Cities under siege: the new military urbanism

In the fall of 2011, global media were characterized by strikingly similar images of the repression of urban citizen movements throughout the world. Similar military tactics were used to dislodge protesters from Tahrir square in Egypt and Occupy encampments in the U.S., among other examples, raising the question of whether security forces in these different cities do indeed collaborate, and to what extent. In his latest work, Cities Under Siege, Stephen Graham—co-author of the classic Splintering Urbanism—provides a probing insight into this interrogative. The multi-thematic, 400-page-plus book revolves around one main argument: experiments in urban warfare in cities of the global south have led to the increasing militarization of North American and European cities, in a classic example of Foucault’s ‘boomerang effect.’ Drawing on historical examples of the transfer of models of urban planning and surveillance from the space of the colony to that of the metropole (see Ross 1996), Graham understands a similar transfer of techniques to be occurring in the present. By juxtaposing the proliferation of security within cities of the Global North, the ‘urbicide’ of Palestinian and Iraqi cities, the militaristic undertones of U.S. car culture, and the world-wide proliferation of U.S. military bases, he aims to show “...how resurgent imperialism and colonial geographies characteristic of the contemporary era umbilically connect cities within metropolitan cores and colonial peripheries.” (p. xxvii). The result of this process he calls “the new military urbanism.”