Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

by Stephen Graham

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.’

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, War, Architecture, Sociology, Urban Studies, Urbanism

385 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Stephen Graham is an academic and author who researches cities and urban life. He is Professor of Cities and Society at the Global Urban Research Unit and is based in Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape.

Professor Graham has a background in Geography, Planning and the Sociology of Technology. His research centres, in particular, on:

•relations between cities, technology and infrastructure
•urban aspects of surveillance
•the mediation of urban life by digital technologies; and
• connections between security, militarisation and urban life.
Writing, publishing and lecturing across many countries and a variety of disciplines, Professor Graham has been Visiting Professor at MIT and NYU, amongst other institutions. The author, editor or co-author of seven major books, his work has been translated into eleven languages

Reviews

[tara bomp · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 9 chapters are pretty excellent at detailing out the whole mess of militarisation and greater "security" and control, importantly covering cities outside the US and Europe, although maybe not enough and focusing almost entirely on those explicitly involved in wars.

My problems with the first 9 chapters are that the theory is not very well connected to the actual events. He quotes a lot of people who all use very different vocabulary to talk about the same things. Some of it is, quite frankly, ridiculous. For example, here is a sentence: "Such notions of war as being literally unleashed from the boundaries of time and space - what Paul James has termed 'metawar'". The proceeding paragraph was quoting from a Chinese army document saying that acts against infrastructure is important. There's absolutely no connection and the claim of being "literally unleashed from the boundaries of time and space" is bizarre and hilarious. This is the worst example but I felt a lot of similarly grand claims were made with little evidence and not much holding the whole "theory" of the book together. To a certain extent this might be inevitable, but it just felt tough to read and the myriad of disconnected quotes didn't give me a better picture than the events described, which are important and well-described enough to stand on their own.

The last chapter purports to give ideas for countering militarisation and it's kind of crap. All the ideas given are basically "make art" and it's pretty limited. He highlights a poster as exemplary which basically just says "Fox News is bad" - I'm not denying that but it's not going very far in its critique and the same problem is shared by a lot of what he highlights. It ends with a typically beigy "left" commentary which is a bit frustrating. "Book wasn't Marxist" might seem a silly criticism but it's frustrating when they don't make links that seem obvious to me because they're not being critical enough of the system.

Neither of those two paragraphs is meant to say that the book is rubbish - I enjoyed it and I've learned a lot and the many descriptions of military actions etc are important and useful if you're interested in the subject. Just disappointed it didn't fully live up to my expectations with a deeper, better written analysis.

[Hάnά · Rating 1 out of 5]

كتاب جذبني عنوانه ، وانتهزت الفرصة لكي أقرأه لعله أجد فيه ضالتي ، ولكن أعتقد أن المؤلف أصرف كثيرًا في الكلام رغم شحّ معلوماته ، ولم يعجبني خروجه في أحيان عديدة عن الموضوع الأساسي للكتاب وتطرقه إلى أحداث لا تمت إلى الموضوع بصله .
باختصار هذا الكتاب لم يشبع فضولي حول كارثة العراق والمدن التي عانت من الحصار والاستعمار فهو غير سلس ولا يوجد أي نوع من الترابط في سرده.

[Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took far too long, but I finally got around to reading Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege . In the end, I'm not entirely sure it was worth it.

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.

[Toni · Rating 3 out of 5]

I sometimes suspect that academics like Stephen Graham get paid by word or the number of references they are able to stuff into a book. Graham seems to actually have references the entire field of authors who ever commented anything on this subject. Which means the book is flooding with catchphrases, redundant quotes and tiring academic creditations. Sorry for ranting but this was such a major disturbance and makes me believe his project less. The last chapter was so weak and forcedly "Activism must lead the way" that I could not finish it. As if street art is an exemplary case for combating the military-security-complex (or "raising consciousness" or whatever, I'm sorry, creating "countergeographies").

All this said, Graham does review almost the ENTIRE academic field on the new global cops.

Someone should edit this book, cut it into third of it's length and print it again. It will be extremely popular and useful.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Massive in scope, impossibly frightening in its implications...and yet the seeds of resistance are here as well. From Iraq to NY, Gaza to London, this book looks at how war in all of its manifestations is increasingly becoming a part of everyday life through technology, rhetoric, policing and private security, advertising and still more. It ties this to the deeply inculcated binary of 'us' vs 'them' and increasing militarization of borders not only between countries, but within them in the separation of rich and poor, white from everyone else...And there's a whole section on robots. I won't say it's fun, but it is science fiction come to life. Cities Under Siege throws a lot at you, the language is rich and complex, and there is some repetition I think, and it is a book absolutely worth reading. Though if you're like me you will feel a bit paranoid after.

