Graham, Stephen. "Postmortem city: Towards an urban geopolitics." City 8.2 (2004): 165-196. APA

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/04/020165-32 © 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1360481042000242148

CITY, VOL. 8, NO. 2, JULY 2004

Postmortem cityTowards an urban geopolitics1

Stephen Graham

We tend to see contemporary cities through a peace-time lens and war as somehowexceptional. In this ambitious paper, long in historical range and global in geographical scope,Steve Graham unmasks and displays the very many ways in which warfare is intimatelywoven into the fabric of cities and practices of city planners. He draws out the aggressionwhich we should see as the counterpart of the defensive fortifications of historic towns,continues with the re-structuring—often itself violent— of Paris and of many other cities toenable the oppressive state forces to patrol and subordinate the feared masses. Otherexamples take us through the fear of aerial bombardment as an influence on Le Corbusierand modernist urban design to the meticulous planners who devised and monitored theslaughter in Dresden, Tokyo and other targets in World War 2. Later episodes, some drawingon previously classified material, show how military thinking conditioned urbanisation in theCold War and does so in the multiple ‘wars’ now under way—against ‘terrorism’ and theenemy within. City has carried some exceptional work on war and ‘urbicide’ but this paperargues that, for the most part, the social sciences are in denial and ends with a call for action toconfront, reveal and challenge the militarisation of urban space.

Confronting place annihilation in urbanresearch

“As long as people have lived in cities,they have been haunted by fears of urbanruin . . . Every city on earth is groundzero in somebody’s doomsday book.”(Berman, 1996, pp. 175–184)

“To be sure, a cityscape is not made offlesh. Still, sheared-off buildings arealmost as eloquent as body parts (Kabul,Sarajevo, East Mostar, Grozny, 16 acres oflower Manhattan after September 11th2001, the refugee camp in Jenin). Look,the photographs say, this is what it’s like.This is what war does. War tears, warrends. War rips open, eviscerates. Warscorches. War dismembers. War ruins.”(Sontag, 2003, p. 5)

“Today, wars are fought not in trenchesand fields, but in living rooms, schoolsand supermarkets.” (Barakat, 1998, p. 11)

Cities, warfare and organized, polit-ical violence have always beenmutual constructions. “The city,

the polis, is constitutive of the form ofconflict called war, just as war is itselfconstitutive of the political form called thecity” (Virilio, 2002, p. 5, original emphasis).War and the city have intimately shapedeach other throughout urban and militaryhistory. “There is . . . a direct reciprocitybetween war and cities”, writes the geogra-pher Ken Hewitt. “The latter are the morethoroughgoing constructs of collective life,containing the definitive human places.War is the most thorough-going or con-sciously prosecuted occasion of collectiveviolence that destroys places” (Hewitt,1983, p. 258).

The widespread survival of massiveurban fortifications—especially in Asia,North Africa, Europe and parts of Latin

166 CITY VOL. 8, NO. 2

America—are a living testament to thefact that in pre-modern and pre nation-state civilizations, city-states were theactual agents, as well as the main targets, ofwar. In pre-modern times cities were builtfor defence as well as dominant centres ofcommerce, exchange and political, religiousand social power. “The city, with its but-tressed walls, its ramparts and moats, stoodas an outstanding display of ever-threat-ening aggression” (Mumford, 1961, p. 44).

The sacking and killing of fortified citiesand their inhabitants was the central eventin pre-modern war (Weber, 1958). Indeed(often allegorical) stories of such acts makeup a good part of the Bible—especiallyJeremiah and Lamentations—and otherancient and classical religious and philo-sophical texts. “Myths of urban ruin growat our culture’s root” (Berman, 1996).

In the 15th and 16th centuries, as modernnation-states started to emerge in Europe as‘bordered power containers’, they beganseeking a monopoly on political violence(Giddens, 1985). “The states caught up withthe forward gallop of the towns” (Braudel,1973, p. 398). The expanding imperial andmetropolitan cities that lay at the core ofnation-states were no longer organizers oftheir own armies and defences. But theymaintained political power and reach. Mili-tary, political and economic elites withinsuch cities directed violence, control, repres-sion, and the colonial acquisition of territory,raw materials, wealth and labour power fromafar (Driver and Gilbert, 2003).

By the 19th and 20th centuries, industrialcities in the global north had grown insynchrony with the killing powers of tech-nology. They provided the men and materialto sustain the massive, industrial wars of the20th century. At the same time their (oftenfemale-staffed) industries and neighbour-hoods emerged as the prime targets for totalwar. The industrial city thus became “in itsentirety a space for war. Within a few years. . . bombing moved from the selectivedestruction of key sites within cities toextensive attacks on urban areas and, finally,

to instantaneous annihilation of entire urbanspaces and populations” (Shaw, 2003, p.131). Right up to the present day, thecapture of strategic and politically impor-tant cities has “remained the ultimate sym-bol, of conquest and national survival”(Shaw, 2001, p. 1).

Given the centrality of both urbanizationand the prosecution of political violence tomodernity, this subtle inter-penetration ofcities and warfare should be no surprise.“After all, modernity, through most of itscareer, has been modernity at war” (Pieterse,2002, p. 3). It is no longer feasible to containcities within defensive walls or effectivecordons which protect their citizens frommilitary force (Virilio, 1987). But the deliber-ate destruction and targeting of cities and theirsupport systems in times of war and crisis is aconstant throughout 8000 years or so of urbanhistory on our planet. “Destruction of pla-ces”, Hewitt continues, writing in 1987:

“driven by fear and hatred, runs throughthe whole history of wars, from ancientTroy or Carthage, to Warsaw andHiroshima in our own century. Themiseries, uprootings, and deaths of civiliansin besieged cities, especially after defeat,stand amongst the most terrible indictmentsof the powerful and victorious. In thatsense, there is, despite the progress ofweapons of devastation, a continuity in theexperience of civilians from Euripides’Trojan Women or The Lamentations ofJeremiah, to the cries of widowed womenand orphaned children in Beirut, Belfast,the villages of Afghanistan, and those of ElSalvador.” (Hewitt, 1987, p. 469)

Cities, then, provide much more than just thebackdrop or environment for war and terror.Rather, their buildings, assets, institutions,industries, infrastructures, cultural diversi-ties, and symbolic meanings have long actu-ally themselves been the explicit target for awide range of deliberate, orchestrated,attacks. This essential, urban, spatiality oforganized, political violence is rarely recog-nized in the obsessively chronological andtemporal gaze of the historians who dom-

GRAHAM: POSTMORTEM CITY 167

inate the study of the urban violence of the20th century. Thus, the architectures, urban-isms and spatial planning strategies thatsustain, reflect and are intrinsic to strategiesof informal and state terror all too often getoverlooked (Cole, 2003, Chap. 2).

For this explicit concentration on the(attempted) killing of cities in modern war,Ken Hewitt has coined the term ‘placeannihilation’ (1983). “For a social scientist”,he stresses that “it is actually imperative toask just who dies and whose places aredestroyed by violence” within such wars ofplace annihilation (1987, p. 464, originalemphasis). This is because such strategies areusually far from indiscriminate. Commonly,they involve a great deal of planning so thatthe violence and destruction achieves thepolitical, social, economic, ecological andcultural effects, on the target population andtheir places, that are desired by theattackers.

Since the end of the Cold War, thisdominance of war casualties by civilians,rather than enlisted military personnel, hasonly accelerated further. Between 1989 and1998, for example, 4 million people werekilled in violent conflicts across the world.An estimated 90% of these were civilians—primarily women and children (Pieterse,2002, p. 1). In short, since the end of the ColdWar—with its global threat of instant urban-nuclear annihilation—“we have gone fromfearing the death of the city to fearing thecity of death” (Lang, 1995, p. 71). Astraditional state-versus-state wars in openterrain have become objects of curiosity, sothe informal, ‘asymmetric’ or ‘new’ warswhich tend to centre on localized strugglesover strategic urban sites have become thenorm (Kaldor, 1999). As Misselwitz andWeizman suggest:

“It is now clear that the days of theclassical, Clauswitzian definition of warfareas a symmetrical engagement between statearmies in the open field are over. War hasentered the city again—the sphere of theeveryday, the private realm of the house.”(2003, p. 272)

Far from going away, then, strategies ofdeliberately attacking the systems and placesthat support civilian urban life have onlybecome more sophisticated since the SecondWorld War. The deliberate devastation ofurban living spaces continues apace. Fuellingit is a powerful cocktail of intermeshingfactors. Here we must consider the collapseof the Cold War equilibrium; the unleashingof previously constrained ethnic hatreds; theproliferation of fundamentalist religious andpolitical groups; and the militarization ofgangs, drug cartels, militia, corrupt politicalregimes and law enforcement agencies. Wemust address the failure of many national andlocal states; the urbanization of populationsand terrain; and the growing accessibility toheavy weapons. Finally, the growing crisis ofsocial polarization at all geographical scalesand the increasing scarcity of many essentialresources must be considered (Castells, 1997,1998).

To this cocktail we must add the destabi-lizing effects of the USA’s increasinglyaggressive and violent interventions in awidening range of nations, and the delete-rious impacts of neoliberal restructuring and‘structural adjustment’ programmes,imposed on many nations by the Inter-national Monetary Fund (IMF) and theWorld Trade Organization (WTO). Suchprogrammes have added to the sense of crisisin many cities because they have resulted inthe erosion of social and economic securityand the further immiseration of the urbanpoor (and, increasingly, the middle classes,too).

All this has happened at a time when thescale of urbanization is at an unprecedentedglobal level. During the 1990s alone theworld’s urban population grew by 36%. By2003 900 million people lived in slums. Andthe deepening polarization of cities, causedby neoliberal globalization, is providingmany conditions that are ripe for extremes ofcivil, and militarized, violence (Castells,1997, 1998; Vidal, 2003). In fact, neoliberalglobalization itself operates through a vastscale of violence, exploitation and criminality


which works in similarly ‘rhizomatic’ waysto transnational terrorism. “Our own politi-cians and businesses sail a strikingly similarpirate sea [to the al-Qaeda network]”, sug-gests Keller Easterling:

“slipping between legal jurisdictions,leveraging advantages in the differentialvalue of labor and currency, brandishingnational identity one moment andlaundering it the next, using lies anddisguises to neutralize cultural or politicaldifferences.” (2002, p. 189)

In many cases some or all of these factorshave combined in the post-Cold War to forcenothing less than the “implosion of globaland national politics into the urban world”(Appadurai, 1996, p. 152). This has led to aproliferation of bloody, largely urban, wars.Many of these, in turn, stimulate vast migra-tions and the construction of city-scale refu-gee camps to accommodate the displacedpopulations (which stood at a global figure of50 million by 2002) (Agier, 2002; Diken andLaustsen, 2003).

