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To cite this article: Stephen Graham (2009) Cities as Battlespace: The New Military Urbanism,
City, 13:4, 383-402, DOI: 10.1080/13604810903298425
Cities as battlespace
The new military urbanism
Stephen Graham
Taylor and Francis
The latest in an ongoing series of papers on the links between militarism and urbanism
published in City, this paper opens with an exploration of the emerging crossovers between
the targeting of everyday life in so-called smart border and homeland security
programmes and related efforts to delegate the sovereign power to deploy lethal force to
increasingly robotized and automated war machines. Arguing that both cases represent
examples of a new military urbanism, the rest of the paper develops a thesis outlining the
scope and power of contemporary interpenetrations between urbanism and militarism. The
new military urbanism is defined as encompassing a complex set of rapidly evolving ideas,
doctrines, practices, norms, techniques and popular cultural arenas through which the
everyday spaces, sites and infrastructures of citiesalong with their civilian populations
are now rendered as the main targets and threats within a limitless battlespace. The new
military urbanism, it is argued, rests on five related pillars; these are explored in turn.
Included here are the normalization of militarized practices of tracking and targeting
everyday urban circulations; the two-way movement of political, juridical and technologi-
cal techniques between homeland cities and cities on colonial frontiers; the rapid growth of
sprawling, transnational industrial complexes fusing military and security companies with
technology, surveillance and entertainment ones; the deployment of political violence
against and through everyday urban infrastructure by both states and non-state fighters;
and the increasingly seamless fusing of militarized veins of popular, urban and material
culture. The paper finishes by discussing the new political imaginations demanded by the
new military urbanism.
O
n 14 November 2007, Jacqui programme will deploy sophisticated
Smith, then the UKs Home computer algorithms and data mining
Secretary, announced one of the techniques, along with biometric scanning,
most ambitious attempts by any state to continually try to identify illegal or
in history to systematically track and threatening people or behaviours before
surveil all persons entering or leaving its they threaten the UKs territorial limits.
borders. Using technology developed by The E-borders project is based on a
the Trusted Borders consortium led by dream of technological omniscience: of
tracking all the flows of people that cross With both security and military doctrine
the UKs borders whilst using databases of within Western states now centring on the
past activities and associations to identify task of identifying insurgents, terrorists or
future threats before they materialize. malign threats from the chaotic background
When the system is supposed to be fully of urban life, this point becomes clearer still.
established in 2014although many argue As I have argued previously in the pages of
that its simple unworkability will lead to City (Graham, 2008), whether in the queues
inevitable delaysSmith promises that of Heathrow, the tube stations of London
control and security will be reinstated for or the streets of Kabul and Baghdad, this
the UK in a radically mobile and insecure latest doctrine stresses that means must be
world. All travellers to Britain will be found of automatically identifying and
screened against no fly lists and intercept targeting threatening people and circulations
target lists, she predicts. Together with in advance of their materialization, when
biometric visas, this will help keep trouble they are effectively indistinguishable from
away from our shores As well as the the wider urban crowd. Hence the parallel
tougher double check at the border, ID drive in cities within both the capitalist heart-
cards for foreign nationals will soon give us lands of the Global North, and the worlds
a triple check in country (Kobe, 2007). colonial peripheries and frontiers, to estab-
(In a rich irony, another surveillance lish high-tech surveillance systems which
systemInternet viewing billsalmost mine data accumulated about the past to
forced Smith to resign in late March 2009, continually identify insurgent or terrorist
when it was discovered that she tried to claim actions in the near future.
for the costs of her husbands pornographic
viewing habits as parliamentary expenses.
Eventually, she did resign on 2 June 2009 Armed vision: their sons against
after further controversy surrounding her our silicon
expenses claims.)
