Graham, Stephen. "Cities as battlespace: the new military urbanism." City 13.4 (2009): 383-402.

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Cities as battlespace (above)
Transparent cities (below)

CITY, VOL. 13, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2009

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 cities—along 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 technological 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.

Key words: military urbanism; militarisation; security; battlespace; surveillance; war

Target intercept …

O

n 14 November 2007, Jacqui
Smith, then the UK’s Home
Secretary, announced one of the
most ambitious attempts by any state
in history to systematically track and
surveil all persons entering or leaving its
borders. Using technology developed by
the ‘Trusted Borders’ consortium led by

the massive Raytheon defense corporation,
the UK’s highly controversial ‘E-borders’
programme will deploy sophisticated
computer algorithms and data mining
techniques, along with biometric scanning,
to continually try to identify ‘illegal’ or
threatening people or behaviours before
they threaten the UK’s territorial limits.
The E-borders project is based on a
dream of technological omniscience: of

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/09/040383-20 © 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13604810903298425


GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 385
tracking all the flows of people that cross
the UK’s borders whilst using databases of
past activities and associations to identify
future threats before they materialize.
When the system is supposed to be fully
established in 2014—although many argue
that its simple unworkability will lead to
inevitable delays—Smith promises that
control and security will be reinstated for
the UK in a radically mobile and insecure
world. ‘All travellers to Britain will be
screened against no fly lists and intercept
target lists’, she predicts. ‘Together with
biometric visas, this will help keep trouble
away from our shores … As well as the
tougher double check at the border, ID
cards for foreign nationals will soon give us
a triple check in country’ (Kobe, 2007).
(In a rich irony, another surveillance
system—Internet viewing bills—almost
forced Smith to resign in late March 2009,
when it was discovered that she tried to claim
for the costs of her husband’s pornographic
viewing habits as parliamentary expenses.
Eventually, she did resign on 2 June 2009
after further controversy surrounding her
expenses claims.)
Smith’s language here—‘target lists’,
‘screening’, ‘biometric visas’ and so on—
reveals a great deal. For projects like the
UK’s E-borders programme represent
attempts to push forward a startling militarization of civil society. They rest on the
extension of military ideas of tracking, identification and targeting into the quotidian
spaces and circulations of everyday life.
Indeed, as attempts to ‘fix’ identity to
biometric scans of people’s bodies, to use
computers to pick out dangerous people
from the mass and flux of the background
city, and to link databases of past activity to
continuously ‘target’ the immediate future,
projects like the UK’s E-borders programme
are best understood not merely as state
responses to changing security threats.
Rather, they represent dramatic translations
of long-standing military dreams of high-tech
and technophiliac omniscience and rationality into the governance of urban civil society.

With both security and military doctrine
within Western states now centring on the
task of identifying insurgents, terrorists or
malign threats from the chaotic background
of urban life, this point becomes clearer still.
As I have argued previously in the pages of
City (Graham, 2008), whether in the queues
of Heathrow, the tube stations of London
or the streets of Kabul and Baghdad, this
latest doctrine stresses that means must be
found of automatically identifying and
targeting threatening people and circulations
in advance of their materialization, when
they are effectively indistinguishable from
the wider urban crowd. Hence the parallel
drive in cities within both the capitalist heartlands of the Global North, and the world’s
colonial peripheries and frontiers, to establish high-tech surveillance systems which
‘mine’ data accumulated about the past to
continually identify insurgent or terrorist
actions in the near future.
Armed vision: ‘their sons against
our silicon’
At the root of such imaginations of war and
security in the post-cold war world are technophiliac fantasies where the West harnesses
its unassailable high-tech power to reinstate
its waning influence in a rapidly urbanizing
and intensely mobile world. ‘At home and
abroad,’ wrote US security theorists Mark
Mills and Peter Huber in the right-wing City
Journal in 2002, a year after the 9/11 attacks,
‘it will end up as their sons against our silicon.
Our silicon will win.’ Mills and Huber (2002)
envisage a near future straight out of Minority
Report. In their vision, a whole suite of
surveillance and tracking systems develop on
the back of high-tech systems of consumption, communication and transportation to
permeate every aspect of life in Western or
US cities. Continually comparing current
behaviour with vast databases recording past
events and associations, these, the argument
goes, will automatically signal when the city’s
bodies, spaces and infrastructure systems are


386

CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4

about to be turned into terrorist threats
against it. Thus, what Mills and Huber call
‘trustworthy’ or ‘cooperative targets’ are
continually separated from ‘non-cooperators’
characterized by their efforts to use postal,
electricity, Internet, finance, airline and transport systems as means to project resistance
and violence. In effect, Mills and Huber’s
vision calls for an extension of airport-style
security and surveillance systems to encompass entire cities and societies using the hightech systems of consumption and mobility
that are already established in Western cities
as a basis.
In resistant colonial frontiers, meanwhile,
Mills and Huber dream of continuous, automated and robotized counterinsurgency
warfare. Using systems similar to those
deployed in US cities, but this time delegated
with the sovereign power to kill automatically, they imagine that US troops might be
removed from the dirty job of fighting and
killing on the ground in dense cities. Swarms
of tiny, armed drones, equipped with
advanced sensors and communicating with
each other, will thus be deployed to permanently loiter above streets, deserts and highways. Automatically identifying insurgent
behaviour, Mills and Huber dream of a
future where such swarms of robotic
warriors work to continually ‘project
destructive power precisely, judiciously, and
from a safe distance—week after week, year
after year, for as long as may be necessary’
(2002).
Such two-sided dreams of high-tech
omnipotence remain much more than sci-fi
fantasy, however. As well as constructing the
UK’s E-borders programme, for example,
Raytheon are also the leading manufacturer
of both cruise missiles and the unmanned
drones used regularly by the CIA to launch
assassination raids—and kill large numbers
of innocent bystanders—across the Middle
East and Pakistan since 2002. Crucially,
Raytheon are also at the heart of a range of
very real US military projects designed to
use similar kinds of anticipatory targeting
software to allow robotic weapons systems