Appadurai argues that such ‘new’ urbanwars “take their energy from macroeventsand processes . . . that link global politics tothe micropolitics of streets and neighbour-hoods” (1996, pp. 152–153). He observesthat:

“In the conditions of ethnic unrest andurban warfare that characterize cities suchas Belfast and Los Angeles, Ahmedabad andSarajevo, Mogadishu and Johannesburg,urban war zones are becoming armedcamps, driven wholly by implosive forcesthat fold into neighborhoods the mostviolent and problematic repercussions ofwider regional, national and globalprocesses . . . [These cases] represent a newphase in the life of cities, where theconcentration of ethnic populations, theavailability of heavy weaponry, and thecrowded conditions of civic life createfuturist forms of warfare . . . and where ageneral desolation of the national and globallandscape has transposed many bizarreracial, religious, and linguistic enmities into

scenarios of unrelieved urban terror.”(Appadurai, 1996, pp. 152–193, originalemphasis).

All of which means that contemporary war-fare and terror now largely boil down tocontests over the spaces, symbols, meanings,support systems or power structures of citiesand urban regions. As a result, war, ‘terror-ism’ and cities are redefining each other incomplex, but poorly explored ways. Suchredefinitions are, in turn, bound up withdeeper shifts in the ways in which time,space, technology, mobility and power areconstructed and experienced in our societiesas a whole (Virilio, 1986).

Given all of this, it is curious, then, thatwarfare and organized political violence tar-geting the spaces, inhabitants and supportsystems of cities have been persistentlyneglected in critical social scientific debatesabout cities and urbanization since the Sec-ond World War (Mendieta, 2004). By con-trast, this period has seen vast libraries filledwith theoretical, empirical and policy booksaddressing urban de-velopment, con-struc-tion, re-generation, modernization andgrowth (Bishop and Clancey, 2003). In 1983the geographer Ken Hewitt argued that, fromthe perspective of urban social science, the“destruction of cities, as of much else,remains terra incognita” (p. 258).

Another cocktail of factors can be diag-nosed to help explain this neglect. Three areparticularly important. First, a simple, andunderstandable, desire to forget the scale andbarbarity of urban slaughter in the lastcentury can be diagnosed. For example,many wider cultural taboos have inhibiteddispassionate, social scientific analyses of theaerial annihilations of German and Japanesecities in the Second World War (althoughthese are now slowly being overcome—seeSebald, 2003). In the Anglo-Saxon world,whilst the ‘air war’ that killed perhaps 1.6million urbanites in those two countries iswidely glorified and fetishized—what ChrisHables Gray calls “bomber glorioso” (1997,p. 87)—equally powerful taboos, and the


instinct to self-censor, have meant that theperspective here has been overwhelminglyaerial. The annihilated cities, and the hun-dreds of thousands of carbonized dead on theground, barely exist at all in these popularnarratives. When they are represented, hugecontroversy still ensues. The victims of morerecent US bombings in Kabul and Baghdadhave been rendered equally invisible anduncounted by the ferocious power of West-ern propaganda and self-censorship. An‘information operations’ campaign has alsoemerged that leads US forces to bomb anyindependent television station that has thetemerity to show the civilian carnage thatresults, on the ground, even with so-called‘precision strikes’—the inevitable realitybehind the repulsive euphemisms of ‘col-lateral damage’ in urban bombing.

Second, Bishop and Clancey (2003, p. 64),have recently suggested that modern urbansocial science in general has shown markedtendencies since the Second World War todirectly avoid tropes of catastrophism (espe-cially in the West). They argue that this isbecause the complete annihilation of urbanplaces conflicted with its underlying, enlight-enment-tinged notions of progress, order andmodernization. In the post-war, Cold War,period, especially, “The City”, they write,had a “heroic status in both capitalist andsocialist storytelling” (2003, p. 66). Thisworked against an analysis of the city as ascene of catastrophic death. “The city-as-target” remained, therefore, “a reading longburied under layers of academic Modernism”(2003, p. 67).

Bishop and Clancey also believe that this“absence of death within The City alsoreflected the larger economy of death withinthe academy: its studied absence from somedisciplines [urban social science] and com-pensatory over-compensation in others [his-tory]” (2003, p. 67). In disciplinary terms, theresult of this was that the ‘urban’ tended toremain hermetically separated from the ‘stra-tegic’. ‘Military’ issues were carefully demar-cated from ‘civil’ ones. And the overwhelm-ingly ‘local’ concerns of modern urban social

science were kept rigidly apart from (inter)-national ones. This left urban social scienceto address the local, civil and domestic ratherthan the (inter)national, the military or thestrategic. Such concerns were the preserve ofhistory, as well as the fast-emerging dis-ciplines of international politics and inter-national relations. In the dominant hubs ofEnglish-speaking urban social science—North America and the UK—these twointellectual worlds virtually never crossed,separated as they were by disciplinaryboundaries, scalar orientations and theoret-ical traditions.

The final factor stems from the fact thaturban social science finished sedimentinginto modern intellectual disciplines duringthe Cold War. During this time, urbanannihilation, always minutes away, was sim-ply a step on the way to a broader, species-wide, exterminism (Mumford, 1959; Thomp-son, 1982). This also seems to have inhibitedcritical urban research on place annihilation.Waves of secrecy and paranoia about theurban-targeting strategies of the super pow-ers further worked to undermine criticalanalysis of what nuclear Armageddon wouldactually mean for an urbanizing planet (Van-derbilt, 2002). And the inevitable vulner-abilities of cities to nuclear attack wereexploited by a wide range of interests seekingto radically decentralize, and de-urbanize,advanced industrial societies (Farish, 2003;Light, 2003). As Herbert Muschamp hasargued, cities were, in many ways, “amongthe casualties” of the Cold War years (1995,p. 106).

Encouragingly, the persistent neglect ofplace annihilation in urban research has beenslowly overcome since Hewitt wrote theabove words. A broadening range of promis-ing work has emerged in critical and inter-disciplinary urban research, particularly in thepages of City.2 Unfortunately, however, suchwork has yet to gain the momentum necessaryto bring the critical analysis of place annihila-tion into the heart of urban social science. It isstill the case, for example, that only a smallnumber of volumes have systematically


delved into the dark terrain which emergeswhere the city becomes a pre-eminent site forpolitical violence, warfare and ‘terrorism’;where urban de-struction, devastation, de-generation, de-modernization and annihila-tion haunt dreams of urban modernity anddevelopment; and where the promise of thecity reveals its Janus-face in orgies of hatred,killing, murder, bombing and violence (seeAshworth, 1991; Lang, 1995; Picon, 1996,Davis, 2002; Vanderbilt, 2002; Cole, 2003;Schneider and Susser, 2003).

The starting point for this essay is that, inour post Cold-War and post 9/11 world,both the informal (‘terrorist’) and the formal(state) violence, war and terror that areengulfing our planet are actually constitutedby the systematic and planned targeting ofcities and urban places. This extended essayseeks to place such attacks—and the wider‘state of emergency’ within which they areembedded—within their theoretical and his-torical context. In so doing, I aim to helpurban social research to further confront thetaboos which have, over the last 50 years,tended to inhibit research on, and recogni-tion for, organized political violence againstcities within critical social science.

In particular, my purpose in this extendedessay, drawing on Paul Virilio’s (1986) term,is to start mapping out what a specificallyurban geopolitics might amount to. I take‘geopolitics’ here to mean a concern withunderstanding the discourses, strategies andstructures which emerge at the intersectionsof territory, spatiality, and political powerand violence (Agnew and Corbridge, 1995).This essay’s central concern is to argue thatthe parallel transformations of urbanism andpolitical violence in the post-Cold Warperiod, and the increasing constitution of warand terror by acts of violence carefullytargeted against urban, local sites, makes thedevelopment of such a specifically urbangeopolitics an urgent imperative. As states,wars, empires, resistance movements, terrornetworks and economic, social and culturalformations are reconstituted, in parallel, intostretched, transnational webs which inter-

sect, and constitute, the same sets of strategicurban sites, so this imperative will only gainmore momentum.

It follows that there is an urgent, parallel,need for the real recent progress in develop-ing a critical geopolitics (O Tuathail, 1999) tomove beyond an exclusive concern fornation-states, international relations, andinternational terror networks. Critical geo-politics must also become sub-national. Thisis necessary so that the increasingly crucialroles of strategic urban places as geopoliticalsites can be profitably analysed. A blizzard ofquestions provides fuel here. For example, onour rapidly urbanizing planet, how does thecontrol, targeting, destruction and recon-struction of urban sites intersect with chang-ing geopolitical structures and discourses?How are cities, and urban everyday life,being affected both by the umbilically con-nected interplay of terror and counter-ter-ror? What roles do constructions, and imag-inations, of ‘homeland’ and ‘non-homeland’cities play within the emerging US ‘Empire’,a hegemonic neoliberalism, and a prolifera-tion of sites and sources of resistance (Hardtand Negri, 2000)? What place do the systemsof mobility, communication, infrastructureand logistics that are so central to contempo-rary urban life play, as targets and weapons,within the emerging crisis? How does theurbanization of terrain influence the ‘assy-metric wars’ that are emerging which pitchhigh-tech Western and US forces againstboth poorly equipped local fighters and anti-globalization movements? Finally, what arethe prospects for creatively blending criticalurban and geopolitical theory to match theparallel rescaling of political violence andurbanism in today’s world?

In sum, this essay has been written in thebelief that both a specifically geopoliticalurbanism, and a specifically urban geopoli-tics, are now urgently required. A con-structive dialogue between such usually sepa-rated research communities would, I believe,open up many extremely promising avenuesfor theory, analysis and activism. What fol-lows is designed to help such a dialogue


along. To achieve this, my simple aim is tohelp illustrate the inseparability of war, terrorand modern urbanism. I do this by revealinga range of ‘hidden histories’ of what I call the‘dark side’ of urban modernity—the pro-pensity for urban life to be attacked,destroyed or annihilated in acts of organizedviolence.