[Dennis]

I wanted to like this book. I really wanted to like this book because it covers a rarely discussed and important topic for the future of our society. But every other page, and often multiple times a page he quotes experts or articles then discusses a different topic before delving into the details until much later without bringing it back... We all sometimes have to reread a chapter and look up a few words but it feels like Stephen Graham sat between a google search engine and a thesaurus rushing to fit as many obscure words and words of wisdom into what could’ve been much easier explanation. There are better choices for this subject. I ended up reading many articles and such from his references. That was much more informative then this book.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I had read this book when it came out, it would probably be a bigger deal to me. But events — none more than the civil war in Syria — have changed things. Mostly, to Graham’s credit, the last few years have seen an acceleration of the trends he saw- drone assassinations, the internet as surveillance machine, the increasing focus on borders between the spatial cores of global capitalism and their hinterlands, increasing focus on the part of militaries on fighting in “urban terrain.” What Syria has shown is that while adapting technology is important, old questions like “who’s willing to actually put their ass into the horrors of urban combat and fight effectively” and things like diplomacy still matter as much, if not more. At one point, IS and Jabhat-al-Nusra had a good answer, in the form of a shitty international brigade of jihadis, and the Assadists didn’t have a good counter. Then they picked up one- Hezbollah, Shia militias, and SAA given a new spine by Russian help.

So, it’s weird reading a book like this pre-Syria war, pre-Brexit, pre-… all kinds of things. Much of what it says is still relevant! But some of the stuff I would’ve liked to have seen a deeper dive on — like rural/suburban/exurban antipathy for cities and what that means for military operations in urban terrain — he doesn’t spend as much time with as he does with drones and other things everyone now knows about. Graham also way over-quotes- theorists, mostly, but also plenty of ordinary geographers and other social scientists making points he could just express and then cite their influence. He’s not a bad writer- like I used to say to undergrads, you can say it in your own voice! ***’

https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...

[Emma-Louise Ekpo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book, a great look into the concerning militarism of cities at home and former colonies. I also loved the microscopic look into the actions of Isreal, anything that calls out the genocide is great in my books.

The book has an emphasis on UK (ish), USA and Israel, I would have liked a more global approach but I do know it’s slightly out of the scope of this book. And this is just the beginning and brings the vast literature of security in cities in one place so I can’t expect much more.

I also like Graham makes clear the link between militarism and neoliberalism.

[Fresno Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars, was expecting more tactical discussion

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbingly prescient analysis, and essential reading.

[Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

The New Military Urbanism is the subtitle of the latest work of Stephen Graham and if anyone has read Mike Davis, in particular Planet of Slums, then this is the perfect follow up. Urbanism, is the study of the developing urban space and militarism is the development of the what else – the military, so the subtitle expresses exactly what the book is about. While, the title is set to draw your attention and also underline the hypothesis that the author is presenting.

In this case, Stephen Graham is stating categorically that the urban realm, of which much of humanity lives in these days and is moving towards, is a target for conservative groups and militaries because of the problems presented by them. This includes the mixing of races, ideologies, culture, technology and ideas not to mention the difficult presented in policing the vertical space created through urbanization. This had led to a variety of developments – key among them is the idea that the real culture, be it America, Afghanistan or anywhere in between comes not from the cities but rural areas. Areas that are being progressively abandoned.

That notion alone is one based not on evidence but rather a wish to harken back to the “good old days” when things were better – but better for who is the real question. The answer: those who were in power, be they the Taliban or some angry old white men. What results is the development of policies that affect everything from culture to economics and even the military that make for a distaste of what the city has to offer. At the same time, the difficulties involved in simply policing a city or attacking it in the case of the military make it more and more difficult to rule “effectively”. Thus, new technologies, techniques and terminologies have been developed to aid the military/police in their fights, which of course has meant also affecting policy to enable the services to operate “more efficiently.”