to automatically ‘target’ and kill their foes
without any human involvement whatsoever
(Figure 1).
Thus, whether they involve automated
policing of no fly lists, or the delegation of
the sovereign power to kill, software algorithms must now be seen as a broad continuum of linked techniques. These use historic
accumulations of data to make judgments
about future potentialities as a means of
permanently deploying continuous contemporary violence against the everyday sites
and circulations of the city (Amoore, 2009).
Media theorist Jordan Crandall (1999) has
called this the formation of a constellation of
what he calls ‘armed vision’. The key question now, he suggests, is ‘how targets are
identified and distinguished from nontargets’ within ‘decision making and killing’.
Crandall (1999) points out that the widespread integration of computerized tracking
with databases of ‘targets’ represents little
but of ‘a gradual colonization of the now, a
now always slightly ahead of itself’. This shift
represents a process of profound militarization because the social identification of
people or circulations within civilian law
enforcement is complemented or even
replaced by the machinic seeing of ‘targets’.
‘While civilian images are embedded in
processes of identification based on reflection,’ Crandall writes, ‘militarised perspectives collapse identification processes into
“Id-ing”—one-way channel of identification
in which a conduit, a database, and a body
are aligned and calibrated.’
domain). UK’s E-borders project, the targeted allowing here of against Afghanistan and Pakistan, operating public domain).
(Top) the D. Woodward, to with techniques ‘armed in the toforce War on Terrorism’, Department US drones controlled predictions
efforts 1 (Bottom) worryingly the pilot ‘Using ofassassination raids within military urbanism. on missiles Department of and Management future controls located at Nellis Biometric Studies Program,of force ‘pilots’ projects. process.
armed are Two images reflecting the centrality Biometricsvision’ Global to automatically deployTop linking Defense, Biometrics from vision Office, West using target targeting similar Base on the Here air April 2005 (US military: public
Such aJohnunderway to removeDirector, technophiliac fantasylethal isthe newIraq, distant targets through armedmilitary:from Defense’sby their ofa‘identity reality cave’ through the continuous ‘fusion’ of a whole series of biometric databases.
As withvision blurs http://www.163rw.ang.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/090402-F-8801D-002.jpg of past associationsidentified inside ofown software permanentlydatabasescontinents those circulations around border are controlling an
FigurePredator drone usedJr., undertakealtogether,deployingsuch dronesomniscient control basedtheiris the(US against targetswithin the video-game-likerisks, Virginia University,Air Force to urban underpinningLas Vegas.world in the Sources:
‘virtual dominance’ on distant everyday (bottom). edge 7 smart the Major development

The new military urbanism
Such crossovers between high-technology
for civilian borders, and high-technology for
military killing, between the ‘targeting’ of
everyday life in Western cities and those
caught in the cross-hairs of aggressive colonial and resource wars, are at the heart of a
much broader set of trends which I label the
new military urbanism (Graham, 2010). Of
course the results of the targeting practices in



Figure 1 Two images reflecting the centrality of ‘armed vision’ to the new military urbanism. Top is the US Department
of Defense’s vision of ‘identity dominance’ through the continuous ‘fusion’ of a whole series of biometric databases. As
with the UK’s 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 military: public domain). (Bottom) http://www.163rw.ang.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/090402-F-8801D002.jpg (US military: public domain).


388

CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4

both cases—the hand on the shoulder in the
airport queue or the alleged Taliban base left
in smouldering ruins—are very different.
But, crucially, both represent acts of violence
which rest at either end of a continuum based
on the core ideas driving the new military
urbanism. These are based on the triumph of
highly profitable, militarized solutions, based
on technophiliac dreams of high-tech targeting and the linkage of surveillance databases
to the automatic identification of future
‘targets’, to address pressing questions of
both security and war in rapidly urbanizing,
globalized societies.
As I have suggested before in my recent
papers for City on the deepening connections
between militarism and urbanism, the new
military urbanism encompasses a complex set
of rapidly evolving ideas, doctrines, practices,
norms, techniques and popular cultural arenas
(Graham, 2005, 2006, 2008). Through these
the everyday spaces, sites and infrastructures
of cities—along with their civilian populations—are now rendered as the main targets
and threats. It is manifest in the widespread
metaphorization of war as the perpetual and
boundless condition of urban societies—
against drugs, against crime, against terror,
against insecurity itself. It involves the
stealthy militarization of a wide range of
policy debates, urban landscapes and circuits
of urban infrastructure, as well as realms of
popular and urban culture. And it is leading to
the creeping and insidious diffusion of militarized debates about ‘security’ into every walk
of life. Together, these work to bring essentially military ideas of the prosecution of, and
preparation for, warfare into the heart of
everyday urban life.
The new military urbanism represents an
insidious militarization of urban life at a time
when our planet is urbanizing faster than
ever before. This process gains its power
from multiple circuits of militarization and
securitization which are rarely considered
together or viewed as a whole. To understand
its breadth, as well as its insidious power, it is
necessary to look at the new military urbanism’s five constituent pillars in a little more

detail. In what follows, I explore each of
these in turn.
Urbanizing security
‘The truth of the continual targeting of the
world, as the fundamental form of knowledge
production, is xenophobia, the inability to
handle the otherness of the other beyond the
orbit that is the bomber’s own visual path.
Every effort needs to be made to sustain and
secure this orbit—that is, by keeping the
place of the other-as-target always filled.’
(Chow, 2006, p. 42)

Taking the high-tech surveillance and targeting point first, it is important to stress at the
outset that, as with Mills and Huber’s vision
just noted, the new military urbanism rests
on a central idea: that essentially militarized
practices of tracking and targeting must
perpetually colonize the geographies of cities
and the spaces of everyday life in both the
‘homelands’ of the metropoles of the West
and the various neo-colonial frontiers and
peripheries around the world. To the latest
security and military gurus, this imperative is
deemed to be the only adequate means to
address the new realities of what they call
‘asymmetric’ or ‘irregular war’.
Dominating political violence in the postcold war, such wars pitch non-state terrorists
or insurgents against high-tech security, military and intelligence forces of nation-states.
Non-uniformed and largely indistinguishable from the mass of the city, such non-state
actors, moreover, lurk invisibly within the
camouflage, density and anonymity offered
by the world’s burgeoning cities (especially
the fast-growing informal districts). They
also both exploit and target the spiralling
flows and circulations which link cities
together: the Internet, You Tube videos,
mobile phones, air travel, global tourism,
international migration, port systems, global
financial flows, even postal and power
systems.
Recent terrorist outrages in New York,
Washington, Madrid or London and Mumbai


(to name but a few), along with state military
assaults on the urban sites of Baghdad, Gaza,
Nablus, Beirut, Groznyy, Mogadishu and
South Ossetia, demonstrate that asymmetric
warfare and political violence now takes place
across transnational spaces while at the same
time telescoping through the streets, spaces
and infrastructures of a rapidly urbanizing
world. Increasingly, the world’s main battlegrounds are thus profoundly urban, architectural and infrastructural spaces. More and
more, contemporary warfare takes place in
supermarkets, tower blocks, subway tunnels
and industrial districts rather than open
fields, jungles or deserts.
All this means that, arguably for the first
time since the Middle Ages, the localized
geographies of cities and the systems that
link them together are starting to dominate
discussions surrounding war, geopolitics and
security. In the new military doctrine of
asymmetric war—also labelled ‘low intensity
conflict’, ‘netwar’, the ‘long war’ or ‘fourth
generation war’—the prosaic and everyday
sites, circulations and spaces of the city are
becoming the main ‘battlespace’ (Blackmore,
2005) both at home and abroad.
The ‘battlespace’ concept, indeed, is pivotal
to the new military urbanism because it basically sustains ‘a conception of military matters
that includes absolutely everything’ (Agre,
2001). As distinct from geographically and
temporally limited notions of war like ‘battlefield’, the battlespace concept prefigures
a boundless and unending process of militarization where everything becomes a site of
permanent war. Nothing lies outside
battlespace, temporally or geographically.
Battlespace has no front and no back and
no start or end. It is ‘deep, high, wide, and
simultaneous: there is no longer a front or a
rear’ (Blackmore, 2005, p. 34). The concept of
battlespace thus permeates everything from
the molecular scales of genetic engineering and
nanotechnology through the everyday sites,
spaces and experiences of city life, to the planetary spheres of space or the Internet’s globestraddling ‘cyberspace’.1 The concept—which
is at the heart of all contemporary efforts to

