbanism something that can be erected quickly, according to the lessons learned from previous experiments in control, but the hoof prints can be swept away almost as soon as they've been pressed into the gravel. The type of procedural and technological adjustment that Graham highlights can be visible or invisible, present or simply held in reserve.
That these procedures are available to virtually every police force on the planet is no longer noteworthy. What is of interest is the sheer number of different areas affected by these processes of control. Cities Under Siege traces links between the automobile industry, the defence industry, domestic and international politics and the conceptual redefinition of local, national and regional boundaries. Reasoned case studies illustrate what is in fact a much larger and more pertinent question - namely, in what sense are cities things that still belong to those who live in them? Is a city a place that belongs to its citizens or is it an organism that is forever under surveillance, under inspection for fear of a disease that might be rotting it out from the core?
Graham's response to this question is, in short, a breathtaking assemblage of research coupled with a reasoned, considered take on the likely direction of the mechanisms of control that are becoming more and more commonplace. Where it would be tempting to fall into a techno-deterministic rhythm when investigating this subject, Graham manages to hang on to and develop the theoretical questions that are pertinent to the subject matter. He argues that the purpose of the book is to address a lack of cross-disciplinary inclusion in the debate surrounding cities. As difficult as it seems to avoid limiting the debate to one area of inquiry or another, Cities Under Siege accomplishes this to a remarkable degree. In attempting to incorporate what are normally presumptively disparate areas of social investigation, Graham has developed a text that should be compulsory reading for anyone planning to research the contemporary condition of urbanity.
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9 of 18 found the following review helpful:
 Some Substance There, If You Can Get Through the PompOct 18, 2010
By Graham Jenkins
"Past performance does not guarantee future results."
Graham's book is sweeping in its generalizations, its implications, and its conclusions. It broadly traces the rise of the city in military and popular conception as a hotbed of vice and perversion, as a target for military operations, and as an increasingly oppressed environment for its citizens. Cities Under Siege is split into sections covering such phenomenon of urban militarization as the rise of the SUV ("Car Wars"), autonomous drones and robot warfare ("Robowar Dreams"), the destruction and replanning of cities ("Lessons in Urbicide"), recreated urban training centers ("Theme Park Archipelago") and the nexus of the "military-industrial-media-entertainment network." It's a mouthful, as is much of this book.
Cities Under Siege is extensively footnoted - one might say too extensively, as Graham's own thoughts and writings tend to disappear into the morass of impenetrable academic and philosophical gobbledy-gook. The entire book averages almost four footnotes a page (1,386 footnotes in 385 pages), but few are explanatory, and few back up original thought. Instead, he seems to need these references to provide him with the very phrasing of the book - and most of them don't deserve any reproduction. Why is this Chris Hedges sentence worth reprinting?
"[The new wars] take the form of mediatized mechanisms and are ordered as massive intrusions into visual culture, which are conflated with, and substitute for, the actual materiality and practices of the public sphere."
Graham has a puzzling attachments to all the nonsense phrases that warn of an Orwellian future ahead - but one wonders if any of his sources have read "Politics and the English Language." Far more than is necessary, Graham draws on Foucault and the `Manichaean Worlds' of American military thought to produce such tongue-twisting sentences as:
"We must see to it that socialized infrastructure, housing, and urbanism once again become axiomatic within a resurgent conception of Keynesian state politics, organized through multiple scales of intervention to match the contexts of accelerating globalization."
And yet his next proscription is simply stated: "neoliberal economics must go - in toto" [emphasis his]. He can be concise and to the point when he wants, but unfortunately those moments are far and few between.
Obviously, the book has a political bent, and usually I don't mind these kinds of things. I agree with much of what he's saying even if I might disagree with some of the particulars on Israel-Palestine or stateside urban training centers. But when Graham's agenda starts to degrade his language to a point beyond all comprehension, clearly something has gone awry.
The other major objection I have is to the overwhelming focus on New York and London as representative of all cities. Virtually none of the other major cities are acknowledged - Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo get a handful of mentions, there are offhand references to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, Madrid train bombings and the Olympic Games in Beijing, and Boston, Chicago, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Toronto are all entirely and conspicuously absent from the index. New York and London are crucial, important, Alpha++ level world cities - but there are so many others important in their own rights and with developments of their own worth exploring in more depth. For countries as small as they are, the few cities in Israel-Palestine are paid huge amounts of attention, to the detriment of all others across the world.
These shortcomings (which are in reality quite superficial) are all the more problematic because Graham really drawing some fascinating conclusions. The securitization of the city, the surveillance infrastructure created for and left by major world events (Olympics, G20 and WTO meetings, etc.), the convergence of law enforcement and paramilitarization - these are all important, subtle, and hugely consequential developments in cities around the world. They're even more troubling when perpetrated against the citizenry that elected a ruling body, but sadly it is left to others like Geoff Manaugh to really unpack these concepts fully.
The sheer scale and number of urban training centers both in the United States and around the world came as a shock to me. But like many of the issues Graham raises, I don't necessarily find their existence cause for alarm. As Richard Norton says, cities will be the battlefields of the future - wouldn't it make sense to prepare for that? If anything, recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan - particularly Afghanistan - are a break from what would be considered a normal battlespace elsewhere in the world.
I was less concerned with what Graham considers the latent indoctrination of youths into a militaristic culture through video games and other media violence. It's a claim that's been tossed around for quite some time, but I still just don't buy it. The actual convergence of Playstation controllers and military hardware is more interesting to me; unlike Graham I'm not terrified by it (wary, perhaps). Then again, I like playing video games and watching violent television, so I'm coming to that issue with a bias. The nexus of news manufacturing, `shady' agendas, corporate interests, and privatized military operations is nothing new, but Graham does trace their contours well, even if reading "military-industrial-media-entertainment network" gets tiresome very quickly.
That, I suppose, is really the takeaway from Cities Under Siege. If you can stomach and muddle through the language, quote after quote, and at times sheer pompousness, you'll be able to glean some fascinating new insight into cultural attitudes towards the city. But I fear that for many, the book will prove too pretentious to finish. If you have a month to spare, dive right in.
6 of 15 found the following review helpful:
 Someone call an editor.Nov 04, 2010
By Eric Parr
Bought the book out of pure interest in the subject, and Graham does deliver a comprehensive treatment to the matter. This said, the style and language used in the book was unnecessarily complex and far too academic. If the issues addressed in this book are important enough to warrant 400 pages, and I believe they are, why not bring the language down to a readable level. I made it through the book, only through willpower and coffee. For those like me who have an interest in this subject and geography, I think you will still find the book useful.
Note to Graham, get a better editor and lose your thesaurus.
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