Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
Stephen Graham (Verso, 2010)
Hardback, £20.
388 pp, 978-1844673155
Reviewed by Jonny Lowndes
Last winter I was briefly detained in a small windowless room
behind the immigration control counters at New York's John
F. Kennedy airport. I and the other objects of suspicion sat on
office chairs, facing a tall Perspex counter and immigration officers.
The light is low and the ceiling is lower, almost brushing
the officers' hats. The officers, and the room in general, are built
for intimidation as much as efficiency: handguns seem to outnumber
pens. On the chair next to me sat a small Mexican boy
dressed entirely in camouflage, clutching a bright red stuffed
automatic pistol. When he shouted 'Bang! Bang!' all the armed
clerks smiled at him.
Stephen Graham would understand their approval. His three
books about the city have explored spaces in which structures
are ideological as much as physical. Cities Under Siege: The New
Military Urbanism describes 'the idea that new military ideologies
of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying
the militarization of urban life.'(p. 60) By 'urban life' Graham
chiefly means the life of Western cities: London and New
York provide most of his examples; by 'militarization' he means
a process both political and cultural. Policemen have become
soldiers, using Kratos tactics and espionage on their citizens.
Architects and journalists have enlisted too, building bastions
out of cement and ornamental features (with the Ring of Steel,
profiled in this issue) or out of rhetoric: the phrases 'war on terror',
'war on crime' position a transgression of the law as an act
of war, thus legitimising the soldiering of the police.
Graham also examines the changing conception of the
frontier. When cities were states, a bastion and a frontier were
similar in concept. A border crossing was de facto an act of
aggression. Now the bastions are porous: as Paul Andreu says, 'National borders have ceased being continuous lines on the
earth's surface and [have] become non-related sets of lines and
points situated within each country'. The border points - airports,
train stations, Internet servers, financial exchanges - are
vital organs of the city, and border crossings are essential to a
city's life. This makes them highly vulnerable: Graham writes
'war and political violence centre overwhelmingly on the
everyday spaces and circuits of urban life.' (p. xxii) In the age
of king-worship one attacked a king; the modern way to attack
a polity is through public terror, which means attacking the
public places.
In explaining how these public places have been constructed
Graham draws a narrative line from Haussmannised Paris, with
wide boulevards for battalions to march down and trample
rioters, through the American twentieth century (who knew the
American interstate highway system was originally conceived to
facilitate military mobilization in the event of nuclear war?) to
the present, in which 'the architectures of globalization merge
seamlessly into the architecture of control and warfare' (p. 78).
Put in context like this, it is tempting to accept the militarization
of the city as a necessary reaction to the urban guerrilla.
Bombers must be apprehended, and a focus on defence feels
more secure than a focus on crime prevention. Graham, though,
outlines two problems with the current situation: that in its
Manichaean paranoia it is clumsy in identifying terror, as opposed
to legitimate dissent; and that it seems to be motivated at
least in part by lust for money.
London is the urban Panopticon: it has more CCTV cameras
than any city. CCTV is cheap and reassuringly visible, but it is
a meagre asset in the prevention of terrorism (comprehensive
footage of the July 2007 attacks reportedly took three months
to assemble). Graham condemns CCTV as toothless, and he
is unlucky in his timing: published in March 2010, the book
cannot comment on the successful use of CCTV in apprehending
rioters in August 2011. But apprehension is not defence,
and a camera cannot tell you what a subject is about to do
- unless you use paranoia and prejudice as your pointers. 'All
human subjects are...increasingly rendered as real or potential
fighters' (p. 16), and research continues on 'smart CCTV' that
will automatically recognise 'abnormal' behaviour. Criteria for
abnormality are as yet unclear, and will doubtless not be subject
to popular vote, but they will identify and instantly exile anyone
who fails to justify his status as a legitimate citizen.
This book suspects the criteria for normality will have something
to do with money. Denmark has five thousand private
security employees. The UK has over two hundred thousand,
and 'castles, walled cities, and extensive border battlements have
been replaced by gated communities, expansive border zones,
and management by "remote control"' (p. 99). Private security
employees have a direct responsibility, in making security decisions,
for their paying clients, which means their criteria cannot
but be linked with finance. Fair enough; but the Ring of Steel
is publicly funded and maintained, at the behest of financial
corporations who threatened to leave London if their security
could not be maintained. Street furniture is designed to be uncomfortable
for the homeless; the hawking tolerated in Brixton
is anathema in Moorgate; systems such as the Ring of Steel are
designed to be invisible, to cosset the unwashed and keep them
docile as it excludes them. For the defence of a city to be in
private hands is disturbing - for the public coffers to bankroll a
corporate security effort is queasy-making.
The polemical nature of this book leads to some drawbacks.
The large number of footnotes hints at a blanket-bombing approach,
tiring after almost four hundred pages. Some sentences
are as brutal to the ear as a Kratos-trained baton. And Graham
isn't wholly convincing in tying the militarization of city centres
to atavistic colonialism: he writes 'colonial geographies characteristic
of the contemporary era umbilically connect cities
within metropolitan cores and colonial peripheries' (p. xvii), and
it's less than clear whether umbilicality is a good or a bad thing
in itself.
But this is a timely book. Graham reveals the military apparatus
of the modern London as 'security theater' that sells us quietus
at the price of civil liberty. Dress rehearsals for this show
have often taken place at Olympic Games, where local police
forces have tested techniques and tactics which then made their
way into everyday policing. And walkways in the Olympic villages,
currently being polished up, have been designed with the
physics of explosions in mind as much as the free movement
of citizens. In 2012 a Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer will dock
at Greenwich to protect London's skies from attack during
the Olympics. The US Navy are reported to want their own
destroyer by its side. It is difficult not to identify the Thames
with the Rubicon.
About the author
Jonathan Lowndes is a poet and travel
writer whose work has appeared in journals
in the United Kingdom and the United
States. He has lived in North, South, East
and West London and now lives in New
York City.
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