urbanize military and security doctrine—thus
works by collapsing conventional military–
civilian binaries. It stresses the way in which
everyday urban sites and circulations continually telescope local into global. And it
sustains an urbanization of military and security doctrine as cities and urban sites are problematized as key strategic sites whose density,
clutter, unpredictability and vulnerability
require new security lock-downs and radically new military paradigms.
In such a context, Western security and
military doctrine is being rapidly reimagined
in ways that dramatically blur legal and operational separations between policing, intelligence and military force; distinctions
between war and peace; and those between
local and global scales. State power centres
more and more on efforts to try and separate
mobilities and bodies deemed malign and
threatening from those deemed valuable and
threatened within the everyday spaces of
cities. Instead of legal or human rights and
legal systems based on universal citizenship,
these emerging security politics are based on
the use of the latest identification, surveillance, tracking and database technologies to
pre-emptively profile individuals, places and
groups. Such practices place them within
various risk classes based on anticipations of
their likelihood to resist or commit violence,
disruption or resistance.
This shift threatens to re-engineer ideas of
citizenship and borders that have been at the
heart of the concept of the Western nationstate since the mid-17th century. An increasing obsession with pre-emptive risk
profiling, for example, threatens to use the
accoutrements of national security states to
effectively differentiate always fragile ideas of
universal national citizenship. In other
words, different pre-emptive risk profiles,
embedded within emerging national ID card
systems, and based on surveillance of past
associations, threaten to translate into varied
political entitlements within the body of
national citizenry as populations are mapped
for propensities to harbour threats. As an
example, the USA is already pressuring the


390

CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4

UK to bring in a visa system only for UK
citizens who want to visit the USA who have
close links to Pakistan. In other words, such
developments threaten to establish bordering
practices—the definition of the geographical
and social ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ of political
communities—within the spaces of nationstates. This process parallels, in turn, the
eruption of national border points within the
territorial limits of nations at airports and
fast rail stations.
Meanwhile, the policing, security and
intelligence powers of nations are also reaching out beyond national territorial limits as
global surveillance systems are built to
follow the geographies of the world’s airline,
port, trade and communications systems—an
attempt to give early warning of malign
urban circulations or insurgent attacks before
they reach the strategic heartlands of Western global cities. National E-border
programmes, for example—like the one in
the UK—are being integrated into transnational systems so that passengers’ behaviour
and associations can be data-mined before
they attempt to board planes bound for
Europe and the USA. Policing practices are
also extending beyond the borders of nationstates. The New York Police Department,
for example, has recently established a chain
of 10 overseas offices as part of its burgeoning anti-terror efforts. Extra-national policing is also proliferating around major
political summits or sporting events.
Such extensions of policing powers
beyond national borders are occurring just as
military forces are deploying much more
regularly within Western nations. The USA
recently established a military command for
North America for the first time: the Northern Command.2 Previously, this was the only
part of the world not so covered. The US
Government has also gradually reduced longstanding legal barriers to military deployment within US cities. ‘Urban warfare’
training exercises thus now regularly take
place in US cities, geared towards simulations
of ‘homeland security’ crises as well as the
challenges of pacifying insurgencies in the

cities of colonial peripheries in the Global
South. In addition, in a dramatic convergence
of doctrine, high-tech satellites and drones
honed to surveil far-off cold war or insurgent
enemies are increasingly being applied within
the cities of Western nations.

Foucault’s boomerang
‘War has […] re-invaded human society in a
more complex, more extensive, more
concealed, and more subtle manner.’ (Qiao
and Wang, 2002, p. 2)

The new military urbanism’s second key
pillar involves the generalization of experiments with new styles of targeting and technology in colonial war zones like Gaza or
Baghdad, or security operations surrounding
major sporting events or political summits, as
security exemplars to be sold on through the
world’s burgeoning ‘homeland security’
markets. Through such processes of imitation, explicitly colonial models of pacification, militarization and control, honed on the
streets of Global South cities, increasingly
diffuse to the cities of capitalist heartlands in
the Global North.
International studies scholar Lorenzo
Veracini (2005) has diagnosed a dramatic
contemporary resurgence in the importation
of typically colonial tropes and techniques
into the management and development of
cities in the metropolitan cores of Europe
and North America. Such a process, he
argues, is working to gradually unravel a
‘classic and long lasting distinction between
an outer face and an inner face of the colonial
condition’.
It is important to stress, then, that the
resurgence of explicitly colonial strategies
and techniques amongst nation-states such as
the USA, UK and Israel in the contemporary
period3 involves not just the deployment of
the techniques of the new military urbanism
in foreign war zones but their diffusion
and imitation through the securitization of
Western urban life. As in the 19th century,



when European colonial nations imported
fingerprinting, panoptic prisons and Haussmannian boulevard building through neighbourhoods of insurrection to domestic cities
after first experimenting with them on colonized frontiers, colonial techniques today
operate through what Michel Foucault
(2003) termed colonial ‘boomerang effects’.4
‘It should never be forgotten’, Foucault
(2003, p. 103) argued:
‘that while colonization, with its techniques
and its political and juridical weapons,
obviously transported European models to
other continents, it also had a considerable
boomerang effect on the mechanisms of
power in the West, and on the apparatuses,
institutions, and techniques of power. A
whole series of colonial models was brought
back to the West, and the result was that the
West could practice something resembling
colonization, or an internal colonialism, on
itself.’