Ten tales of urban geopolitics: on the‘dark’ side of urban modernity

“Biologists have prepared ‘red books’ ofextinct or endangered species; ecologistshave their ‘green books’ of threatenedhabitats. Perhaps we need our ‘black book’of the places destroyed or nearly destroyedby human agencies. Actually it would takemany books and street maps packed withrememberances to record the settlements,neighbourhoods, and buildings in thoseplaces destroyed in recent wars.” (Hewitt,1987, p. 275)

Arguably, humankind has expended almostas much energy, effort and thought to theannihilation and killing of cities as it has ontheir growth, planning and construction.Such city annihilation or urban warfarerequires purposive work. It needs detailedanalysis. Often, it involves ‘scientific’ plan-ning and operational strategy-making ofextraordinary complexity and sophistication.Thus, it is necessary to assume that acontinuum exists connecting acts of buildingand physical restructuring, on the one hand,and acts of all-out, organized war on theother. By way of mapping the diverse ways inwhich place annihilation is utterly intrinsic toboth urban modernity, and modern urbanismand planning, I offer below a range of 10illustrative ‘tales’.

Architectures of annihilation: the ‘warideology of the plan’

First, civilian urban planning, development,modernization and restructuring often actu-

ally involve levels of devastation of cities,ruination and forced resettlement that matchthat which occurs in all-out war. Even insupposedly democratic societies, plannedurban restructuring often involves autocraticstate violence, massive urban destruction, thedevastation of livelihoods, and even massdeath. In both authoritarian and democraticsocieties, ideologies of urban planning haveoften actually invoked metaphors of war andmilitarism. This has been widely practised asa means of comparing the purported need forviolent restructuring in cities to achievedesired effects with the mass violence ofstates. Anthony Vidler (2001, p. 38) calls this“the war ideology of the plan”.

Thus, place annihilation can be thought ofas a kind of hidden—and sometimes not sohidden—planning history (see Sandercock,1998). The planned devastation and killing ofcities is a dark side of the discipline of urbanplanning that is rarely acknowledged, letalone analysed. It is rarely realized, forexample, that the analytical and statisticalmethods so often used in post-Second WorldWar civilian planning have also been used—sometimes by the same demographic, eco-nomic and planning ‘experts’—to organizespatially the Apartheid regime in SouthAfrica; to plan the systematic fire-bombingof German and Japanese cities; to organizethe house by house demolition of Warsaw in1945; to set up the giant urban-regionalprocess of the Holocaust; or to starve manyEastern European cities and regions intosubmission in the mid–1940s. The latterwork even involved the founder of CentralPlace Theory, that seminal economic geogra-pher, Walter Christaller—star of any tradi-tional school human geography course. Hewas employed by the Nazis to rethink theeconomic geography of an ‘Aryanized’ East-ern Europe, a process linked directly to theplanned starvation and forced migration ofmillions of people (see Rossler, 1989; Aly andHeim, 2002).

Mock German and Japanese housingunits, complete with authentic roofingmaterials, furniture and clothing, were erec-


ted in Nevada to allow the incendiaries thatwould later burn Dresden and Tokyo to becarefully customized for their intended tar-gets (Davis, 2002, pp. 65–84). “The combus-tibility of Japanese dwellings was well illus-trated by tests made in this country”,recalled the US Strategic Bombing Survey in1947:

“Four buildings were constructed: two in‘typical Japanese fashion’ [and] the othertwo to comply with the latest Tokyo fireregulations . . . The four structures were seton fire to determine the time necessary fortheir destruction. Those constructed in‘typical Japanese fashion’ burned to theground in 12 minutes; those constructed inaccordance to Tokyo fire regulations wereconsumed in 32 minutes.” (1947a, p. 72)

The US Strategic Bombing Survey was theapogee of the systematic evaluation of the‘success’ of urban planning for mass death.In it, thousands of operation scientists,architects, engineers and urban statisticianspored over every urban bomb blast in Japanand Germany in an effort to improvethe ‘efficiency’ of the city-killing process(Figure 1).

To predict the effects of the ‘A’-bombs onHiroshima and Nagasaki, a ‘Japanese vil-lage’ was even constructed—again inNevada—complete with all sorts of realisticJapanese-style buildings and infrastructures(Vanderbilt, 2002).

Similarly grim work goes on and on. Morerecently, the US and Israeli militaries haveco-operated to construct and run a kind ofshadow urban system of complete urbandistricts, replete with authentic ‘Islamic’ fea-tures, in order to train the marines andsoldiers who invaded Baghdad, Basra andJenin (Graham, 2003).

It is also scarcely realized that demogra-phers, statisticians, geographers, architectsand planners have been central to Israel’sefforts to deepen its control over the three-dimensional spaces of the Occupied Territo-ries. Their analyses and prescriptions havehelped to shape the annexing of Palestinian

land, the construction of walls and ‘bufferzones’, the mass bulldozing of houses, theethnic cleansing of selected areas, the con-struction of carefully located Jewish settle-ments and access roads, or the appropriationof water and airspace (Graham, 2003; Weiz-man, 2004).

‘Planning’ and occupation as war on thecolonized city

“One of the achievements of the great waveof modernization that began in the late 18thcentury was to incorporate urbicide into theprocess of urban development . . . Itsvictims, along with their neighbourhoodsand towns, vanish without a trace.”(Berman, 1996, p. 181)

In our second illustration, many strategies ofoccupation and colonization have been basedexplicitly on the planned destruction anddevastation of cities. Urban ‘planning’ inmany colonized cities often amounts to littlebut the planned devastation and bulldozingof indigenous cities to underpin the strategiccontrol of the occupiers or settlers (Said,1993; see Maldonado-Torres, 2004). Here the‘orderly’ imprints of Western-style urbanplanning and property law have long beenused as a form of urban warfare. First, thiswas done to quell local insurgencies in non-Western, colonized cities. Later, such milita-rized planning strategies were often importedback to the homeland to reshape the greatimperial capitals for similar purposes (Mis-selwitz and Weizman, 2003).

The first special manual on ‘urban war-fare’ was produced in 1847 by the Frencharmy to show how troops could ruthlesslyput down insurrections in Algiers whichwere then erupting, led by Abdel Kager.This book, La Guerre des Rues et desMaison, was authored by the leader of theFrench Forces, Bugeaud (1997). After abloody, seven-year struggle in a classic‘asymmetric’ urban war—with 100,000French troops pitched against 10,000 local


Figure 1 Typical post-annihilation analyses of the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) of 1947. This involveddetailed assessments of the effectiveness of incendiary and atomic bombs in destroying the various types, structuresand contents of Japanese urban spaces as though the killing of a million Japanese civilians were some giant physicalexperiment. (a) percentage of urban Japan which was ‘successfully’ incinerated according to the dominant land use(USSBS, 1947b, Vol. ix, Chap. 3, p. 45). Of all the 64 cities burnt, the Survey concluded that “Tokyo was thebest-burning of them all” (USSBS, 1947b, Vol. ix, Chap. 3, p. 38); (b) Fire damage map of the small Japanese city ofUbe (USSBS, 1947b, Vol. ix, Chap. 3, p. 79).


resistance fighters—Bugeaud simplydestroyed entire neighbourhoods in thedense Algiers Casbah. In the process hecommitted many atrocities against civiliansand fighters alike and imprinted massiveavenues through the city to sustain militarysurveillance and movement. This broke theresistance (for a time, at least) (Misselwitzand Weizman, 2003).

In a process that would be paralleled manytimes later, these techniques were then used

to inform urban planning strategies to quellcivil and social unrest in the ‘homeland’,imperial centres of the colonizing powers.Bugeaud’s doctrines, for example, had amajor influence on Baron Haussmann in the1870s, as he violently imprinted a strategy ofmassive boulevards and canon firing-arcs onParis, partly for the sake of improving thestrategic control of the State on the volatilecapital (Misselwitz and Weizman, 2003). Inthe process “Haussmann draped a façade oftheatres, cafes and shops over boulevards laidout for the benefits of the troops who mightbe called upon to quell civil disturbance”(Muschamp, 1995, p. 105).

Thus, the anti-urban rhetoric of rulingelites tended to see both colonized and‘home’ cities as morally toxic hotbeds ofunrest that needed to be ‘regularized’ anddisciplined through similar, violent, urbanrestructuring efforts. “If strategic urbandesign previously focused on strengtheningthe city’s peripheral walls and fortificationsto keep out the enemy”, wrote Misselwitzand Weizman:

“here, since the enemy was already insidethe city, the city had to be controlled fromwithin. The city fabric itself, its streets andhouses, that had to be adapted accordingly. . . Military control was exercised on thedrawing board, according to the rules ofdesign, fashion and speculative interests.”(2003, p. 272)

Here there are sometimes striking con-tinuities between the colonial and suppos-edly ‘postcolonial’ city. In an episode thatsadly would be repeated in the same city 56years later by the Israelis (see Figure 6), in1936, the British took 4200 kilos of explo-sives to the refugee camp in Jenin anddestroyed a whole quarter of the town. Thiswas an act of collective punishment at thecontinuing resistance to their occupation ofPalestine (Corera, 2002). A similar processof urban remodelling by demolition, aimedat undermining resistance, occurred in Jaffain the same year (Figure 2).

Figure 2 ‘Operation Anchor’: the use of explosives bythe British to carve boulevards through the PalestinianCasbah in Jaffa in 1936, to improve the strategiccontrol of the British over the settlement. Source:Misselwitz and Weizman (2003, p. 275).


Modernism and urban war I: aerial livingas response to aerial war

Our third illustration centres on the first oftwo deep connections that run betweenmodernist urbanism and aerial bombing. ForLe Corbusier’s famous obsession withloosely spaced modern towers set in park-land—most famously elaborated in his VilleRadieuse or ‘Radiant City’ (1933)—were notjust a celebration of light, air, sunlight andthe modern house as a ‘machine for living in’.They were also a reaction to a widespreadobsession in 1930s Europe with the need tocompletely re-plan cities so that they pre-sented the smallest possible targets to themassed ranks of heavy bombers then beingfielded by the major powers. Corbusier’stowers—variants of which had hardened‘anti-aircraft’ bomb-proof roofs—were alsodesigned to lift residents above expected gasattacks (Markou, 2002).