Smiths language heretarget lists, At the root of such imaginations of war and
screening, biometric visas and so on security in the post-cold war world are tech-
reveals a great deal. For projects like the nophiliac fantasies where the West harnesses
UKs E-borders programme represent its unassailable high-tech power to reinstate
attempts to push forward a startling militari- its waning influence in a rapidly urbanizing
zation of civil society. They rest on the and intensely mobile world. At home and
extension of military ideas of tracking, iden- abroad, wrote US security theorists Mark
tification and targeting into the quotidian Mills and Peter Huber in the right-wing City
spaces and circulations of everyday life. Journal in 2002, a year after the 9/11 attacks,
Indeed, as attempts to fix identity to it will end up as their sons against our silicon.
biometric scans of peoples bodies, to use Our silicon will win. Mills and Huber (2002)
computers to pick out dangerous people envisage a near future straight out of Minority
from the mass and flux of the background Report. In their vision, a whole suite of
city, and to link databases of past activity to surveillance and tracking systems develop on
continuously target the immediate future, the back of high-tech systems of consump-
projects like the UKs E-borders programme tion, communication and transportation to
are best understood not merely as state permeate every aspect of life in Western or
responses to changing security threats. US cities. Continually comparing current
Rather, they represent dramatic translations behaviour with vast databases recording past
of long-standing military dreams of high-tech events and associations, these, the argument
and technophiliac omniscience and rational- goes, will automatically signal when the citys
ity into the governance of urban civil society. bodies, spaces and infrastructure systems are
386 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4
about to be turned into terrorist threats to automatically target and kill their foes
against it. Thus, what Mills and Huber call without any human involvement whatsoever
trustworthy or cooperative targets are (Figure 1).
continually separated from non-cooperators Thus, whether they involve automated
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characterized by their efforts to use postal, policing of no fly lists, or the delegation of
electricity, Internet, finance, airline and trans- the sovereign power to kill, software algo-
port systems as means to project resistance rithms must now be seen as a broad contin-
and violence. In effect, Mills and Hubers uum of linked techniques. These use historic
vision calls for an extension of airport-style accumulations of data to make judgments
security and surveillance systems to encom- about future potentialities as a means of
pass entire cities and societies using the high- permanently deploying continuous contem-
tech systems of consumption and mobility porary violence against the everyday sites
that are already established in Western cities and circulations of the city (Amoore, 2009).
as a basis. Media theorist Jordan Crandall (1999) has
In resistant colonial frontiers, meanwhile, called this the formation of a constellation of
Mills and Huber dream of continuous, auto- what he calls armed vision. The key ques-
mated and robotized counterinsurgency tion now, he suggests, is how targets are
warfare. Using systems similar to those identified and distinguished from non-
deployed in US cities, but this time delegated targets within decision making and killing.
with the sovereign power to kill automati- Crandall (1999) points out that the wide-
cally, they imagine that US troops might be spread integration of computerized tracking
removed from the dirty job of fighting and with databases of targets represents little
killing on the ground in dense cities. Swarms but of a gradual colonization of the now, a
of tiny, armed drones, equipped with now always slightly ahead of itself. This shift
advanced sensors and communicating with represents a process of profound militariza-
each other, will thus be deployed to perma- tion because the social identification of
nently loiter above streets, deserts and high- people or circulations within civilian law
ways. Automatically identifying insurgent enforcement is complemented or even
behaviour, Mills and Huber dream of a replaced by the machinic seeing of targets.
future where such swarms of robotic While civilian images are embedded in
warriors work to continually project processes of identification based on reflec-
destructive power precisely, judiciously, and tion, Crandall writes, militarised perspec-
from a safe distanceweek after week, year tives collapse identification processes into
after year, for as long as may be necessary Id-ingone-way channel of identification
(2002). in which a conduit, a database, and a body
Such two-sided dreams of high-tech are aligned and calibrated.
omnipotence remain much more than sci-fi
fantasy, however. As well as constructing the
UKs E-borders programme, for example, The new military urbanism
Raytheon are also the leading manufacturer
of both cruise missiles and the unmanned Such crossovers between high-technology
drones used regularly by the CIA to launch for civilian borders, and high-technology for
assassination raidsand kill large numbers military killing, between the targeting of
of innocent bystandersacross the Middle everyday life in Western cities and those
East and Pakistan since 2002. Crucially, caught in the cross-hairs of aggressive colo-
Raytheon are also at the heart of a range of nial and resource wars, are at the heart of a
very real US military projects designed to much broader set of trends which I label the
use similar kinds of anticipatory targeting new military urbanism (Graham, 2010). Of
software to allow robotic weapons systems course the results of the targeting practices in
GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 387
Figure 1 Two images reflecting the centrality of armed vision to the new military urbanism. Top is the US Department
of Defenses vision of identity dominance through the continuous fusion of a whole series of biometric databases. As
with the UKs E-borders project, the technophiliac fantasy here is of omniscient control based on linking past associations
and predictions of future risks, permanently targeting everyday urban circulations around the world in the process. Such
a vision blurs worryingly with techniques of deploying lethal force against distant targets through armed drones
controlled from video-game-like controls located on distant continents (bottom). Here air force pilots are controlling an
armed Predator drone used to undertake targeted assassination raids within Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, operating
from within the inside of a virtual reality cave at Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of Las Vegas. Major development
efforts are underway to remove the pilot altogether, allowing such drones to automatically deploy their missiles against
targets identified by their own software using target databases similar to those underpinning smart border projects.