In the contemporary period, the military
urbanism is marked by—and indeed, constituted through—a myriad of increasingly startling Foucauldian boomerang effects. For
example, Israeli drones designed to vertically
subjugate and target Palestinians are now
routinely deployed by police forces in North
America, Europe and East Asia. Private operators of US ‘supermax’ prisons are heavily
involved in running the global archipelago
organizing incarceration and torture that has
bourgeoned since the start of the ‘war on
terror’. Private military corporations heavily
colonize ‘reconstruction’ contracts in both
Iraq and New Orleans. Israeli expertise in
population control is regularly sought by
those planning security operations for major
summits and sporting events. And ‘shoot to
kill’ policies developed to confront risks of
suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and Haifa have
been adopted by police forces in Western
cities (a process which directly led to the state
killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by
London anti-terrorist police on 22 July 2005).
Meanwhile, aggressive and militarized
policing against public demonstrations and

social mobilizations in London, Toronto,
Paris or New York now utilize the same
‘non-lethal weapons’ as Israel’s army in Gaza
or Jenin. Constructions of ‘security zones’
around the strategic financial cores of
London and New York echo the techniques
used in Baghdad’s Green Zone. And many of
the techniques used to fortify enclaves in
Baghdad or the West Bank are being sold
around the world as leading-edge and
‘combat-proven’ ‘security solutions’ by
corporate coalitions linking Israeli, US and
other companies and states.
Crucially, such boomerang effects linking
security and military doctrine in the cities of
the West with those on colonial peripheries
are backed up by the cultural geographies
which underpin the political right and farright, along with hawkish commentators
within Western militaries themselves. These
tend to deem cities per se to be intrinsically
problematic spaces—the main sites concentrating acts of subversion, resistance, mobilization, dissent and protest challenging
national security states.
Bastions of ethno-nationalist politics, the
burgeoning movements of the far right, often
heavily represented within policing and state
militaries, tend to see rural or exurban areas
as the authentic and pure spaces of white
nationalism linked to Christian traditions.
Examples here range from US Christian
Fundamentalists, through the British
National Party to Austria’s Freedom Party,
the French National Front and Italy’s Forza
Italia. The fast-growing and sprawling
cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the West’s
cities, meanwhile, are often cast by such
groups in the same Orientalist terms as the
mega-cities of the Global South, as places
radically external to the vulnerable nation—
threatening or enemy territories every bit as
foreign as Baghdad or Gaza.
Paradoxically, the imaginations of geography which underpin the new military urbanism tend to treat colonial frontiers and
Western ‘homelands’ as fundamentally separate domains—clashes of civilizations in
Samuel Huntington’s incendiary proposition


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(1998)—even as the security, military and
intelligence doctrine addressing both increasingly fuses. Such imaginations of geography
work to deny the ways in which the cities in
both domains are increasingly linked by
migration and investment flows to constitute
each other.
In rendering all mixed-up cities as problematic spaces beyond the rural or exurban
heartlands of authentic national communities, telling movements in representations of
cities occur between colonial peripheries and
capitalist heartlands. The construction of
sectarian enclaves modelled on Israeli practice by US forces in Baghdad from 2003, for
example, was widely described by US security personnel as the development of USstyle ‘gated communities’ in the country. In
the aftermath of the devastation of New
Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in late 2005,
meanwhile, US Army Officers talked of the
need to ‘take back’ the City from Iraqi-style
‘insurgents’.
As ever, then, the imaginations of urban
life in colonized zones interact powerfully
with that in the cities of the colonizers.
Indeed, the projection of colonial tropes and
security exemplars into postcolonial metropoles in capitalist heartlands is fuelled by a
new ‘inner city Orientalism’ (Howell and
Shryock, 2003). This relies on the widespread
depiction amongst rightist security or military commentators of immigrant districts
within the West’s cities as ‘backward’ zones
threatening the body politic of the Western
city and nation. In France, for example, postwar state planning worked to conceptualize
the mass, peripheral housing projects of the
banlieues as ‘near peripheral’ reservations
attached to, but distant from, the country’s
metropolitan centres (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2007). Bitter memories of the Algerian
and other anti-colonial wars saturate the
French far-right’s discourse about waning
‘white’ power and the ‘insecurity’ caused by
the banlieues—a process that has led to a
dramatic mobilization of state security forces
in and around the main immigrant housing
complexes.

Discussing the shift from external to internal colonization in France, Kristin Ross
(1996) points to the way in which France
now ‘distances itself from its (former) colonies, both within and without’. This functions, she continues, through a ‘great
cordoning off of the immigrants, their
removal to the suburbs in a massive reworking of the social boundaries of Paris and
other French cities’ (Ross, 1996, p. 12). The
2005 riots were only the latest in a long line
of reactions towards the increasing militarization and securitization of this form of
internal colonization and enforced peripherality within what Mustafa Dikeç (2007) has
called the ‘badlands’ of the contemporary
French Republic.5
Indeed, such is the contemporary right’s
conflation of terrorism and migration that
simple acts of migration are now often being
deemed to be little more than acts of warfare.
This discursive shift has been termed the
‘weaponization’ of migration (Cato, 2008)—
the shift away from emphases on moral obligations to offer hospitality to refugees
toward criminalizing or dehumanizing
migrants’ bodies as weapons against purportedly homogenous and ethno-nationalist
bases of national power.
Here the latest debates about ‘asymmetric’,
‘irregular’ or ‘low intensity war’, where
nothing can be defined outside of boundless
and never-ending definitions of political
violence, blur uncomfortably into the growing clamour of demonization by right and
far-right commentators of the West’s
diasporic and increasingly cosmopolitan
cities. Samuel Huntington (2005), taking his
‘clash of civilizations’ thesis (1998) further,
now argues that the very fabric of US power
and national identity is under threat not just
because of global Islamist terrorism but
because non-white and especially Latino
groups are colonizing, and dominating, US
metropolitan areas.
Adopting such Manichean imaginations of
the world, US military theorist William Lind
(2004) has argued that prosaic acts of immigration from the Global South to the North’s


cities must now be understood as acts of
warfare. ‘In Fourth Generation war’, Lind
writes, ‘invasion by immigration can be at
least as dangerous as invasion by a state
army.’ Under what he calls the ‘poisonous
ideology of multiculturalism’, Lind argues
that migrants within Western nations can
now launch ‘a homegrown variety of Fourth
Generation war, which is by far the most
dangerous kind’.
Given the two-way movement of the
exemplars of the new military urbanism
between Western cities and those on colonial
frontiers, fuelled by the instinctive antiurbanism of national security states, it is no
surprise that cities in both domains are starting to display startling similarities as well
as their more obvious differences. In both,
hard, military-style borders, fences and
checkpoints around defended enclaves and
‘security zones’, superimposed on the
wider and more open city, are proliferating.
Jersey-barrier blast walls, identity checkpoints, computerized CCTV, biometric
surveillance and military styles of access
control protect archipelagos of fortified
enclaves from an outside deemed unruly,
impoverished or dangerous. In the former
case, these encompass green zones, war prisons, ethnic and sectarian neighbourhoods
and military bases; in the latter they are
growing around strategic financial districts,
embassy zones, tourist spaces, airport and
port complexes, sport event spaces, gated
communities and export processing zones.
In both domains, efforts to identify urban
populations are linked with similar systems
of surveillance, tracking and targeting
dangerous bodies amidst the mass of urban
life. We thus see parallel deployments of
high-tech satellites, drones, ‘intelligent’
closed circuit TV, ‘non-lethal’ weaponry and
biometric surveillance in the very different
contexts of cities at home and abroad. And in
both domains, finally, there is a similar sense
that new doctrines of perpetual war are being
used to permanently treat all urban residents
as perpetual targets whose benign nature,
rather than being assumed, now needs to be