Like the Italian futurists before him, LeCorbusier celebrated the modernism of theaircraft machine and its vertical destructivepower. “What a gift to be able to sow deathwith bombs upon sleeping towns”, he wrote(1935, pp. 8–9). His response to the “sinisterapotheosis” of death and destruction her-alded by aerial warfare was the total demoli-tion of the old city, and its replacement by amodern utopia specifically designed to be“capable of emerging victorious from the airwar” (1935, pp. 60–61).

Post 9/11—an event which seemed tounderline the extreme vulnerability of sky-scrapers—it seems painfully ironic that thedreams of that arch celebrator of sky scraperswere, in fact, partly intended to reduce thecity’s exposure to aerial annihilation. Thefamous modernist architectural theorist Sig-fried Gideon—who was strongly influencedby Le Corbusier’s views—argued in 1941that:

“the threat of attack from the air demandsurban changes. Great cities sprawling opento the sky, their congested areas at themercy of bombs hurtling down out of

space, are invitations to destruction. Theyare practically indefensible as nowconstituted, and it is now becoming clearthat the best means of defending them is bythe construction, on the one hand, of greatvertical concentrations which offer aminimum surface to the bomber and, on theother hand, by the laying out of extensive,free, open spaces.” (1941, p. 543)

Modernism and urban war II: aerialbombing as a “new chance”

Following the war, as the scale and scope ofdevastation became clear, preservationistsachieved some limited success in rebuildingparts of some cities along old lines. Manyruined buildings—churches especially—were also preserved as war memorials. TheBritish war artist Kenneth Clark even arguedthat “bomb damage itself is picturesque”(Woodward, 2001, p. 212).

Our fourth illustration centres on the wayin which devout modernists saw the unim-aginable devastation as an unparalleledopportunity to reconstruct entire citiesaccording to the principles of Le Corbusierand other modernist architects. As part of the‘brave new word’ of post-war reconstruc-tion, modernist planners and architectsseemed in many cases to be almost gratefulthat the deadly work of the bombers had laidwaste to waste urban landscapes of tradi-tional, closely built streets and buildings(Tiratsoo et al., 2002).

For example, one pamphlet, published inthe UK by John Mansbridge during theSecond World War (Figure 3), expressedgratitude to that modernist icon, the aero-plane. Not only had it “given us a newvision” but it had offered Britain “a newchance by blasting away the centres ofcities”. Thus, it continued, modernist recon-struction would now be delivered to sustain“the swift flow of modern traffic for the playof light and air” (Tiratsoo et al., 2002).

Meanwhile, in Germany, the closing stagesof the Second World War saw Third Reichplanners preparing to totally disperse the


City of Hamburg—which had been so dev-astated by the fire storm raids of 1943—as atest case in the wholesale ‘deurbanization’ ofGerman society. When the founder of theBauhaus, Walter Gropius, returned to Ger-many in 1947, to advise on post-war recon-struction, he argued that the urban devasta-tion in Germany meant that it was “the bestplace to start breaking up cities into hometowns and to establish small-scale commu-nities, in which the essential importance ofthe individual could be realised” (cited inKostof, 1992, p. 261).

Thus, in a way, the total bombing of totalwar—a massive act of planned urban devas-tation in its own right—served as a massiveaccelerator of modernist urban planning,architecture and urbanism. The tabula rasathat every devoted modernist craved sud-

denly became the norm rather than theexception, particularly in the city centres ofpost-war Europe. As a result, to use thewords of Ken Hewitt (1983, p. 278), “theghosts of the architects of urban bombing—(Guilo) Douhet, (Billy) Mitchell, (Sir Hugh)Trenchard, (Frederick) Lindemann—and thepraxis of airmen like (‘Bomber’) Harris and(Curtis) LeMay, still stalk the streets of ourcities”.

Cold War urban geopolitics

In our fifth illustration, Cold War citieswere often deliberately remodelled as afunction of them resting at the centre of thenuclear cross-hairs. As Matthew Farish(2003) and Jennifer Light (2003) show, the

Figure 3 Illustrations from John Mansbridge’s (nd) British Second World War pamphlet Here Comes Tomorrowcelebrating both the modernism of aircraft and the ‘new chance’ their bombing offered British cities to rebuild alongmodernist lines. Source: Tiratsoo et al. (2002, p. 57).


familiar story of deconcentration and sprawlin post-war US cities, for example, was notjust fuelled by Federal subsidies, the Inter-state highway program, a deepening anti-urbanism, and ‘White Flight’. It was alsoactively encouraged by military strategiststo reduce the USA’s strategic vulnerabilityto a massive first nuclear strike by theSoviet Union.

As well as burrowing underground(McCamley, 1998; Vanderbilt, 2002), massiveefforts were made to make cities sprawl. Inthe USA, especially, vast new suburban tractswere projected as domesticated citadels, pop-ulated by perfect nuclear families living the‘American dream’ yet also shaped to beresilient in the face of atomic Armageddon(Zarlengo, 1999; McEnaney, 2000). Corecities, meanwhile, were widely portrayed bypopular media and planners as inherentlyrisky and unsafe, a politics of fear that mixedtragically with the wider racialization ofurban centrality in post-war America andfurther fuelled central city decline (Galison,2001).

Planning as ‘urbicide’: post-war urban‘renewal’ and the military–industrialcomplex in the USA

A sixth illustration is the critical influence ofsuch quasi-military urban planning on thehuge effort at urban ‘renewal’ in the post-warUSA. One of its arch proponents, RobertMoses—who was major of New York Cityfor much of this period—believed that, inmodernizing New York, “when you operatein an overbuilt metropolis you have to hackyour way through with a meat ax” (quoted inBerman, 1983, p. 307). Following the dis-placement of 50,000 as a highway was carvedthrough the Bronx, for example, Moseshelped set in train a war-like process ofdisintegration which by the 1970s “hadbecome spectacular, devouring house afterhouse and block after block, driving hun-dreds of thousands of people from theirhomes” (Berman, 1996, p. 172). Marshal

Berman argues that the scale of devastation—if not the human lives lost—in such pro-grammes, means that the Bronx needs to beseen in the same light as the all-out, orguerilla wars of Berlin, Belfast or Beirut.Along with several other authors he evencoins the word ‘urbicide’—or “the murderof the city”—to describe all these, and manyother cases (1996, p. 175).

Robert Goodman, writing in his 1972book After the Planners, argued that a US-wide drive for such ‘urban renewal’ actuallyamounted to little but a exercise in racist(anti-black) state violence on a par with thegenocidal attacks on the indigenous NorthAmericans that drove them to the edge ofextinction (see Porteous and Smith, 2001,Chap. 4).

Importantly, major military research anddevelopment bodies like RAND, STC andMITRE had major inputs into the statisticalanalyses, operations research strategies and‘rational’ planning doctrines that fuelled thehuge scale of Cold War ‘urban renewal’ andcomprehensive redevelopment in the USA(Light, 2002, 2003). Thus, in many cases, the‘sciences’ of urban and military strategybecame extremely blurred and interwovenduring this period. On the one hand, citygovernments pledged ‘war’ against the‘urban crisis’ (see Farish, 2003). On theother, the military–industrial complexsought to gain finance and power byreshaping civil strategic spaces in cities(Beauregard, 2003). The result was that, “by1970, the military–industrial complex hadsuccessfully done what it had set out to doat the start of the decade—expand its mar-ket to city planning and management”(Light, 2002).

Whilst rarely discussed, such planning-based urbicide is still extremely widespreadaround the world. For example, countlessinformal settlements continue to be bull-dozed around the planet in the name ofmodernization, freeway construction, eco-nomic development, ‘hygiene’ and theimprovement of a city’s image (see, forexample, Patel et al., 2002).


Urban ruination and the politics of‘unbuilding’

It is crucial to stress—in our seventh illustra-tion—that, after decades of urban crises ofvarious sorts and an entrenchment of global,neoliberal restructuring, the discipline ofurban planning is now confronting whatMike Davis (2002) calls ‘the radical con-tingency of the metropolis’ in many guisesand many places. The world is littered withfailed utopian, modernist urban landscapes.Many of these now resemble dystopian sitesof ethnic battles, economic and social col-lapse, financial meltdown or physical decay(Olalquiaga, 1995; Buck-Morss, 2000).

The continuum of organized, urban vio-lence is thus complicated by the fact thatmuch ‘planned’ urban change, even in timesof ‘peace’, itself involves war-like levels ofviolence, destabilization, rupture, forcedexpulsion and place annihilation (Berman,1996). Particularly within the dizzying peaksand troughs of capitalist urbanism, state-ledplanning often boils down to the legitimizedclearance of vast tracts of cities in the name ofthe removal of decay, modernization,improvement, ordering, economic competi-tion, or facilitating technological change andcapital accumulation and speculation. “Theeconomically, politically and socially drivenprocesses of creative-destruction throughabandonment and redevelopment”, suggestsDavid Harvey, “are often every bit asdestructive as arbitrary acts of war. Much ofcontemporary Baltimore, with its 40,000abandoned houses, looks like a war zone torival Sarajevo” (Harvey, 2003b, p. 26).

As a result, in paradigmatic modern citieslike Detroit, for example, much urban plan-ning doctrine and effort now centres on thepolitics of ‘unbuilding’ rather than building(Daskalakis et al., 2001). As in many other UScore cities, old industrial European cities, andAsian and Latin American megacities con-fronting recent financial collapses, the chal-lenge here is to ‘plan’ not for growth,prosperity and modernization. Rather, it is totry to overcome obsolescent structures, aban-

doned neighbourhoods, half-built or half-ruined cityscapes, decayed infrastructures andwar-like levels of gang, ethnic and drug-related violence and arson (Vergara, 1997,1999). Often, such “enclaves of disinvestmentreverse normal codes of controlled develop-ment; they are pockets of free-fall urbanimplosion, partaking of a frenzied violence . . .Here the police plead for their own automaticweapons, pleading that they are outgunned byteenage gangs” (Shane, 1995, p. 65).