Sources: (Top) John D. Woodward, Jr., Director, Using Biometrics in the Global War on Terrorism, Department of
Defense, Biometrics Management Office, West Virginia University, Biometric Studies Program, 7 April 2005 (US mili-
tary: public domain). (Bottom) http://www.163rw.ang.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/090402-F-8801D-
002.jpg (US military: public domain).
388 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4
both casesthe hand on the shoulder in the detail. In what follows, I explore each of
airport queue or the alleged Taliban base left these in turn.
in smouldering ruinsare very different.
But, crucially, both represent acts of violence
which rest at either end of a continuum based Urbanizing security
on the core ideas driving the new military
urbanism. These are based on the triumph of The truth of the continual targeting of the
highly profitable, militarized solutions, based world, as the fundamental form of knowledge
production, is xenophobia, the inability to
on technophiliac dreams of high-tech target-
handle the otherness of the other beyond the
ing and the linkage of surveillance databases
orbit that is the bombers own visual path.
to the automatic identification of future Every effort needs to be made to sustain and
targets, to address pressing questions of secure this orbitthat is, by keeping the
both security and war in rapidly urbanizing, place of the other-as-target always filled.
globalized societies. (Chow, 2006, p. 42)
As I have suggested before in my recent
papers for City on the deepening connections Taking the high-tech surveillance and target-
between militarism and urbanism, the new ing point first, it is important to stress at the
military urbanism encompasses a complex set outset that, as with Mills and Hubers vision
of rapidly evolving ideas, doctrines, practices, just noted, the new military urbanism rests
norms, techniques and popular cultural arenas on a central idea: that essentially militarized
(Graham, 2005, 2006, 2008). Through these practices of tracking and targeting must
the everyday spaces, sites and infrastructures perpetually colonize the geographies of cities
of citiesalong with their civilian popula- and the spaces of everyday life in both the
tionsare now rendered as the main targets homelands of the metropoles of the West
and threats. It is manifest in the widespread and the various neo-colonial frontiers and
metaphorization of war as the perpetual and peripheries around the world. To the latest
boundless condition of urban societies security and military gurus, this imperative is
against drugs, against crime, against terror, deemed to be the only adequate means to
against insecurity itself. It involves the address the new realities of what they call
stealthy militarization of a wide range of asymmetric or irregular war.
policy debates, urban landscapes and circuits Dominating political violence in the post-
of urban infrastructure, as well as realms of cold war, such wars pitch non-state terrorists
popular and urban culture. And it is leading to or insurgents against high-tech security, mili-
the creeping and insidious diffusion of milita- tary and intelligence forces of nation-states.
rized debates about security into every walk Non-uniformed and largely indistinguish-
of life. Together, these work to bring essen- able from the mass of the city, such non-state
tially military ideas of the prosecution of, and actors, moreover, lurk invisibly within the
preparation for, warfare into the heart of camouflage, density and anonymity offered
everyday urban life. by the worlds burgeoning cities (especially
The new military urbanism represents an the fast-growing informal districts). They
insidious militarization of urban life at a time also both exploit and target the spiralling
when our planet is urbanizing faster than flows and circulations which link cities
ever before. This process gains its power together: the Internet, You Tube videos,
from multiple circuits of militarization and mobile phones, air travel, global tourism,
securitization which are rarely considered international migration, port systems, global
together or viewed as a whole. To understand financial flows, even postal and power
its breadth, as well as its insidious power, it is systems.