continually demonstrated to complex architectures of surveillance or data mining as the
subject moves around the city. Such moves
are backed by parallel legal suspensions
targeting groups deemed threatening with
special restrictions, pre-emptive arrests or a
priori incarceration within globe-straddling
extra-legal torture camps and gulags.
Whilst these various archipelagos of
enclaves function in a wide variety of ways
they are similar in that they replace urban
traditions of open access with security
systems that force people to prove legitimacy
as they gain access. Urban theorists and
philosophers now wonder whether the
possibilities of the city as a key political
foundation for dissent and collective mobilization within civil society are being replaced
by complex geographies made up of various
systems of enclaves and camps which link
together whilst withdrawing from the urban
outside beyond the walls or access-control
systems (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Diken
and Laustsen, 2005, p. 64). In such a context
one wonders whether urban securitization
might reach a level in the future which
would effectively decouple the strategic
economic role of cities as drivers of capital
accumulation from their historic role as
centres for the mobilization of democratic
dissent.

Surveillant economy
‘What used to be one among several decisive
measures of public administration until the
first half of the twentieth century [security],
now becomes the sole criterion of political
legitimation.’ (Agamben, 2002, pp. 1–2)

Turning to the new military urbanism’s third
pillar—its political economy—it is important
to stress that the colonization of urban thinking and practice by militarized ideas of ‘security’ does not have a single source. In fact, it
emanates from a complex range of sources.
These encompass sprawling, transnational
industrial complexes fusing military and


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security companies with technology, surveillance and entertainment ones; a wide range of
consultants and industries who sell ‘security’
solutions as silver bullets to complex social
problems; and a complex mass of security
and military thinkers who now argue that
war and political violence centres overwhelmingly on the everyday spaces and
circuits of urban life cities.
As vague and all-encompassing ideas about
‘security’ creep to infect virtually all aspects
of public policy and social life (Agamben,
2002), so these emerging industrial–security
complexes work together on the highly lucrative challenges of perpetually targeting everyday activities, spaces and behaviours in cities
and the circulations which link them together.
The proliferation of wars sustaining permanent mobilization and pre-emptive, ubiquitous surveillance within and beyond territorial
borders means that the imperative of ‘security’
now ‘imposes itself of the basic principle of
state activity’ (Agamben, 2002, pp. 1–2).
Amidst global economic collapse, markets
for ‘security’ services and technologies,
which overlay military-style systems of
command, control and targeting over the
everyday spaces and systems of civilian life,
are booming like never before. It is no accident that security–industrial complexes blossom in parallel with the diffusion of market
fundamentalist notions of organizing social,
economic and political life. The hyperinequalities and urban militarization and
securitization sustained by neoliberalization
are mutually reinforcing. In a discussion of
the US state’s response to the Katrina disaster, Henry Giroux (2006, p. 172) points out
that the normalization of market fundamentalism in US culture has made it much more
‘difficult to translate private woes into social
issues and collective action or to insist on a
language of the public good’. He argues that
‘the evisceration of all notions of sociality’ in
this case has led to ‘a sense of total abandonment, resulting in fear, anxiety, and insecurity over one’s future’.
‘International expenditure on homeland
security now surpasses established enterprises

like movie-making and the music industry in
annual revenues’ (Economic Times, 2007).
Homeland Security Research Corp. point
out that ‘the worldwide “total defense”
outlay (military, intelligence community, and
Homeland Security/Homeland Defense) is
forecasted to grow by approximately 50%,
from $1,400 billion in 2006 to $2,054 billion
by 2015’. By 2005, US defence expenditure
alone had reached $420 billion a year—
comparable to the rest of the world combined.
Over a quarter of this was devoted to purchasing services from a rapidly expanding market
of private military corporations. By 2010,
such mercenary groups are in line to receive a
staggering $202 billion from the US state alone
(Schreier and Caparini, 2005).
Meanwhile, worldwide ‘Homeland Security’ spending outlay is forecasted to grow by
nearly 100%, from $231 billion in 2006 to
$518 billion by 2015. ‘Where the homeland
security outlay was 12% of the world’s total
defence outlay in 2003, it is expected to
become 25% of the total defence outlay by
2015.’6 Even more meteoric growth is
expected in some of the key sectors of the
new control technologies. Global markets in
biometric technology, for example, are
expected to increase from the small base of
$1.5 billion in 2005 to $5.7 billion by 2010.7
Crucially, as the Raytheon example
demonstrates, the same constellations of
‘security’ companies are often involved in
selling, establishing and operating the techniques and practices of the new military
urbanism in both war-zone and ‘homeland’
cities. Often, as with the EU’s new security
policies, states or supranational blocks are
bringing in high-tech and militarized means
of tracking illegal immigrants not because
they are necessarily the best means of addressing their security concerns but because such
policies might help stimulate their defence,
security or technology companies to compete
in booming global markets for security
technology. Moreover, Israeli experience in
locking down its cities whilst turning the
Occupied Territories into permanent, urban
prison camps, is proving especially influential


as a source of ‘combat proven’ exemplars to be
imitated around the world (Klein, 2007). The
new high-tech border fence between the USA
and Mexico, for example, is being built by a
consortium linking Boeing to the Israeli
company Elbit whose radar and targeting
technologies have been honed in the permanent lock-down of Palestinian urban life into
highly militarized enclaves (Catterall, 2009).
It is also startling how much US counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq have explicitly been
based on efforts to effectively scale-up Israeli
treatment of the Palestinians during the
second Intifada.
The political economies sustaining the
new military urbanism inevitably centre on
cities as the main production centres of
neoliberal capitalism as well as the main
arenas and markets for rolling out new security ‘solutions’. The world’s major financial
centres, in particular, orchestrate global
processes of militarization and securitization. They house the headquarters of global
security, technology and military corporations, provide the locations for the world’s
biggest technological corporate universities,
which dominate research and development
in new security technologies and support the
global network of financial institutions
which so often work to violently erase or
appropriate cities and resources in colonized
lands in the name of neoliberal economics
and ‘free trade’.
The network of so-called ‘global cities’
through which neoliberal capitalism is
orchestrated—London, New York, Paris,
Frankfurt and so on—thus helps to directly
produce new logics of aggressive colonial
acquisition and dispossession by multinational capital working closely with state militaries and private military operators.
With the easing of state monopolies on
violence, and the proliferation of acquisitive
private military and mercenary corporations,
so the brutal ‘Urbicidal’ violence and dispossession that so often helps bolster the parasitic
aspects of Western city economies, and
feeds contemporary corporate capitalism,
is more apparent than ever (Kipfer and

Goonewardena, 2007). In a world increasingly
haunted by the spectre of imminent resource
exhaustion, the new military urbanism is
also linked intimately with the neo-colonial
exploitation of distant resources to try and
sustain richer cities and urban lifestyles. New
York and London provide the financial
and corporate power through which Iraqi
oil reserves have been reappropriated by
Western oil companies since the 2003 invasion.
Neo-colonial land-grabs to grow biofuels for
cars or future food for increasingly precarious
urban populations of the rich North in the
poor countries of the Global South are also
organized through global commodity markets
centred on the world’s major financial cities.
Finally, the rapid global growth in markets for
high-tech security is itself providing a major
boost to global financial cities in times of
global economic meltdown.