Terror versus ‘war on terror’:city-targeting, orbital power and newwars

“While at one time war elsewhereguaranteed peace at the centre of theempire, now the enemy strikes preciselyand more easily at the centre . . . Warabroad no longer guarantees peace athome.” (Eco, 2003, p. 7)

“Cities are especially vulnerable to thestresses of conflict . . . City-dwellers areparticularly at risk when their complex andsophisticated infrastructure systems aredestroyed and rendered inoperable, or whenthey become isolated from externalcontacts.” (Barakat, 1998, p. 12)

All of which leads neatly to our eighthvignette: a brief analysis of the central role ofcities and urban spaces within the current‘third world war’ pitching ‘super terrorism’against counter-terrorism. Five brief pointsneed to be stressed here.

Everyday infrastructures as weapons of war

First, the potential for catastrophic violenceagainst cities and urban life has changed inparallel with the shift of urban life towardsever-more distanciated, transnational, andflows-based systems and networks. The resultof this is that the everyday technics, spacesand infrastructures of urban life—airliners,metro trains, computer networks, water sys-


tems, electricity grids, trade networks, foodsystems, medical systems, scientific researchgrids—may be easily assaulted and turnedinto agents either of instantaneous terror ordebilitating demodernization (Graham, 2002;Luke, 2004). In a ‘24/7’, ‘always-on’ andintensively networked society, urbanitesbecome so reliant on taken-for-granted infra-structural and computerized systems thatthey creep ever closer to the point where, asBill Joy puts it, “turning off becomes suicide”(2000, p. 239). In particular, given that all the‘Big Systems’ that sustain advanced, urbansocieties are profoundly electrical, we become“hostages to electricity” (Leslie, 1999). Allthis means that “tremendous lethal capabil-ities can be created simply by contra-func-tioning the everyday applications of manytechnics” (Luke, 2004).

Most obviously, this applies to the airlinesuicide attacks of 9/11 (Graham, 2002),Palestinian bus bombers or the Moscowmetro attacks of February 2004. But it alsoapplies to the much less well-known effortsof US and Israeli militaries to systematicallydemodernize entire urban societies in thepast few decades. It is striking that the‘innovations’ underpinning both informaland state terror, to use the words of TimothyLuke (2004), “mobilize assets for attacks thatdestructively activate the embedded threatsof large technical systems, everyday logistics,and civil offensive capabilities”.

Thus, the murderous 9/11 attacks simplyturned banal capsules of everyday, inter-urbanmobility into anti-urban cruise missiles. Amassive perversion of everyday mobilitysystems orchestrated for saturation real-timecoverage, these attacks brought an over-whelmingly symbolic and mediatized act ofurban mass murder to a devastating conclu-sion (Graham, 2002; Luke 2004).

Similarly, the deliberate US bombing ofelectrical systems in Kosovo in 1999, andIraq in 2001—often using graphite ‘soft’bombs designed to generate massive shortcircuits and fires—led to a vast pressure onthose societies by effectively de-electrifying,and de-modernizing, them (Graham, 2004a).

Between 1991 and 2003, for example, as aresult of the bombing and the followingsanctions, Iraq was a modern, highly urbansociety forcibly “relegated to a pre-industrialage” by state violence (United Nations, 1999cited in Blakeley, 2001, p. 32). Even a leadingUS Air Force planner had to concede thatthis direct targeting of so-called ‘dual-use’(military/civilian) electrical infrastructure in1991 “shut down water purification andsewage treatment plants. As a result, epi-demics of gastroenteritis, cholera, andtyphoid broke out, leading to as many as100,000 civilian deaths and the doubling ofinfant mortality rates” (Rizer, 2001). Overthe next decade, over 500,000 Iraqi civilianswere to die because the war and the sanctionsforced a modern, urban society to livewithout the basic, life-sustaining systems thatare needed to keep it alive. This was a classiccase, as Ruth Blakeley (2001) has put it, of‘bomb now, die later’.

As US forces move into the new terrain of‘cyber war’ or ‘computer network attack’ sothey have developed detailed knowledge ofthe software systems that sustain basic,everyday infrastructure in potentially adver-sarial cities and states. In 2002, Major Gen-eral Bruce Wright, Deputy Director of Infor-mation Operations at the Center at JointWarfare Analysis Center at Dahlgren, VA,revealed that his team “can tell you not justhow a power plant or rail system [within anadversary’s country] is built, but whatexactly is involved in keeping that softwaresystem up and making that system efficient”(cited in Church, 2002).

The urbanization of war: cities as refugefrom orbital and aerial hegemony

“Some people say to me that the Iraqis arenot the Vietnamese! They have no junglesor swamps to hide in. I reply, ‘let our citiesbe our swamps and our buildings ourjungles’.” (Tariq Aziz, then Iraqi foreignminister, October 2002, quoted in Bellamy,2003, p. 3)


Second, the relative anonymity of urban liferenders cities as the last sites of refuge fromthe globe-spanning, high-tech militaryomnipotence of US surveillance and killing.The complex, congested and contested ter-rain below, within and above cities is seen bymany within the US military as a set ofphysical spaces which limit the effectivenessof high-tech space-targeted bombs, surveil-lance systems and automated, ‘network-cen-tric’ weapons. These derive their power fromthe USA’s massive dominance in space-basedsatellite targeting, navigation and surveillance(Graham, 2004b). Such weapons and infor-mation systems have been deliberately devel-oped in the last 30 years, under the auspicesof the so-called ‘Revolution in MilitaryAffairs’, to ensure that the USA remains apre-eminent global military power with ‘fullspectrum dominance’ over its potential chal-lengers (Gray, 1997). The widespread urbani-zation of potential ‘battlespace’ is thereforeseen to reduce the ability of US forces tofight and kill at a distance (always thepreferred way because of their ‘casualtydread’ and technological supremacy). And, asis being revealed in the Iraqi guerrilla war,urban warfare is also seen to necessitate amuch more labour- and casualty-intensiveway of fighting than the USA is used to thesedays.

“The long term trend in open-area com-bat is toward overhead dominance by USforces”, writes Ralph Peters (1996, p. 6), aninfluential US observer of what might betermed the urbanization of war. “Battlefieldawareness may prove so complete, and ‘pre-cision’ weapons so widely-available andeffective, that enemy ground-based combatsystems will not be able to survive in thedeserts, plains, and fields that have seen somany of history’s main battles.” As a result,he argues that the USA’s “enemies will beforced into cities and other complex terrain,such as industrial developments and inter-city sprawl” (1997, p. 4).

Peters’s military mind recoils in horror atthe prospect of US forces habitually fightingin the majority world’s burgeoning mega-

cities and urbanizing corridors (see alsoRosenau, 1997; Spiller 2000). To him, theseare spaces where “human waste goes undis-posed, the air is appalling, and mankind isrotting” (Peters, 1996, p. 2). Here cities andurbanization represent decay, anarchy, dis-order and the post-Cold War collapse of‘failed’ nation-states. “Boom cities pay forfailed states, post-modern dispersed citiespay for failed states, and failed cities turn intokilling grounds and reservoirs for humanity’ssurplus and discards (guess where we willfight)” (1996, p. 3).

To Peters, the pivotal geo-strategic role ofurban regions within the post-Cold Warperiod is stark and clear. “Who cares aboutUpper Egypt if Cairo is calm?”, he writes.“We do not deal with Indonesia—we dealwith Jakarta. In our [then] recent evacuationof Sierra Leone Freetown was all that mat-tered” (1997, p. 5). Peters also candidlycharacterizes the role of the US militarywithin the emerging neoliberal ‘empire’ withthe USA as the central military enforcer(although he obviously does not use thesewords) (see Hardt and Negri, 2000). “Ourfuture military expeditions will increasinglydefend our foreign investments”, he writes,“rather than defending [the home nation]against foreign invasions. And we will fightto subdue anarchy and violent ‘isms’ becausedisorder is bad for business. All of thisactivity will focus on cities”.

Such urban warfare ‘expeditions’ havebeen central to the USA’s post-Cold Warstrategy. In a parallel process of urbaniza-tion of war (Graham, 2004c, Part II), theyare also the basis for the intensifyingefforts of Israeli forces to systematicallydemodernize Palestinian cities. All theseaggressions have devastated, and immiser-ated, the fragile systems that allow urbansocieties to function. Arguably—at least inthis case—the attacks have been so com-prehensive and complete that we have wit-nessed a case of ‘urbicide’—the denial, orkilling, of the city (see Berman, 1996;Safier, 2001; Graham, 2003, 2004d). Thou-sands of dwellings have been demolished


Figure 4 The banality of urbicide: Israeli Defence Forcesoldiers preparing to blow up a Palestinian home in theTul Quarem refugee camp in the West Bank, 2002.Photographer: Nir Kafri, 2003.


(Figure 4). Infrastructure systems have beensystematically ripped up by the claws ofbulldozers (Figure 5). And whole refugeecamps deemed to be the symbolic or actualcentres of resistance to occupation—boththrough the horrific programme of suicidebombing in Israeli cities, and othermeans—have been bulldozed in the culmi-nation of brutal urban battles (Figure 6).Urban areas have had the life literallystrangled out of them by extending arraysof checkpoints, curfews and barriers, com-bined with the progressive annexation ofwater resources and the destruction andannexation of agricultural land. The Pales-tinian population has been brutalized likenever before, with 2194 civilians killedbetween September 2000 and 21 October2003 alone (Graham, 2004d).

The language and legitimation of war

Thirdly, as always, these urban wars arebeing made and legitimized through lan-guage. Both Sharon’s assaults on Palestiniancities, and Bush’s assaults on Iraqi andAfghan ones, have been justified throughindiscriminate, Orientalist, categorizations.This language—what has been termed the‘new barbarism’—does huge political work.It does this by separating “the civilizedworld” [Israel or the USA]—who’s ‘home-land’ cities must be ‘defended’—from the“dark forces” which are alleged to threatenthe health, prosperity, and democracy ofboth these spaces and the ‘free’ world(Kaplan, 2003; Tisdall, 2003; Tuastad,2003).

Thus, such rhetoric conveniently lumpstogether the residents of whole nations assources of ‘terrorism’. As Derek Gregory(2003, p. 311) has shown, such languagesustains the demodernization, as well asdemonization, of whole Islamic or Araburban societies. By ‘casting out’ the subjectcivilians of those cities, these people, cru-cially, are “placed beyond the privileges andprotections of the law so that their lives

(and deaths) [are] rendered of no account”.In then forcibly creating a kind of chaoticurban hell, through state terror, violence,and the deliberated destruction of modernurban infrastructures, this violence, per-versely, produces what the discoursesdepict: an urban world “outside of themodern, figuratively as well as physically”(Gregory, 2003, p. 313).