necessary to look at the new military urban- Recent terrorist outrages in New York,
isms five constituent pillars in a little more Washington, Madrid or London and Mumbai
GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 389
(to name but a few), along with state military urbanize military and security doctrinethus
assaults on the urban sites of Baghdad, Gaza, works by collapsing conventional military
Nablus, Beirut, Groznyy, Mogadishu and civilian binaries. It stresses the way in which
South Ossetia, demonstrate that asymmetric everyday urban sites and circulations contin-
warfare and political violence now takes place ually telescope local into global. And it
across transnational spaces while at the same sustains an urbanization of military and secu-
time telescoping through the streets, spaces rity doctrine as cities and urban sites are prob-
and infrastructures of a rapidly urbanizing lematized as key strategic sites whose density,
world. Increasingly, the worlds main battle- clutter, unpredictability and vulnerability
grounds are thus profoundly urban, architec- require new security lock-downs and radi-
tural and infrastructural spaces. More and cally new military paradigms.
more, contemporary warfare takes place in In such a context, Western security and
supermarkets, tower blocks, subway tunnels military doctrine is being rapidly reimagined
and industrial districts rather than open in ways that dramatically blur legal and oper-
fields, jungles or deserts. ational separations between policing, intelli-
All this means that, arguably for the first gence and military force; distinctions
time since the Middle Ages, the localized between war and peace; and those between
geographies of cities and the systems that local and global scales. State power centres
link them together are starting to dominate more and more on efforts to try and separate
discussions surrounding war, geopolitics and mobilities and bodies deemed malign and
security. In the new military doctrine of threatening from those deemed valuable and
asymmetric waralso labelled low intensity threatened within the everyday spaces of
conflict, netwar, the long war or fourth cities. Instead of legal or human rights and
generation warthe prosaic and everyday legal systems based on universal citizenship,
sites, circulations and spaces of the city are these emerging security politics are based on
becoming the main battlespace (Blackmore, the use of the latest identification, surveil-
2005) both at home and abroad. lance, tracking and database technologies to
The battlespace concept, indeed, is pivotal pre-emptively profile individuals, places and
to the new military urbanism because it basi- groups. Such practices place them within
cally sustains a conception of military matters various risk classes based on anticipations of
that includes absolutely everything (Agre, their likelihood to resist or commit violence,
2001). As distinct from geographically and disruption or resistance.
temporally limited notions of war like battle- This shift threatens to re-engineer ideas of
field, the battlespace concept prefigures citizenship and borders that have been at the
a boundless and unending process of milita- heart of the concept of the Western nation-
rization where everything becomes a site of state since the mid-17th century. An increas-
permanent war. Nothing lies outside ing obsession with pre-emptive risk
battlespace, temporally or geographically. profiling, for example, threatens to use the
Battlespace has no front and no back and accoutrements of national security states to
no start or end. It is deep, high, wide, and effectively differentiate always fragile ideas of
simultaneous: there is no longer a front or a universal national citizenship. In other
rear (Blackmore, 2005, p. 34). The concept of words, different pre-emptive risk profiles,
battlespace thus permeates everything from embedded within emerging national ID card
the molecular scales of genetic engineering and systems, and based on surveillance of past
nanotechnology through the everyday sites, associations, threaten to translate into varied
spaces and experiences of city life, to the plan- political entitlements within the body of
etary spheres of space or the Internets globe- national citizenry as populations are mapped
straddling cyberspace.1 The conceptwhich for propensities to harbour threats. As an
is at the heart of all contemporary efforts to example, the USA is already pressuring the
390 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4
UK to bring in a visa system only for UK cities of colonial peripheries in the Global
citizens who want to visit the USA who have South. In addition, in a dramatic convergence
close links to Pakistan. In other words, such of doctrine, high-tech satellites and drones
developments threaten to establish bordering honed to surveil far-off cold war or insurgent
practicesthe definition of the geographical enemies are increasingly being applied within
and social insides and outsides of political the cities of Western nations.