Urban Achilles
‘If you want to destroy someone nowadays,
you go after their infrastructure.’ (Agre,
2001, p. 1)

As I have detailed in a previous article for
City (Graham, 2005), the new military
urbanism’s penultimate pillar rests on the
way that the everyday architectures and
infrastructures of cities—the structures and
mechanisms that support modern urban
life—are now being appropriated by state
militaries and non-state fighters as primary
means of waging war and amplifying political violence. The very conditions of the
modern, globalized city—its reliance on
dense webs of infrastructure, its density and
anonymity, its dependence on imported
water, food and energy—thus create the
possibilities of violence against it, and,
crucially, through it. The intensively
networked and distanciated nature of
contemporary urbanism provides the Achilles heel when the everyday sites and spaces of
cities are transformed into the key
‘battlespaces’ of ‘asymmetric’ or ‘irregular


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warfare’. Urban everyday life everywhere is
thus stalked by ambient threats of interruption operating through webs of infrastructure: the blackout, the gridlock, the severed
connection, the technical malfunction, the
inhibited flow, the network unavailable sign.
The potential for catastrophic violence
against cities and urban life has changed in
parallel with the shift of urban life towards
ever-greater reliance on modern infrastructures. The result of this is that the everyday
infrastructures of urban life—highways,
metro trains, computer networks, water and
sanitation systems, electricity grids, airliners—may be easily assaulted and turned into
agents either of instantaneous terror, debilitating disruption, even demodernization.
Increasingly, then, in high-tech societies
dominated by socially abstract interconnections and circulations, both high-tech
warfare and terrorism ‘targets the means of
life, not combatants’ (Hinkson, 2005, pp.
145–146). As John Robb (2007) puts it:
‘most of the networks that we rely on for city
life—communications, electricity,
transportation, water—are extremely
vulnerable to intentional disruptions. In
practice, this means that a very small number
of attacks on the critical hubs of an
[infrastructure] network can collapse the
entire network.’

Many recent examples demonstrate how
non-state actors now gain much of their
power by appropriating the technical infrastructure necessary to sustain modern,
globalized urban life in order to project, and
massively amplify, the power of their political violence. Insurgents use the city’s infrastructure to attack New York, London,
Madrid or Mumbai. Insurgents disrupt electricity networks, oil pipelines or mobile
phone systems in Iraq, Nigeria and elsewhere. Somali pirates systematically hijacking global shipping routes have even been
shown to be using ‘spies’ in London’s shipping brokers to provide intelligence for their
attacks. In doing so, such actors can get by
with the most basic of weapons, transforming

airliners, metro trains, cars, mobile phones,
electricity and communications grids, or
small boats, into deadly devices.
However, such threats of ‘infrastructural
terrorism’, while very real and important,
pale beside the much less visible efforts of
state militaries to target the essential infrastructure that makes modern urban life
possible. The US and Israeli forces, for example, have long worked to systematically
‘demodernize’ entire urban societies through
the destruction of the life-support and infrastructure systems of Gaza, the West Bank,
Lebanon or Iraq since 1991. States have thus
replaced total war against cities with the
systematic destruction of water and electricity systems with weapons—such as bombs
which rain down millions of graphite spools
to short-circuit electricity stations—designed
especially for this task.
Ostensibly means of bringing unbearable
political pressure on adversary regimes, such
purportedly ‘humanitarian’ modes of war
end up killing the sick, the ill and the old
almost as effectively as carpet bombing, but
beyond the capricious gaze of the media.
Such wars on public health are engineered
through the deliberate generation of public
health crises in highly urbanized societies
where no infrastructural alternatives to
modern water, sewerage, power, medical and
food supplies exist.
The devastating Israeli siege of Gaza since
Hamas were elected there in 2006 is another
powerful example here. This has transformed
a dense urban corridor, with 1.5 million
people squeezed into an area the size of the
Isle of Wight, into a vast prison camp. Within
this the weak, the old, the young and sick die
invisibly in startling numbers beyond the
capricious gaze of the mainstream media.
Everyone else is forced to live something
approaching what Georgio Agamben (1998)
has called ‘bare life’—a biological existence
which can be sacrificed at any time by a
colonial power which maintains the right to
kill with impunity but has withdrawn all
moral, political or human responsibilities for
the population.


Increasingly, such formal ‘infrastructural
war’, based on the severing of the lines of
supply which continually work to bring
modern urban life into its very existence as a
means of political coercion, blurs seamlessly
into economic competition and energy
geopolitics. Putin’s resurgent Russia, for
example, these days gains much of its strategic power not through formal military
deployments but by its continued threats to
switch off the energy supplies of Europe’s
cities at a stroke.
The systematic demodernization of highly
urbanized societies through air power is
justified by ‘air power theory’, which exists
as the dark shadow of long-discredited
modernization theory. This suggests that
societal ‘progress’ can be reversed, pushing
societies ‘back’ towards increasingly primitive states. Thomas Friedman, for example,
deployed such arguments as NATO cranked
up its bombing campaign against Serbia in
1999. Picking up a variety of historic dates
that could be the future destiny of Serbian
society, post bombing, Friedman urged that
all of the movements and mobilities sustaining urban life in Serbian cities should be
brought to a grinding halt. ‘It should be
lights out in Belgrade’, he said. ‘Every power
grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related
factory has to be targeted […]. We will set
your country back by pulverizing you. You
want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389?
We can do that, too!’ (cited in Skoric, 1999).
In Friedman’s scenario, the precise reversal
of time that the adversary society is to be
bombed ‘back’ through is presumably a
matter merely of the correct weapon and
target selection.
The politics of seeing the bombing of infrastructure as a form of reversed modernization
plays a much wider discursive role. It also
does much to sustain and bolster the longstanding depiction of countries deemed ‘less
developed’, along some putatively linear line
of modernization, as pathologically backward, intrinsically barbarian, unmodern, even
savage. Aerial bombing aimed at demodernization thus works to reinforce Orientalist