Urban war and ‘accumulation bydispossession’

Fourth, such destruction, and the new strat-egy of pre-emptive war also, of course,create opportunities for predatory, imperialgain. This is especially so as they are locatedwithin a globalizing, neoliberal, politicaleconomy centred on the rapacious accumu-lative appetite of politically favoured trans-nationals for both urban and infrastructuralassets and strategic raw materials (Harvey,2003b; Kirsch, 2003).

Certainly, the US invasions of key partsof the strategic zones of central Eurasia andthe Middle East have paved the way forwhat David Harvey (2003a, Chap. 4) hascalled “accumulation by dispossession”.This has operated through the privatizationof assets and infrastructures in conqueredlands and the handing over of these assets,and natural resource rights, to the massivecorporations that are almost inseparablywoven into the Bush regime. Even moderatecommentators like Michael Ignatieff nowadmit that the high-tech ‘war on terror’ is,essentially, a classic, imperialistic strategyadjusted to the demands of a US-centred,network-based, neoliberal ‘empire’ based oncommercial control backed up by militarydominance (Ignatieff, 2003; see Hardt andNegri, 2000; Klein, 2003). “This war, likemost of the wars that preceded it, is firmlyrooted in geopolitical competition” (Klare,2001, p. 4). As Dyer-Witheford has argued,it remains the case that, “at its cutting edge,capitalist globalization means war” (1999,p. 157).


Figure 5 A series of video capture images showing the claw of an Israeli Defence Force D–9 bulldozer being used todestroy a Palestinian road and water network in Bethlehem as part of ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, April 2002.Photographer: a Palestinian activist who wishes to remain anonymous.


Urban cosmopolitanism and competingfundamentalisms

Finally, cities constitute the front line ofthe ‘war on terror’ in another crucial way.As the critical sites of diasporic mixing,and the destination points for global migra-tion, cities provide the multicultural envir-onments which are being stretched acrossthe resurgent ‘them’ and ‘us’ boundariesthat are (re)emerging in the wake of 9/11,the ‘war on terror’, and the drive for‘homeland security’ (Sassen, 1999). Whatfuture for urban multiculturalism, or forthe global–local flows of migration anddiaspora formation, in a world where “therhetoric of ‘insides’ needing protectionfrom external threats in the form of inter-national organizations is pervasive” (Dalby,2000, p. 5)?

Ironically, 9/11 itself symbolized that thistelescoping of the world’s political violenceinto the city (and vice versa) was nowinescapable. “If it existed, any comfortabledistinction between domestic and interna-tional, here and there, us and them, ceased tohave meaning after that day” (Hyndman,2003, p. 1).

On the one hand, then, the 9/11 attackscan be seen as part of a fundamentalist,transnational war, or Jihad, by radical Islami-cist movements against pluralistic and het-erogeneous mixing in (capitalist) cities(Buck-Morss, 2003). This loosely affiliatednetwork of radical Islamic terror organiza-tions need to be considered as one of a largenumber of social movements against whatCastells calls the “new global order” (2004, p.108). Heterogeneous mixing of ethnicitiesand religious groups holds no place within

Figure 6 Aerial photograph of the destruction of the Hart-Al-Hawashin district in the centre of the Jenin refugee campcaused by Israeli bulldozers (used with the permission of the Public Relations Branch, Israeli Defence Force).


umma, the transnational fundamentalist Isla-mic space that these movements are strug-gling to establish (Castells, 2004, p. 111).Thus, it is notable that cities that have longsustained complex heterogeneities, religiouspluralism, and multiple diasporas—NewYork and Istanbul, for example—have beenprime targets for catastrophic terror attacks.Indeed, in their own horrible way, the grimlists of casualties on that bright New Yorkday in September 2001 revealed the multiplediasporas and cosmopolitanisms that nowconstitute the very social fabric of ‘global’cities like New York. As Watson writes:

“global labor migration patterns have . . .brought the world to lower Manhattan toservice the corporate office blocks: thedishwashers, messengers, coffee-cartvendors, and office cleaners were Mexican,Bangladeshi, Jamaican and Palestinian. Oneof the tragedies of September 11th 2001 wasthat it took such an extraordinary event toreveal the everyday reality of life at theheart of the global city.” (2003, p. 109)

On the other hand, Bush’s neoconservativeand neoimperial ‘war on terror’ also prob-lematizes such urban cosmopolitanism. It,too, undermines both the possibility, and thelegitimacy, of city-based democratic plural-ism and dissent against the ‘new globalorder’. In asserting a binaried split between“the civilised and savage throughout thesocial circuitry”, the ‘war on terror’ rhetoricof the Bush regime, and the policies based onit, have produced a “constant scrutiny ofthose who bear the sign of ‘dormant’ terror-ist” (Passavant and Dean, 2002, cited inGregory, 2003). It has also “activate[d] apolicing of points of vulnerability against anenemy who inheres within the space of theUS” (ibid.).

A ‘domestic front’ has thus been drawn inBush’s ‘war on terror’. Sally Howell andAndrew Shryock (2003) call this a “crackingdown on diaspora”. This process involvesdeepening state surveillance against thoseseen to harbour ‘terrorist threats’, combinedwith a radically increased effort to ensure the

filtering power of national borders (seeAndreas and Biersteker, 2003; Molotch andMcLain, 2003). After decades when thebusiness press triumphantly celebrated the‘death of distance’, or the imperative ofopening borders to the ‘free’ movements ofneoliberal globalization, post–9/11, “in bothpolitical debates and policy practice, bordersare very much back in style” (Andreas andBiersteker, 2003, p. 1).

Once again, then, nations, as well asstrategic cities, are being (re)imagined asbounded, organized spaces with closely con-trolled, and filtered, relationships with thesupposed terrors of the outside world.Global geopolitical tensions, and attempts tobolster ‘homeland security’, have telescopedinto policies shaping immigration controls,social policies addressing asylum seekers, andlocal policies towards multicultural and dia-sporic communities in cities. In the USA, forexample, national immigration, border con-trol, and social policy strategies have beendramatically remodelled since 9/11 in an:

“attempt to reconstitute the [USA] as abounded area that can be fortified againstoutsiders and other global influences. Inthis imagining of nation, the US ceases tobe a constellation of local, national,international, and global relations,experiences, and meanings that coalesce inplaces like New York City and WashingtonDC; rather, it is increasingly defined by a‘security perimeter’ and the strictsurveillance of borders.” (Hyndman, 2003,p. 2; see Anderson, 2002)

The ‘hybrid’, transnational identities of manyneighbourhoods and communities in cities,shaped by generations of migration anddiasporic mixing, are thus becoming prob-lematized. Inevitably, such places and groupsare being ‘stretched’ across the resurgent‘them’ and ‘us’ or ‘home’ and ‘foreign’binaries that are being imposed. Many peo-ple, spaces and communities in Western citiesare thus becoming ‘othered’ simply becausethey are perceived to be associated with‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim terrorists’ (Hall, 2003).


Homeland/globe: war, ‘security’, and thegeopolitics of production andconsumption

“Every generation has a taboo and ours isthis: that the resources upon which ourlives have been built are running out.”(Monbiot, 2003, p. 25)

Which brings us neatly to our penultimateexample of the inseparability of contempo-rary war and urbanism. This centres on theways in which the reconstruction of land-scapes and consumption habits in thewealthy cities of the advanced industrialworld, with their profound implications forgeopolitical competition, impact on security,terror and urbanizing war elsewhere (LeBillon, 2001). A powerful case of theseimportant but poorly researched connectionscomes with the growing fashion for large,four-wheel drive ‘Sports Utility Vehicles’(SUVs) in Western, and particularly, UScities.

Given the very high degree of influence ofmajor US oil companies on the Bush regime,there is growing evidence of direct connec-tions between the fashion for more and moreprofligate use of oil in sprawling US cit-yscapes; the geopolitical remodelling of USdefence forces; and the so-called ‘war onterror’ through which the US government isachieving a high level of geopolitical controlof the world’s largest untapped oil reserves,in and around the Caspian Basin (Kleveman,2003). 9/11 has thus been ruthlessly exploi-ted. In particular the 9/11 attacks providedthe “catastrophic and catalysing event” thatwas identified by the influential 1997 reportProject for a New American Century—including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolf-owitz—as necessary to allow the USA tojustify the invasion of Iraq with any hope oflegitimacy (Harvey, 2003b, p. 15).

Whilst the US strategy is not necessarilyabout directly controlling oil resources perse, there is little doubt that “it is aboutensuring that whoever controls it buys andsells it in US dollars through the New York

commodities market” that lies a few hundredmetres from ‘ground zero’ (Halevi and Var-oufakis, 2003, p. 66). There is little doubt thata key objective of the US attack on Iraq wasto install a US-friendly oil-producing regimethere that would eventually displace theSaudis as the main ‘swing producer’, allowingthe USA (and not OPEC) to regulate theinternational price of oil (Harvey, 2003a;Gregory, 2004a).

Three key points are crucial here. First,SUVs were fashioned and marketed after thefirst Gulf War as quasi-militarized ‘urbanassault luxury vehicles’ (Rampton andStauber, 2003). Clotaire Rapaille, a psycho-logical consultant to major US SUV manu-facturers, reveals that his research suggeststhat Americans want “aggressive cars” thatcan be thought of as “weapons” or “armoredcars for the urban battlefield”. The designand marketing of such vehicles, he argues—with their names like ‘Stealth’ and ‘War-rior’—needs to tap into, and address, theirconsumers’ fears about contemporary urbanlife (cited in Rampton and Stauber, 2003, p.138).

Post-9/11, it is now clear that advertisershave been deliberately exploiting widespreadfears of catastrophic terrorism to furtherincrease sales of highly profitable SUVs.Rapaille has recently been urging the mainauto manufacturers to address the fact that“the Homeland is at war” by appealing tobuyers’ most primitive emotions (ibid., p.139).

Second, the SUV is being enrolled intourban everyday life as a defensive capsule or“portable civilization”—a signifier of safetythat, like the gated communities into whichthey so often drive, is portrayed in advertise-ments as being immune to the risky andunpredictable urban life outside (Garner,2000). Such vehicles seem to assuage the fearthat the urban middle classes feel whenmoving—or queuing in traffic—in their‘homeland’ city.

