Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism - Stephen Graham (Verso, Uk, 2011)

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

by Stephen Graham

A powerful exposé of how political violence operates through the spaces of urban life.

Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, Cities Under Siege traces the spread of political violence through the sites, spaces, infrastructure and symbols of the world’s rapidly expanding metropolitan areas. 

Drawing on a wealth of original research, Stephen Graham shows how Western militaries and security forces now perceive all urban terrain as a conflict zone inhabited by lurking shadow enemies. Urban inhabitants have become targets that need to be continually tracked, scanned and controlled. Graham examines the transformation of Western armies into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces. He looks at the militarization and surveillance of international borders, the use of ‘security’ concerns to suppress democratic dissent, and the enacting of legislation to suspend civilian law. In doing so, he reveals how the New Military Urbanism permeates the entire fabric of urban life, from subway and transport networks hardwired with high-tech ‘command and control’ systems to the insidious militarization of a popular culture corrupted by the all-pervasive discourse of ‘terrorism.’

The new urban militarism of law enforcement: interview with Stephen Graham

Last week, Stephen Graham sat down with WBEZ 91.5 in Chicago to talk about the new and increasingly militarized forms of law enforcement that are fast becoming the norm throughout the West. Drawing from his new book on the topic, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, he addresses this rapid transformation and critically examines both the subtler and more familiarly overt modes of social control and surveillance that are being put to use in troubling ways. In the interview, Graham touches on these new modes of enforcement and considers how they are used to subdue dissent and criminalize behaviour, among other things. With new technologies and invocations of “security concerns,” these are now becoming a part of our urban landscape and are being used in everything from the increased policing of borders and crowds to the surveillance of public space and police crackdowns. As Graham suggests, it is part of larger, discomforting trends that are changing the way people live and move within cities. 

Please visit WBEZ to listen to the interview in full.

• “Cities Under Siege is a detailed and intense forensics of new urban frontiers, laboratories of the extreme where experiments with new urban conditions are currently being undertaken. In this fascinating new work Steven Graham has created a novel concept of the city, looking at war as the limit condition of urbanity and calling for an alternative urban life yet to come.”
  – Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land
• “Roll over Jane Jacobs: here’s urban geography as it looks like through the eye of a Predator at 25,000 feet. A fundamental and very scary report from the global red zone.”
  – Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
• “A brilliant critique of the deadly embrace of military violence and contemporary urbanism. Steve Graham writes with immense power and lucidity, layering detail over detail and image over image to expose the shadows that are falling across cities around the world. This is not a dystopian future but the present, and Graham compels us to open our eyes to the dangers military urbanism poses to contemporary democracy.”
  – Derek Gregory, Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia and author of The Colonial Present
  Read more on Verso website