imaginations which relegate ‘the “savage”,
colonized target population to an “other”
time and space’ (Deer, 2007, p. 3). Indeed,
Nils Gilman (2003, p. 199) has argued that, ‘as
long as modernization was conceived as a
unitary and unidirectional process of
economic expansion’, it would be possible to
explain backwardness and insurgency ‘only
in terms of deviance and pathology’.
At its heart, then, the systematic demodernization of whole societies in the name of
‘fighting terror’ involves a darkly ironic and
self-fulfilling prophecy. As Derek Gregory
(2004) has argued, drawing on Georgio
Agamben’s ideas (1998), the demodernization of entire Middle Eastern cities and societies, through both the Israeli wars against
Lebanon and the Palestinians, and the US
‘war on terror’, are both fuelled by similar
‘Orientalist’ discourses. These revivify longstanding tropes and work by ‘casting out’
ordinary civilians and their cities—whether
they be in Kabul, Baghdad or Nablus—‘so
that they are placed beyond the privileges
and protections of the law so that their lives
(and deaths) [are] rendered of no account’
(Gregory, 2003, p. 311). Here, then, beyond
the increasingly fortified homeland, ‘sovereignty works by abandoning subjects, reducing them to bare life’ (Diken and Laustsen,
2002, original emphasis).

Citizen-soldiers
‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic
culminate in one thing—war.’ (Benjamin,
1968, p. 241)8

The final key pillar sustaining the new military urbanism is the way it gains much of its
power and legitimacy by fusing seamlessly
with militarized veins of popular, urban and
material culture. Very often, for example,
military ideas of tracking, surveillance and
targeting do not require completely new
systems. Instead, they simply appropriate the
systems of high-tech consumption that have
been laid out within and through cities to


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sustain the latest means of digitally organized
travel and consumption. Thus, as in central
London, congestion-charging zones thus
quickly morph into ‘security’ zones. Internet
interactions and transactions provide the
basis for ‘data mining’ to root out supposedly threatening behaviours. Dreams of
‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ cars blur with those
of robotic weapons systems. Satellite imagery
and GPS support new styles of civilian urban
life as well as ‘precision’ urban bombing.
And, as in the new security initiative in
Lower Manhattan, CCTV cameras designed
to make shoppers feel secure are transformed
into ‘anti-terrorist’ screens.
Perhaps the most powerful series of civilian–military crossovers at the heart of the new
military urbanism, however, are being forged
within cultures of virtual and electronic entertainment and corporate news. Here, to tempt
in the nimble-fingered recruits best able to
control the latest high-tech drones and weaponry, the US military produces some of the
most popular urban warfare consumer video
games. Highly successful games like the US
Army’s America’s Army or US Marines’ Full
Spectrum Warrior9 allow players to slay
‘terrorists’ in fictionalized and Orientalized
cities in frameworks based directly on those
of the US military’s own training systems.
The main purpose of these games,
however, is public relations: they are a
powerful and extremely cost-effective means
of recruitment. ‘Because the Pentagon
spends around $15,000 on average wooing
each recruit, the game needs only to result in
300 enlistments per year to recoup costs’
(Stahl, 2006, p. 123). Forty per cent of those
who join the Army have previously played
the game (Stahl, 2006, p. 123). The game also
provides the basis for a sophisticated surveillance system through which Army recruitment efforts are directed and targeted. In the
marketing speak of its military developers,
America’s Army is designed to reach the
substantial overlap in ‘population between
the gaming population & the army’s target
recruiting segments’. It addresses ‘tech-savvy
audiences and afford the army a unique,

strategic communication advantage’ (Lenoir,
n.d.).
To close the circle between virtual entertainment and virtual killing, control panels
for the latest US weapons systems—such as
the latest control stations for ‘pilots’ or
armed Predator drones, manufactured by our
old friends Raytheon (see Figure 1(b))—now
directly imitate the consoles of Playstation2s,
which are, after all, most familiar to recruits.
The newest Predator control systems from
Raytheon—leading manufacturer of assassination drones as well as key player in the
UK’s E-borders consortium—deliberately
use the ‘same HOTAS [hands on stick and
throttle] system on a [ ] video game’.
Raytheon’s UAV designer argues that
‘there’s no point in re-inventing the wheel.
The current generation of pilots was raised
on the [Sony] Playstation, so we created an
interface that they will immediately understand’ (Richfield, 2006). Added to this, many
of the latest video games actually depict the
very same armed drones as those used in
assassination raids by US forces.10
Wired magazine, talking to one Predator
‘pilot’, Private Joe Clark, about this experience directing drone assassinations from a
virtual reality ‘cave’ on the edge of Las Vegas,
points out that he has, in a sense ‘been prepping for the job since he was a kid: He plays
videogames. A lot of videogames. Back in the
barracks he spends downtime with an Xbox
and a PlayStation.’ After his training, ‘when
he first slid behind the controls of a Shadow
[Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] UAV, the point
and click operation turned out to work much
the same way. “You watch the screen. You
tell it to roll left, it rolls left. It’s pretty
simple”’, Clark says (Shachtman, 2005).
Projecting such trends, Bryan Finoki speculates about a near-future where ‘video
games become the ultimate interface for
conducting real life warfare’, as virtual reality
simulators used in video gaming converge
completely with those used in military training and exercises. Finoki takes the video
game-like existence of the Las Vegas Predator
‘pilots’, with their Playstation-style controls


as his starting point. He speculates, only half
ironically, whether future video gamers could
‘become decorated war heroes by virtue of
their eye-and-hand coordination skills,
which would eventually dominate the triggers of network-centric remote controlled
warfare?’11
A final vital circuit of militarization linking
urban and popular culture in domestic cities
to colonial violence in occupied ones centres
on the militarization of car culture. This
particular link is most powerfully symbolized
by the rise of explicitly militarized Sports
Utility Vehicles, especially in the USA
(Mendietta, 2005). The rise and fall of the
Hummer is an especially pivotal example
here. Here, US military vehicles for urban
warfare have been directly modified as hyperaggressive civilian vehicles marketed as patriotic embodiments of the ‘war on terror’.
‘With names like Tracker, Equinox,
Freestyle, Escape, Defender, Trail Blazer,
Navigator, Pathfinder, and Warrior,’ David
Campbell (2005, p. 958) writes, ‘SUVs populate the crowded urban routes of daily life
with representations of the militarized frontier.’ Crucial here are the ways in which militarized urban automobile cultures help to
materialize and territorialize the separation
of the domestic city lying ‘inside’ the ‘homespace’ of the US or Western nation or city,
from the ‘borderlands’ cursed with the ongoing resource wars surrounding oil exploitation. Such borderlands, Campbell (2005,
p. 945) continues, ‘are conventionally understood as distant, wild places of insecurity
where foreign intervention will be necessary
to ensure domestic interests are secured’. Far
from enriching local populations, dominant
means of organizing exploitation and
pipelines actually work to further marginalize impoverished indigenous communities,
ratcheting up insecurity and violence in the
process. The destiny of such people and
places is thus violently ‘subsumed by the
privilege accorded a resource (oil) that is
central to the American way of life, the security of which is regarded as a fundamental
strategic issue’ (Campbell, 2005, p. 945).