Subliminal processes of urban and culturalmilitarization are going on here. This wasmost powerfully illustrated by the trans-


formation of the US army’s ‘Humvee’ assaultvehicle into the civilian ‘Hummer’ just afterthe first Iraq war—an idea that came from theTerminator film star (and now CaliforniaGovernor) Arnold Schwarzenegger (whopromptly received the first one off theproduction line). Andrew Garner writes that:

“For the middle classes, the SUV isinterpreted culturally as strong andinvincible, yet civilised. In the case of themiddle class alienation from the inner city,the SUV is an urban assault vehicle. Thedriver is transformed into a trooper,combating an increasingly dangerous world.This sense of security felt when driving theSUV continues when it is not being driven.The SUV’s symbols of strength, power,command and security becomes an importantpart of the self-sign . . . With theidentification of enemies within our borders,this vehicle has become a way of protectingmembers of the middle class from any threatto their lifestyle” (2000, p. 6).

Finally, the fact that SUVs account for over45% of US car sales has very real impacts onthe global geopolitics of oil. With theirconsumption rates of double or triple normalcars, this highly lucrative sector clearly addsdirectly to the power of the neo-conservativeand ex-oil executive ‘hawks’ in the Bushregime to drive forward the above-men-tioned strategy of colonization by disposses-sion. This is especially so as they haveoperationalized their perpetual ‘war on ter-ror’ in ways that are helping the USA tosecure access to the huge, low-priced oilreserves that the USA argues it needs to fuelits ever-growing level of consumption. (cur-rently these stand at 25.5% of global con-sumption to sustain a country with less than5% of the world’s population.)

Clearly, then, the profligate oil consump-tion and militarized design of SUVs “takeson additional significance in the light of therole that dependency on foreign oil hasplayed in shaping U.S. relations with coun-tries in the Middle East” (Rampton andStauber, 2003, p. 139).

“The economic, cultural and militaryinfrastructure that undergirds US MiddleEast policy will not be so easily undone”,writes Tim Watson, “and without its whole-sale reform or dismantling, Islamic terroristswill not so easily disappear” (2003, p. 110).As with the cosmopolitan nationalities of thedead, then, so the events of 9/11, in their ownway, reflect and symbolize the deep connec-tions between urban everyday life and cityform and the violence spawned by geopolit-ical conflict and imperialist aggression. Wat-son writes that he has been haunted since9/11 by images of the hundreds of vehiclesabandoned, never to be recovered, at railstations by commuters to the twin towers inthe states of New York, Connecticut andNew Jersey. “That day these symbols ofmobility” became, instead:

“images of immobility and death. But theseforlorn, expensive cars and SUVs alsorepresent a nodal point between theUS-domestic economy and a global oilmarket in which Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Iraqiproduction is still so important.” (2003, pp.110–111).

‘A geopolitics of urban decay andcybernetic play’: popular culture blurswith military strategy

“War is the new psychotropic. Warprecludes our doubts. War preserves ourright to pursue overabundance. War closesthe circle. It creates anxiety; it cures anxiety.It defines our alienation; it resolves ouralienation.” (Hart, 2003, p. 16)

Our final vignette centres on the ways inwhich the neglect of place annihilation inurban social science has left the connectionsbetween today’s cities, and the curious obses-sion with ruined cities and post-apocalypticurban landscapes in contemporary popularculture, largely unexplored. This is importantbecause cities are unmade and annihilateddiscursively as well as through bombs, planesand terrorist acts. As various electronic


media become ever-more dominant in shap-ing the tenor of urban culture, so theirdepictions of cities crucially affect collectivenotions of what cities actually are, of whatthey might actually become.

Increasingly, in these ‘post-modern’ times,cities are depicted as sites of ruination, fearand decay, rather than ones of development,order or ‘progress’. As long ago as the mid–1960s, Susan Sontag observed that most sci-fifilms, for example, are about the “aesthetic ofdestruction, the peculiar beauties to be foundin wreaking havoc, making a mess” (1966, p.213). Crucially, this means that millennia-old“link between civilization and barbarism isreversed: City life turns into a state of naturecharacterised by the rule of terror, accom-panied by omnipresent fear” (Diken andLaustsen 2002, p. 291).

This shift taps into a century or more ofapocalyptic, anti-urban, literature andfilms—from H.G. Wells’s (1908) War in theAir to vast ranges of atomic-age and cyber-punk fiction. All of this predicts in its ownway the final victory of weapons of annihila-tion over the very possibility of a conven-tional urban life (see Franklin, 1988). Addingto this, a swathe of recent post-apocalypticfilms have so shaped the collective culture ofurbanism that the stock response to the 9/11catastrophe was that “it was just like a scenein a movie!” Whilst the output of such filmspaused after 9/11 they are now back in fullflow (Maher, 2002). Mike Davis has arguedthat the 9/11 attacks:

“were organised as epic horror cinema withmeticulous attention to the mise-en-scene.The hijacked planes were aimed precisely atthe vulnerable border between fantasy andreality . . . Thousands of people who turnedon their televisions on 9/11 were convincedthat the cataclysm was just a broadcast, ahoax. They thought they were watchingrushes from the latest Bruce Willis film . . .The ‘Attack on America’, and its sequels,‘America Fights Back’ and ‘America FreaksOut’, have continued to unspool as asuccession of celluloid hallucinations, eachof which can be rented from the video

shop: The Siege, Independence Day,Executive Action, Outbreak, The Sum of AllFears, and so on.” (2002, p. 5)

Indeed, the complex links between virtual,filmic and televisual representations of city-killing, and actual acts of urban war, arebecoming so blurred as to be almost indis-tinguishable. At least amongst US forces, thereal targeting of cities is being remodelled asa ‘joy stick war’. This operates through‘virtual’ simulations, computerized killingsystems, and a growing distanciation of theoperator from the sites of the killing and thekilled. In the process, the realities of urbanwar—at least for some—start to blur seam-lessly with the wider cultures of sci-fi, film,video games and popular entertainment(Thussu and Freedman, 2003).

Take, for example, the unmanned, lowaltitude ‘Predator’ aircraft that are alreadybeing used for extra-judicial assassinations ofalleged ‘terrorists’ (and whoever happens tobe close by) in the Yemen, Afghanistan andIraq whilst being ‘piloted’ from a Florida airbase 8 or 10,000 miles away. For the USmilitary personnel doing the piloting, this‘virtual’ work is almost indistinguishablefrom a ‘shoot-em-up’ video game (exceptthat the people who die are real). “At the endof the work day”, one Predator operatorrecently boasted during Gulf War II, “youwalk back into the rest of life in America”(quoted in Newman, 2003).

As war is increasingly consumed by avoyeuristic public, so digital technologiesbring the vicarious thrills of urban war directto the homes of news-hungry consumers.Consumption of the Iraq war by people inthe USA, for example, offered a wide rangeof satellite image-based maps of the City aslittle more than an array of targets, to bedestroyed from the air, in newspapers or onmedia websites. Thus:

“The New York Times provided a dailysatellite map of Baghdad as a city of targets.On the web, USA Today’s interactive mapof ‘Downtown Baghdad’ invited its users:


“Get a satellite-eye view of Baghdad.Strategic sites and bombing targets aremarked, but you can click on any quadrantfor a close up’. The site also includedimages of targets ‘before’ and ‘after’ airstrikes. The Washington Post’s interactivesinvited the viewer to ‘roll over the numbersto see what targets were hit on which day;click to read more about the targets.”(Gregory, 2004b, p. 229)

In a perverse twist, corporate media andentertainment industries increasingly provideboth computer games and films which vir-tually simulate recent urban wars to massparticipants, and the virtual and physicalsimulations of cities that US forces use tohone their warfare skills for fighting inKabul, Baghdad or Freetown.

This is one example of the ways in whichthe actual prosecution of wars is mergingmore and more with electronic entertainmentindustries. “The US military is preparing forwars that will be fought in the same manneras they are electronically represented, onreal-time networks and by live feed videos,on the PC and the TV actually and virtually”(Der Derian, 2002, p. 61). The “military nowmobilizes science fiction writers and otherfuturologists to plan for the wars of tomor-row just as they consciously recruit video-game playing adolescents to fight the sameconflict” (Gray, 1997, p. 190).

James Der Derian (2001) coins the term the“military–industrial–media–entertainmentnetwork” to capture the deepening andincreasingly insidious connections betweenthe military, defence industries, popular cul-ture and electronic entertainment. Here,huge software simulations are constructed torecreate any possible urban warfare scenario,complete with vast forces, casualties, the gazeof the media and three-dimensional, real-time participation by thousands. Hollywoodspecialists of computer-generated films pro-vide extra ‘realism’ in the these simulations;their theme park designers, meanwhile, helpin the construction of the ‘real’ urban warfaretraining cities that are dotted across the USA.Major ‘invasions’—such as the ‘Urban War-

rior’ exercise in March 1999—are evenundertaken on major US cities from air, landand sea to further improve training both forforeign incursions and the control of majordomestic urban unrest. Civilians areemployed in these exercises to play variousparts (Willis, 2003). Such mock invasionshave even been proposed as local economicdevelopment initiatives for declining citycores.

Finally, the US military are deepening theirconnections with corporate news media, sothat the ‘information warfare’ side of theiroperations—i.e. propaganda—can be moresuccessful. Just as Al Qaida timed the secondplane’s impact on 9/11 so that the world’snews media could beam it live to billions ofastonished onlookers, so the ‘Shock andAwe’ strategy at the start of the US bombingof Baghdad was a carefully orchestratedmedia spectacle (with the world’s TV jour-nalists lined up in a major hotel a short, butsafe, distance way from the carefully selec-ted—and empty—buildings that were pin-pointed for GPS-based destruction). Thus,both formal and informal attacks againstcities emerge as rhizomatic, internationallynetworked operations orchestrated withglobal media representation in mind. Both AlQaeda and the US military are transnationalorganizations concerned as much with sym-bolic effects as with the real devastation oflocal sites (Zizek, 2003). “This war takesplace in the invisible space of the terrorimaginary of the US (attacks on buildingsand government, germ infection, etc.) and inthe visibly impoverished landscape of Afgha-nistan” (Aretxaga, 2003, p. 144).