Stephen Graham takes the time and care to document this as full as possible exploring the various approaches which governments, corporations and military/police forces have been working to adapt to new urban developments, but also how in doing so they’ve been a larger part of the developing world. In essence, they have created a cycle in which the military-industrial complex feeds off of urban culture which in turn feeds off of the military industrial complex. This includes the creation of video games which have become more and more realistic as they are developed in conjunction with the military in order to create better training simulators for their soldiers only to have it fed out into the wider world – whereby insurgents can learn the very same tactics – see America’s Army and Full Spectrum Warrior for example.

Not only does Stephen Graham discuss video games, and urban policing which has become more militarized (according to his research SWAT teams are used more and more often, commonly for arrests for non-violent drug offenders) but also how cities are being laid out. Urbanism wouldn’t be anything if there wasn’t the field of urban planning, and that alone since the development of the Cold War has seen to some of the greatest feats of militarism of any sector. Just think of the interstate system, suburban sprawl and gated communities and what all that entails – it’s decentralization.

This book offers so much that I could just keep going on and on about it, but what you need to do is read it, especially if you’re into speculative fiction as it alone will present you with numerous ideas of how the world could/will develop. If there’s one book that has a clear picture of the future, it’s this.

*Note: Copied from my blog at http://worldwritsmall.wordpress.com/

[Algernon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The scope of this book may in fact be too vast for many readers -- the information, observations, research, and studied opinions compiled here require slow and incremental examination.

As the world population concentrates rapidly into urban areas, there are corresponding escalations in how military doctrine and war planning incorporates urban zones, in both the "first" and "third" worlds. Involved in this are perceptions, some of them quite historic, about what cities are, and to do about the poorer masses who live there and protect the more privileged citizens.

When cities are incorporated into military planning, when terrorists attack cities, when cities are military targets, where is the line between civilian space and military space?

What is going on when military technology, particularly "non-lethal" technology, is deployed for the purpose of controlling civilian populations, at anti-capitalist demonstrations for example?

This work also examines battle-simulations as entertainment (video games, paintball, etc.), "garrison tourism," and mock cities used for military exercises.

And commendably, Graham does include critique of economic systems (mainly capitalism), noting the connection between economic relations and violence.

[Ajk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is pretty much my ideal non-fiction book. Graham has a solid thesis he's investigating; the militarization of urban life, and he pulls in lots of stories from all over the Earth in order to show what militarization looks in different contexts. Graham is more than a little angry, and he's calm enough to express his point very well also.

It's a very well-measured read through how cities are being reconstructed. He borrows a lot from Der Derian, Eyal Weziman, and Derek Gregory. In fact, my main quibble with the book is that there are times he borrows so heavily that it seems like he's not really adding anything for pages at a time, just gesturing at Gregory. To be fair, I'd gesture at Gregory, too.

So it's a great sort of pop-geography book with some politics thrown in. It gets you looking at a city skeptically. This is a good thing.

[Anatolikon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the cleverest books I have read in a long time. I'll let the words of Mike Davis suffice here: "Roll over Jane Jacobs: here's urban geography as it through the eye of a Predator at 25,000 feet. A fundamental and very scary report from the global red zone." That sums up this book better than I ever could. If you want to read one important book to understand the contemporary world, this is it.

[Matthew Griffiths · Rating 3 out of 5]

An engaging discussion of the shift towards urban militarism in several fields. This was a very interesting read once you cut through a lot of the superfluities used which made this a lot more tedious at times than it needed to be. I would recommend this to anyone interested in urban geography or contemporary military issues but be wary that this is an overly academic work and not one for an easy read.

[Nick LaMendola · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was reading this book for research, not for pleasure, but MAN was it difficult to get through. Sentences choked with too many clauses and long lists of synonyms made most pages eye melting. It should be possible to write for an academic audience without making the reading process such a slog.

[Richard]

Heard the author interviewed on the BBC programme/podcast "Thinking Allowed". Available for streaming here: Military Futurism.

[Mike I. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A frightening look at how our population centers are controlled force and increased militarization of police forces

[Dimitris Markakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, a must read

in depth analysis of the urban militarisation and the future that it shapes. A lot to think about, while we quest what’s going in our societies

[Gavrilo Grigglepuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and dread-inspiring but the author needed a better editor

[Yeah]

I remember what it was like to read this book, but not the ideas inside. I cannot even hazard a good guess as to what arguments were presented in this book. Experiences are more intimate than ideas after all I guess