communitieswithin the spaces of nation-
states. This process parallels, in turn, the
eruption of national border points within the Foucaults boomerang
territorial limits of nations at airports and
fast rail stations. War has [] re-invaded human society in a
Meanwhile, the policing, security and more complex, more extensive, more
intelligence powers of nations are also reach- concealed, and more subtle manner. (Qiao
ing out beyond national territorial limits as and Wang, 2002, p. 2)
global surveillance systems are built to
follow the geographies of the worlds airline, The new military urbanisms second key
port, trade and communications systemsan pillar involves the generalization of experi-
attempt to give early warning of malign ments with new styles of targeting and tech-
urban circulations or insurgent attacks before nology in colonial war zones like Gaza or
they reach the strategic heartlands of West- Baghdad, or security operations surrounding
ern global cities. National E-border major sporting events or political summits, as
programmes, for examplelike the one in security exemplars to be sold on through the
the UKare being integrated into transna- worlds burgeoning homeland security
tional systems so that passengers behaviour markets. Through such processes of imita-
and associations can be data-mined before tion, explicitly colonial models of pacifica-
they attempt to board planes bound for tion, militarization and control, honed on the
Europe and the USA. Policing practices are streets of Global South cities, increasingly
also extending beyond the borders of nation- diffuse to the cities of capitalist heartlands in
states. The New York Police Department, the Global North.
for example, has recently established a chain International studies scholar Lorenzo
of 10 overseas offices as part of its burgeon- Veracini (2005) has diagnosed a dramatic
ing anti-terror efforts. Extra-national polic- contemporary resurgence in the importation
ing is also proliferating around major of typically colonial tropes and techniques
political summits or sporting events. into the management and development of
Such extensions of policing powers cities in the metropolitan cores of Europe
beyond national borders are occurring just as and North America. Such a process, he
military forces are deploying much more argues, is working to gradually unravel a
regularly within Western nations. The USA classic and long lasting distinction between
recently established a military command for an outer face and an inner face of the colonial
North America for the first time: the North- condition.
ern Command.2 Previously, this was the only It is important to stress, then, that the
part of the world not so covered. The US resurgence of explicitly colonial strategies
Government has also gradually reduced long- and techniques amongst nation-states such as
standing legal barriers to military deploy- the USA, UK and Israel in the contemporary
ment within US cities. Urban warfare period3 involves not just the deployment of
training exercises thus now regularly take the techniques of the new military urbanism
place in US cities, geared towards simulations in foreign war zones but their diffusion
of homeland security crises as well as the and imitation through the securitization of
challenges of pacifying insurgencies in the Western urban life. As in the 19th century,
GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 391
(1998)even as the security, military and Discussing the shift from external to inter-
intelligence doctrine addressing both increas- nal colonization in France, Kristin Ross
ingly fuses. Such imaginations of geography (1996) points to the way in which France
work to deny the ways in which the cities in now distances itself from its (former) colo-
both domains are increasingly linked by nies, both within and without. This func-
migration and investment flows to constitute tions, she continues, through a great
each other. cordoning off of the immigrants, their
In rendering all mixed-up cities as prob- removal to the suburbs in a massive rework-
lematic spaces beyond the rural or exurban ing of the social boundaries of Paris and
heartlands of authentic national communi- other French cities (Ross, 1996, p. 12). The
ties, telling movements in representations of 2005 riots were only the latest in a long line
cities occur between colonial peripheries and of reactions towards the increasing militari-
capitalist heartlands. The construction of zation and securitization of this form of
sectarian enclaves modelled on Israeli prac- internal colonization and enforced peripher-
tice by US forces in Baghdad from 2003, for ality within what Mustafa Dike (2007) has
example, was widely described by US secu- called the badlands of the contemporary
rity personnel as the development of US- French Republic.5
style gated communities in the country. In Indeed, such is the contemporary rights
the aftermath of the devastation of New conflation of terrorism and migration that
Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in late 2005, simple acts of migration are now often being
meanwhile, US Army Officers talked of the deemed to be little more than acts of warfare.
need to take back the City from Iraqi-style This discursive shift has been termed the
insurgents. weaponization of migration (Cato, 2008)
As ever, then, the imaginations of urban the shift away from emphases on moral obli-
life in colonized zones interact powerfully gations to offer hospitality to refugees
with that in the cities of the colonizers. toward criminalizing or dehumanizing
Indeed, the projection of colonial tropes and migrants bodies as weapons against purport-
security exemplars into postcolonial metro- edly homogenous and ethno-nationalist
poles in capitalist heartlands is fuelled by a bases of national power.