James Lukaszewiski, a US public relationscounsellor who advises the US military,admits that the links between terrorist orga-nizations and the global media are equallyinsidious:

“media coverage and terrorism are soulmates—virtually inseparable. They feed offeach other. They together create a dance ofdeath—the one for political or ideologicalmotives, the other for commercial success.


Terrorist activities are high profile,ratings-building events. The news medianeed to prolong these stories because theybuild viewership and readership.” (cited inRampton and Stauber, 2003, p. 134)

Claire Sponster (1992) terms the particularobsession with decayed cityscapes withincyberpunk depictions on urban futures a“geopolitics of urban decay and cyberneticplay”. Whilst these have moved beyond thecommon sci-fi obsession with post-nuclearcities during the Cold War:

“the physical settings of [such] cyberpunkstories look strikingly like the settling ofany post-holocausts story: blighted,rubble-strewn, broken-down cityspaces;vast terrains of decay, bleakness, and thedetritus of civilization; and the nearcomplete absence of a benign and beautifulnature.” (Sponster, 1992, p. 253)

The vast array of ‘virtual reality’ and simula-tion games, where players can be masters ofurban annihilation, further demonstrate theblurring of the actual and virtual killing ofurban places (and their inhabitants). Threeranges of games are relevant here.

First, there are simulated urban construc-tion games—like the SimCities™ series. Inthese participants endlessly construct, anddestroy, cityscapes in repeated cycles ofvirtual urban cataclysms (Sponster, 1992;Bleecker, 1994). One SimCity™ introductionand guide available on the Web describes thefascination with virtual urban destructionamongst players thus:

“My name is Dr Wright and I will be yourguide and teacher as you set out to createbustling cities of sprawling urbanwastelands. As Mayor, the choice is yours.Let’s start off by destroying Tokyo! Studiesshow that nine out of ten mayors begintheir careers with a frenzy of destruction. . . Another curious fact about SimCity™mayors is that one disaster is never enough.The reasoning goes something like this:“gee, that monster was great, but there mustbe half a dozen buildings still standing. I

wonder what it would take to destroyEVERYTHING!” . . . Simply point at thedisaster(s) of you choice and push B toactivate it.” (original emphasis)

Second, there are virtual combat gamesdesigned to allow Western users to ‘fight’enemies in far-off cities. These provideomnipotent players with ‘realistic—andoften devastated—(usually Middle Eastern)cities in which to annihilate racialized anddehumanized enemies again and again. Therhetoric and marketing of such games, echo-ing George Bush’s nationalistic discourses of‘protecting freedom’ and ‘ensuring democ-racy’, imply that the task of the player is toinfiltrate these cities to rid the world of‘terrorists’ and so ‘fight for freedom’.

The urban war of your choice—BlackHawk Down (Mogadishu), Gulf War I, GulfWar II, the LA Riots, a myriad of urban‘anti-terrorist’ operations’—can thus be elec-tronically simulated and consumed as enter-tainment. The comments of participants arevery telling here. For example, a Black HawkDown player admits that “those graphics areso sweet you can almost feel the bulletswhizz past your head and ricochet off wallsaround you. The scenery is good although ifyou are spending time admiring it then your[sic] already dead!” Another gushes:

“when you’re trapped in the middle of ahostile situation and completelysurrounded, it really does get the heartpumping . . . When I first jumped into ahelicopter, took off, saw the enemy in thecity streets below and then activated thehelicopter’s mini-gun it was such a rush! Ialso enjoyed being able to use gunemplacements and firing massive mini-gunsfrom the choppers and watching the emptyshell casings bouncing off the tin roofs [of‘Mogadishu’] below!”

A third range of games brings urban war tothe ‘homeland’. Here the challenge is todestroy ‘terrorists’ who are in the process ofunleashing instant and unknown catastro-phes on Western cities. One user of the


“Tom Clancy Rainbow Six Rogue SpearPlatinum” urban warfare game describes itschallenges. “Urban Operations really add tothe gameplay”, he says, “with missions inlive public areas (London underground,open top markets etc). You can even shootout the lights! [The spaces are] full of publicpeople. And if a stray shot should kill anymember of the public . . . Game Over!”(comments taken from amazon.co.uk; origi-nal emphasis).

Conclusion: looking at ruins

“The human race is, and has always been,ruin-minded.” (Macaulay, 1964, p. 264)

“The ruins are painful to look at, but willhurt more in the long run if we try not tosee.” (Berman, 1996, p. 185)

“Wounded cities, like all cities, are dynamicentities, replete with the potential torecuperate loss and reconstruct anew for thefuture.” (Schneider and Susser, 2003, p. 1)

To conclude this extended essay, it is strik-ingly clear that urbanists and urbanresearchers can no longer neglect eitherattempts to deny, destroy or annihilate cit-ies, or the ‘dark’ side of urban modernitywhich links cities intimately to organized,political violence. In this ‘post–9/11’ and‘post-war on terror’ world, urban research-ers and social scientists—like everyoneelse—are being forced to begin addressingtheir taboos about attempted city-killing,place annihilation, ‘urbicide’ and the urbani-zation of war. In a parallel process, inter-national relations theorists, geopoliticalresearchers and sociologists of war, arebeing forced to consider urban and sub-national spaces as crucial geopolitical sites,often for the first time.

As a result, researchers in both traditionsare now once again starting to explore, andexcavate, the spaces and practices that emergeat the intersections of urbanism, terrorismand warfare. There is a growing acknowl-

edgement that violent catastrophe, crafted byhumans, is part and parcel of modern urbanlife. A much needed, specifically urban,geopolitics is thus slowly (re)emerging whichaddresses the telescoping connectionsbetween transnational geopolitical transfor-mations and very local acts of violenceagainst urban sites. This emerging body ofwork is trying to unearth, as Diken andLaustsen put it, “the way in which discipline,control, and terror coexist in today’s imagi-nary and real urban geographies” (2002, p.291).

As an exploratory synthesis, this essay hasdeveloped a particularly broad perspective ofthe ways in which the purposive destructionand annihilation of cities, in war, terror,planning and virtual play, is utterly inter-woven with urban modernity. Two conclu-sions are apparent from this wide-rangingdiscussion.

First, as the gaze of critical urban socialscience starts to fall on the purposive ruina-tion and annihilation of place, so this synthe-sis underlines five, related, urban researchchallenges. First, the research and profes-sional taboos that cloak the geopolitical andstrategic archaeologies, and spatialities, ofmodern urbanism must be undermined, andunderstood. Second, the ‘hidden’, militarizedhistories and spatialities of modern urbanplanning and state terror must be excavatedand relentlessly exposed. Third, the charac-teristics of city spaces and infrastructuresthat make them the choices par excellence ofthose seeking to commit terrorist acts requiredetailed analysis, as do the impacts of theseacts on the shape, condition and imagining ofcities and urban life. Fourth, the telescoping,transnational connections between the geo-politics of war and ‘empire’, and politicaleconomies of production, consumption,migration, the media and resistance requirerigorous theorization and analysis. Andfinally, the fast-growing, and usually hiddenworlds of ‘shadow’ urban research, throughwhich the world’s military perceive, recon-struct and target urban spaces must beactively uncovered.


Our second conclusion, of course, must bepolitically, rather than analytically, norma-tive. This reflects the palpable risk that aglobal polarization will emerge around thetwo alternative fundamentalisms that cur-rently so threaten to destabilize, and devas-tate, our world. The clear imperative here isto forcibly reject both of the racist, masculi-nist fundamentalisms which are currentlylocked in a globe-spanning circle of intensi-fying atrocity and counter-atrocity. As Rosa-lind Petchesky has argued, these offer achoice between “the permanent war machine(or permament security state) and the reignof holy terror” (cited in Joseph and Sharma,2003, p. xxi). Untrammelled, the self-perpe-tuating cycles of atrocity between urbanterror and state counter-terror, that thesediscourses legitimize and sustain, offer up anextremely bleak urban future indeed. This,perhaps, is the ultimate urban dystopia. Forit is crucial to realize, as the Israeli–Pales-tinian quagmire demonstrates, that informalterror and state counter-terror tend to beumbilically connected. In the end, they tend,tragically, to be self-perpetuating in an end-less circle of intensifying atrocity (Graham,2004d). As Zulaika argues:

“the ultimate catastrophe is that . . . acategorically ill-defined, perpetuallydeferred, simple minded Good-versus-Evilwar [‘against terror’] echoes and re-createsthe very absolutist mentality andexceptionalist tactics of the insurgentterrorists. By formally adopting theterrorists’ own game—one that bydefinition lacks rules of engagement,definite endings, clear alignments betweenenemies and fiends, or formal arrangementsof any sort, military, political, legal, orethical—the inevitable danger lies inreproducing it endlessly.” (2003, p. 198)

As a global polarization threatens to occurbetween those who are pro-‘Western’ andthose who are pro-‘radical Islam’—stokedby sickening and self-fulfilling circles ofinformal and state terror and fundamentalistpropaganda—one thing is sure. Normatively,

cities must be seen as key sites, perhaps thekey sites, for nurturing the tolerances, dia-sporic mixings, and multicultural spaces thatare needed to push fundamentalist fantasiesof all sorts to the lunatic fringes where theybelong (Safier, 2001; Sandercock, 2003).Arguably, our planet currently faces nogreater challenge.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge thesupport of the British Academy, withoutwhich the research that led to this essaywould not have been possible. Thanks also tothe referees of the paper for their valuablecomments. All the usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1 The term ‘postmortem city’ was first coined by ChrisHables Gray in his book Postmodern War (1997).He coined the term to describe an aerial ‘damageassessment’ map of Tokyo after the US fire bombingdevastated the city on 9/10 March 1945. Thisraid— the most murderous act of war in humanhistory—killed over 130,000 civilians in a fewhours (see Gray, 1997, p. 86).

2 See, for example, Lang (1995), Berman (1996),Bollens (2001), Catterall (2001), Mendieta (2001),Safier, (2001), Coward (2002), Davis (2002), Dikenand Laustsen (2002), Prodanovic (2002), Vanderbilt(2002), Bishop and Clancey (2003), Cole (2003),Farish (2003), Graham (2003, 2004a, 2004b,2004c), Gregory (2003), Schneider and Susser(2003), Sassen (2002).

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Stephen Graham is based in the GeographyDepartment at the University of Durham,UK. E-mail: [email protected].

Graham, Stephen. "Postmortem city: Towards an urban geopolitics." City 8.2 (2004): 165-196. APA

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