Synoptic politics
‘The city [is] not just the site, but the very
medium of warfare—a flexible, almost liquid
medium that is forever contingent and in
flux.’ (Weizman, 2005, p. 53)

The power of the new military urbanism
thesis is that it forces together sites and
circuits of militarization that are usually
scrutinized in isolation. It achieves this,
moreover, by attending to the visceral and
material transformations across everyday
urban life rather than the abstractions of
geopolitics and international relations.
Finally, it attends to the fundamental connections in the contemporary world between
cities and urbanization on the one hand and
questions of state and non-state political
violence on the other.
In encompassing the ways in which technophiliac dreams of control and omniscience
blend with Foucauldian boomerang effects,
political economies of ‘security’, projections
of political violence through the infrastructural circuits of cities, and the militarization
of popular, electronic, material and automobile culture, the new military urbanism thesis
reveals with unprecedented clarity how
pernicious circuits of militarization operate
across a broad swathe. The ways in which the
new military urbanism works to colonize the
everyday spaces and sites of city life, under
all-embracing paradigms that project life
itself to be little but war, and within a boundless and unending ‘battlespace’, emerge
starkly.
Many contemporary military and ‘security’ theories and doctrines now conclude
that ‘war’ is now ‘everywhere and everything. It is large and small. It has no boundaries in time and space. Life itself is war’
(Agre, 2001). Working though xenophobic
and deeply anti-urban views of the world,
which continuously telescope between
conventional North–South binaries, such
perspectives see the world through technophiliac cross-hairs; they automatically translate difference into othering, othering into


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targeting, and targeting into violence. Such
logics, moreover, have been shown to be
constituted through circuits of popular
culture, from car culture to video games, film
and science fiction, through to the deepening
crossovers between war, entertainment and
weapon design. What emerges is a stark challenge to all those concerned with the right to
the city, and the future of democratic urban
life, at the start of this quintessentially urban
century. For the challenge now is to forge
a synoptic and multifaceted politics, which
itself embraces highly fluid new media
technologies and telescopes across global
North–South divides, to systematically erode
the key pillars of the new military urbanism.
Such a politics, though, must engage first
with the ways in which ideas of an ‘urban
public domain’ must move beyond traditional
notions that they encompass both media
content and geographical spaces exempt from
proprietary control which combine to ‘form
our common aesthetic, cultural and intellectual landscape’ (Zimmermann, 2007). Rather
than permanent, protected zones of urbanity
or ‘publicness’, organized hierarchically by
key gatekeepers, transnational urban life is
now characterized by constantly emerging
public domains which are highly fluid, pluralized and organized by interaction between
many producers and consumers (Zimmermann, 2007). The new public domains,
through which challenges to the new military
urbanism can be sustained, must forge collaborations and connections across distance and
difference. They must materialize new
publics, and create new countergeographic
spaces. Ironically, they must use the very same
media and control technologies that the militaries, and the transnational architecture of
security states, are using so perniciously in
their attempts to pre-emptively lock-down
democratic politics (Zimmermann, 2007).
Notes
1

1 Major David Pendall (2004) of the US Army writes
that ‘friendly cyber or virtual operations live on the
same networks and systems as adversaries’

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

10
10

11
11

networks and systems. In most cases, both use the
same protocols, infrastructures, and platforms. They
can quickly turn any space into a battlespace.’
See http://www.northcom.mil/
See Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present, Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004; David Harvey, The New
Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
On the panopticon, see Mitchell (2000). On
Hausmannian planning, see Weizman (2003).
And on fingerprinting, see Sengoopta (2003).
See also Ross (1996, pp. 151–155).
Source: Homeland Security Research Corp., 2007,
at www.photonicsleadership.org.uk/files/
MarketResearch_DefenceSecurity.doc
Source: Homeland Security Research Corp., 2007,
at www.photonicsleadership.org.uk/
Thanks to Marcus Power for this reference.
See http://www.americasarmy.com/ and http://
www.fullspectrumwarrior.com/ respectively.
One example here is the game, Battlefield 2, see
Quilty-Harper (2006).
See ‘War Room’, Subtopia Blog, 20 May 2006, at
http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2006/05/warroom_20.html

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Stephen Graham is Professor of Human
Geography at the University of Durham.
Email: s.d.n.graham@durham.ac.uk

CITY
December
0
400000
13
Taylor and (print)/1470-3629 (online)
2009 & Francis
Original Article
1360-48132009
City
10.1080/ Francis
CCIT_A_GN156975.sgm

VOLUME 13

NUMBER 4

DECEMBER 2009

EDITORIAL

379

Articles
CITIES AS BATTLESPACE: THE NEW MILITARY URBANISM
Stephen Graham

383

TRANSPARENT CITIES: RE-SHAPING THE URBAN EXPERIENCE THROUGH INTERACTIVE

VIDEO GAME SIMULATION

Rowland Atkinson and Paul Willis

403

NEO-URBANISM IN THE MAKING UNDER CHINA’S MARKET TRANSITION
Fulong Wu

418

PROBING THE SYMPTOMATIC SILENCES OF MIDDLE-CLASS SETTLEMENT: A CASE STUDY
GLASGOW
Kirsteen Paton

432

URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND SMALL PLACES: SLOW CITIES AS SITES OF ACTIVISM
Sarah Pink

451

‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’: background and comments
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

466

PETER MARCUSE AND THE ‘RIGHT TO THE CITY’: INTRODUCTION TO THE KEYNOTE
PETER MARCUSE
Bruno Flierl

471

RESCUING THE ‘RIGHT TO THE CITY’
Martin Woessner

474

THE NEW MIKADO? TOM SLATER, GENTRIFICATION AND DISPLACEMENT
Chris Hamnett

476

CITIES FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR PROFIT—FROM A RADICAL-LIBERTARIAN AND
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE
Marcelo Lopes de Souza

483

CITIES AFTER OIL (ONE MORE TIME)
Adrian Atkinson

493

OF GENTRIFICATION PROCESSES IN

LECTURE BY

499

Scenes & Sounds
CHICAGO FADE: PUTTING THE RESEARCHER’S BODY BACK INTO PLAY
Loïc Wacquant


Debates
THE BANTUSTAN SUBLIME: REFRAMING THE COLONIAL IN RAMALLAH
Nasser Abourahme

510

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

Volume Content and Author Index

551

Graham, Stephen. "Cities as battlespace: the new military urbanism." City 13.4 (2009): 383-402.

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