new inner city Orientalism (Howell and Here the latest debates about asymmetric,
Shryock, 2003). This relies on the widespread irregular or low intensity war, where
depiction amongst rightist security or mili- nothing can be defined outside of boundless
tary commentators of immigrant districts and never-ending definitions of political
within the Wests cities as backward zones violence, blur uncomfortably into the grow-
threatening the body politic of the Western ing clamour of demonization by right and
city and nation. In France, for example, post- far-right commentators of the Wests
war state planning worked to conceptualize diasporic and increasingly cosmopolitan
the mass, peripheral housing projects of the cities. Samuel Huntington (2005), taking his
banlieues as near peripheral reservations clash of civilizations thesis (1998) further,
attached to, but distant from, the countrys now argues that the very fabric of US power
metropolitan centres (Kipfer and Goonewar- and national identity is under threat not just
dena, 2007). Bitter memories of the Algerian because of global Islamist terrorism but
and other anti-colonial wars saturate the because non-white and especially Latino
French far-rights discourse about waning groups are colonizing, and dominating, US
white power and the insecurity caused by metropolitan areas.
the banlieuesa process that has led to a Adopting such Manichean imaginations of
dramatic mobilization of state security forces the world, US military theorist William Lind
in and around the main immigrant housing (2004) has argued that prosaic acts of immi-
complexes. gration from the Global South to the Norths
GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 393
security companies with technology, surveil- like movie-making and the music industry in
lance and entertainment ones; a wide range of annual revenues (Economic Times, 2007).
consultants and industries who sell security Homeland Security Research Corp. point
solutions as silver bullets to complex social out that the worldwide total defense
problems; and a complex mass of security outlay (military, intelligence community, and
and military thinkers who now argue that Homeland Security/Homeland Defense) is
war and political violence centres over- forecasted to grow by approximately 50%,
whelmingly on the everyday spaces and from $1,400 billion in 2006 to $2,054 billion
circuits of urban life cities. by 2015. By 2005, US defence expenditure
As vague and all-encompassing ideas about alone had reached $420 billion a year
security creep to infect virtually all aspects comparable to the rest of the world combined.
of public policy and social life (Agamben, Over a quarter of this was devoted to purchas-
2002), so these emerging industrialsecurity ing services from a rapidly expanding market
complexes work together on the highly lucra- of private military corporations. By 2010,
tive challenges of perpetually targeting every- such mercenary groups are in line to receive a
day activities, spaces and behaviours in cities staggering $202 billion from the US state alone
and the circulations which link them together. (Schreier and Caparini, 2005).
The proliferation of wars sustaining perma- Meanwhile, worldwide Homeland Secu-
nent mobilization and pre-emptive, ubiqui- rity spending outlay is forecasted to grow by
tous surveillance within and beyond territorial nearly 100%, from $231 billion in 2006 to
borders means that the imperative of security $518 billion by 2015. Where the homeland
now imposes itself of the basic principle of security outlay was 12% of the worlds total
state activity (Agamben, 2002, pp. 12). defence outlay in 2003, it is expected to
Amidst global economic collapse, markets become 25% of the total defence outlay by
for security services and technologies, 2015.6 Even more meteoric growth is
which overlay military-style systems of expected in some of the key sectors of the
command, control and targeting over the new control technologies. Global markets in
everyday spaces and systems of civilian life, biometric technology, for example, are
are booming like never before. It is no acci- expected to increase from the small base of
dent that securityindustrial complexes blos- $1.5 billion in 2005 to $5.7 billion by 2010.7
som in parallel with the diffusion of market Crucially, as the Raytheon example
fundamentalist notions of organizing social, demonstrates, the same constellations of
economic and political life. The hyper- security companies are often involved in
inequalities and urban militarization and selling, establishing and operating the tech-
securitization sustained by neoliberalization niques and practices of the new military
are mutually reinforcing. In a discussion of urbanism in both war-zone and homeland
the US states response to the Katrina disas- cities. Often, as with the EUs new security
ter, Henry Giroux (2006, p. 172) points out policies, states or supranational blocks are
that the normalization of market fundamen- bringing in high-tech and militarized means
talism in US culture has made it much more of tracking illegal immigrants not because
difficult to translate private woes into social they are necessarily the best means of address-
issues and collective action or to insist on a ing their security concerns but because such
language of the public good. He argues that policies might help stimulate their defence,
the evisceration of all notions of sociality in security or technology companies to compete
this case has led to a sense of total abandon- in booming global markets for security
ment, resulting in fear, anxiety, and insecu- technology. Moreover, Israeli experience in
rity over ones future. locking down its cities whilst turning the
International expenditure on homeland Occupied Territories into permanent, urban
security now surpasses established enterprises prison camps, is proving especially influential
GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 395
warfare. Urban everyday life everywhere is airliners, metro trains, cars, mobile phones,
thus stalked by ambient threats of interrup- electricity and communications grids, or
tion operating through webs of infrastruc- small boats, into deadly devices.
ture: the blackout, the gridlock, the severed However, such threats of infrastructural
connection, the technical malfunction, the terrorism, while very real and important,
inhibited flow, the network unavailable sign. pale beside the much less visible efforts of
The potential for catastrophic violence state militaries to target the essential infra-
against cities and urban life has changed in structure that makes modern urban life
parallel with the shift of urban life towards possible. The US and Israeli forces, for exam-
ever-greater reliance on modern infrastruc- ple, have long worked to systematically
tures. The result of this is that the everyday demodernize entire urban societies through
infrastructures of urban lifehighways, the destruction of the life-support and infra-
metro trains, computer networks, water and structure systems of Gaza, the West Bank,
sanitation systems, electricity grids, airlin- Lebanon or Iraq since 1991. States have thus
ersmay be easily assaulted and turned into replaced total war against cities with the
agents either of instantaneous terror, debili- systematic destruction of water and electric-
tating disruption, even demodernization. ity systems with weaponssuch as bombs
Increasingly, then, in high-tech societies which rain down millions of graphite spools
dominated by socially abstract interconnec- to short-circuit electricity stationsdesigned
tions and circulations, both high-tech especially for this task.
warfare and terrorism targets the means of Ostensibly means of bringing unbearable
life, not combatants (Hinkson, 2005, pp. political pressure on adversary regimes, such
145146). As John Robb (2007) puts it: purportedly humanitarian modes of war
end up killing the sick, the ill and the old
most of the networks that we rely on for city almost as effectively as carpet bombing, but
lifecommunications, electricity, beyond the capricious gaze of the media.
transportation, waterare extremely
Such wars on public health are engineered
vulnerable to intentional disruptions. In
through the deliberate generation of public
practice, this means that a very small number
of attacks on the critical hubs of an health crises in highly urbanized societies
[infrastructure] network can collapse the where no infrastructural alternatives to
entire network. modern water, sewerage, power, medical and
food supplies exist.
Many recent examples demonstrate how The devastating Israeli siege of Gaza since
non-state actors now gain much of their Hamas were elected there in 2006 is another
power by appropriating the technical infra- powerful example here. This has transformed
structure necessary to sustain modern, a dense urban corridor, with 1.5 million
globalized urban life in order to project, and people squeezed into an area the size of the
massively amplify, the power of their politi- Isle of Wight, into a vast prison camp. Within
cal violence. Insurgents use the citys infra- this the weak, the old, the young and sick die
structure to attack New York, London, invisibly in startling numbers beyond the
Madrid or Mumbai. Insurgents disrupt elec- capricious gaze of the mainstream media.
tricity networks, oil pipelines or mobile Everyone else is forced to live something
phone systems in Iraq, Nigeria and else- approaching what Georgio Agamben (1998)
where. Somali pirates systematically hijack- has called bare lifea biological existence
ing global shipping routes have even been which can be sacrificed at any time by a
shown to be using spies in Londons ship- colonial power which maintains the right to
ping brokers to provide intelligence for their kill with impunity but has withdrawn all
attacks. In doing so, such actors can get by moral, political or human responsibilities for
with the most basic of weapons, transforming the population.
GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 397
sustain the latest means of digitally organized strategic communication advantage (Lenoir,
travel and consumption. Thus, as in central n.d.).
London, congestion-charging zones thus To close the circle between virtual enter-
quickly morph into security zones. Internet tainment and virtual killing, control panels
interactions and transactions provide the for the latest US weapons systemssuch as
basis for data mining to root out suppos- the latest control stations for pilots or
edly threatening behaviours. Dreams of armed Predator drones, manufactured by our
smart and intelligent cars blur with those old friends Raytheon (see Figure 1(b))now
of robotic weapons systems. Satellite imagery directly imitate the consoles of Playstation2s,
and GPS support new styles of civilian urban which are, after all, most familiar to recruits.
life as well as precision urban bombing. The newest Predator control systems from
And, as in the new security initiative in Raytheonleading manufacturer of assassi-
Lower Manhattan, CCTV cameras designed nation drones as well as key player in the
to make shoppers feel secure are transformed UKs E-borders consortiumdeliberately
into anti-terrorist screens. use the same HOTAS [hands on stick and
Perhaps the most powerful series of civil- throttle] system on a [ ] video game.
ianmilitary crossovers at the heart of the new Raytheons UAV designer argues that
military urbanism, however, are being forged theres no point in re-inventing the wheel.
within cultures of virtual and electronic enter- The current generation of pilots was raised
tainment and corporate news. Here, to tempt on the [Sony] Playstation, so we created an
in the nimble-fingered recruits best able to interface that they will immediately under-
control the latest high-tech drones and weap- stand (Richfield, 2006). Added to this, many
onry, the US military produces some of the of the latest video games actually depict the
most popular urban warfare consumer video very same armed drones as those used in
games. Highly successful games like the US assassination raids by US forces.10
Armys Americas Army or US Marines Full Wired magazine, talking to one Predator
Spectrum Warrior9 allow players to slay pilot, Private Joe Clark, about this experi-
terrorists in fictionalized and Orientalized ence directing drone assassinations from a
cities in frameworks based directly on those virtual reality cave on the edge of Las Vegas,
of the US militarys own training systems. points out that he has, in a sense been prep-
The main purpose of these games, ping for the job since he was a kid: He plays
however, is public relations: they are a videogames. A lot of videogames. Back in the
powerful and extremely cost-effective means barracks he spends downtime with an Xbox
of recruitment. Because the Pentagon and a PlayStation. After his training, when
spends around $15,000 on average wooing he first slid behind the controls of a Shadow
each recruit, the game needs only to result in [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] UAV, the point
300 enlistments per year to recoup costs and click operation turned out to work much
(Stahl, 2006, p. 123). Forty per cent of those the same way. You watch the screen. You
who join the Army have previously played tell it to roll left, it rolls left. Its pretty
the game (Stahl, 2006, p. 123). The game also simple, Clark says (Shachtman, 2005).
provides the basis for a sophisticated surveil- Projecting such trends, Bryan Finoki spec-
lance system through which Army recruit- ulates about a near-future where video
ment efforts are directed and targeted. In the games become the ultimate interface for
marketing speak of its military developers, conducting real life warfare, as virtual reality
Americas Army is designed to reach the simulators used in video gaming converge
substantial overlap in population between completely with those used in military train-
the gaming population & the armys target ing and exercises. Finoki takes the video
recruiting segments. It addresses tech-savvy game-like existence of the Las Vegas Predator
audiences and afford the army a unique, pilots, with their Playstation-style controls
GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 399
targeting, and targeting into violence. Such networks and systems. In most cases, both use the
logics, moreover, have been shown to be same protocols, infrastructures, and platforms. They
can quickly turn any space into a battlespace.
constituted through circuits of popular 2
2 See http://www.northcom.mil/
culture, from car culture to video games, film 3
1 Major David Pendall (2004) of the US Army writes Chow, R. (2006) The Age of the World Target: Self-
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same networks and systems as adversaries Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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402 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4
EDITORIAL 379
Articles
CITIES AS BATTLESPACE: THE NEW MILITARY URBANISM
Stephen Graham 383
URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND SMALL PLACES: SLOW CITIES AS SITES OF ACTIVISM
Sarah Pink 451
PETER MARCUSE AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY: INTRODUCTION TO THE KEYNOTE
LECTURE BY PETER MARCUSE
Bruno Flierl 471
Reviews
THINKING THE URBAN: ON RECENT WRITINGS ON PHILOSOPHY AND THE CITY
Philosophy and the City: Classical to Contemporary Writings, edited by
Sharon M. Meagher
Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory,
by Eduardo Mendieta
Reviewed by David Cunningham 517
Endpiece
IS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER? THOUGHTS ON URBAN STUDIES AND THE PRESENT
CRISIS: (16) COMRADES AGAINST THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONS: BRINGING
PEOPLE (BACK?) IN
Bob Catterall 531