The document discusses the US military's "urban turn" and its attempts to optimize warfare strategies for urban environments through surveillance, simulation, and robotics technologies. It argues that cities are increasingly seen as "battlespaces" where residents become "targets." The military seeks to reconfigure urban spaces, mobilize simulations for training, and develop persistent surveillance systems to "unveil" cities and track potential threats. However, the strategies are contested within the military and unlikely to achieve the level of control desired in unconquerable urban insurgencies. The "urban turn" says more about domestic political and social fantasies than objective assessments of military options.
Stephen graham infrastructure disruptions as extreme eventsStephen Graham
An overview of how disruptions to the networks of infrastructure than keep cities running -- water, energy, transport and communications -- bring crises and emergency on a highly urbanised planet
An overview of how Israel's warfare against Palestinian civilians and cities since 2002 amounts to a strategy of 'urbicide' -- the deliberate killing of the city
Stephen graham switching societies off: war, infrastructure, geopoliticsStephen Graham
A detailed look at how contemporary war involves the devastation of the essential civilian infrastructures of cities by state militaries. The presentation also looks in depth at the devastating and often hidden effects of these actions on urban civilians
Prof. Stephen Graham; Cities as Battlespace: The New Military UrbanismStephen Graham
An exposé of how contemporary political violence now operates through the sites, spaces and infrastructures of everyday urban life.
Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, "Cities as Battlespace: The New Military Urbanism', a presentation based on the 2010 Verso book 'Cities Under Siege', traces the spread of political violence through the sites, spaces, infrastructure and symbols of the world’s rapidly expanding metropolitan areas.
Stephen graham infrastructure disruptions as extreme eventsStephen Graham
An overview of how disruptions to the networks of infrastructure than keep cities running -- water, energy, transport and communications -- bring crises and emergency on a highly urbanised planet
An overview of how Israel's warfare against Palestinian civilians and cities since 2002 amounts to a strategy of 'urbicide' -- the deliberate killing of the city
Stephen graham switching societies off: war, infrastructure, geopoliticsStephen Graham
A detailed look at how contemporary war involves the devastation of the essential civilian infrastructures of cities by state militaries. The presentation also looks in depth at the devastating and often hidden effects of these actions on urban civilians
Prof. Stephen Graham; Cities as Battlespace: The New Military UrbanismStephen Graham
An exposé of how contemporary political violence now operates through the sites, spaces and infrastructures of everyday urban life.
Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, "Cities as Battlespace: The New Military Urbanism', a presentation based on the 2010 Verso book 'Cities Under Siege', traces the spread of political violence through the sites, spaces, infrastructure and symbols of the world’s rapidly expanding metropolitan areas.
RobowarTM dreams US military technophilia and global south urbanisationStephen Graham
Graham, Stephen. "Robowar™ dreams: US military technophilia and global south urbanisation 1." City 12.1 (2008): 25-49.
This paper seeks to open up to critical scrutiny the attempts currently being made to re- engineer post-cold war US military power to directly confront global south urbanisation. Through analysing the discourses produced by US military commentators about ‘urban warfare’, and the purported military, technological and robotic solutions that might allow US forces to dominate and control global south cities in the near to medium-term future, the paper demonstrates that such environments are being widely essentialised as spaces which necessarily work to undermine the USA’s military’s high-technology systems for surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting. The paper shows how, amid the ongoing urban insurgency in Iraq, widescale efforts are being made to ‘urbanise’ these military systems so that US military forces can attempt to assert high-tech dominance over the fine-grained geographies of global south cities in the future. This includes an examination of how, by 2007, US forces, in close collaboration with the Israeli military, had already begun to imple- ment ideas of robotised or automated urban warfare to counter the complex insurgencies in Iraq. The paper concludes with a critique of the urban and robotic turns in US military doctrine.
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Graham, Stephen. "When life itself is war: On the urbanization of military an...Stephen Graham
It is now well established that both the ‘war on terror’ and its offshoots have been conspicuously marked by overwhelmingly urban discourses, materialities and practices. Deliberately transdisciplinary, synthetical and polemical in scope, this article seeks to demonstrate that new ideologies of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying the militarization of urban life in the contemporary period. The article delineates the ways in which contemporary processes of militarization — which surround what I label the ‘new military urbanism’ — raise fundamental questions for critical urban scholarship because of the ways in which they work to normalize the permanent targeting of everyday urban sites, circulations and populations. Focusing primarily on US security and military doctrine, culture and technology, this article exploresthenewmilitaryurbanism’sfiveinterrelatedfoundationsindetail,namely:the urbanization of military and security doctrine; the links between militarized control technologies and digitized urban life; the cultural performances of militarized media consumption; the emerging urban political economies of the ‘security’ industries; and the new state spaces of violence. Following the elaboration of each of these themes, the article concludes by identifying ways forward for critical urban research in exposing and confronting the normalization of the new military urbanism.
Graham, Stephen. "Switching cities off: Urban infrastructure and US air power...Stephen Graham
In this follow-up to a piece originally published in City 8(2), Stephen Graham offers a detailed portrait of the tactics and techniques of contemporary urban warfare. As cities have become more reliant than ever on networks, and as their infrastructures have become more fragile due to the vagaries of neoliberal privatization, urban-based warfare, which targets the systems—informational, medical, agricultural, and technological—that sustain the civilian populations of cities, has had disastrous consequences. Although terrorists have chosen to target urban infrastructures in an attempt to disrupt modern urban life, Graham suggests that the greater threat to metropolitan existence comes from systematic attempts by traditional powers, such as the United States, to disrupt urban networks, thereby effectively ‘switching cities off’. Policies of what Graham calls ‘deliberate demodernization’ have become the hallmark of US air power. Although such policies are thought to bring about asymmetrical military advantage, they also place civilian populations at risk. Such policies represent thus perpetuation of total war in a different key. Graham concludes by calling for further research into the new geopolitics of infrastructural warfare.
This article aims to show how science and technology are used in cyber warfare as one of the weapons of modern warfare and what to do to use it solely for the good of humanity.
Graham, Stephen. "Postmortem city: Towards an urban geopolitics." City 8.2 (2...Stephen Graham
Graham, Stephen. "Postmortem city: Towards an urban geopolitics 1." City 8.2 (2004): 165-196.
We tend to see contemporary cities through a peace-time lens and war as somehow exceptional. 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 intimately woven into the fabric of cities and practices of city planners. He draws out the aggression which 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 to enable the oppressive state forces to patrol and subordinate the feared masses. Other examples take us through the fear of aerial bombardment as an influence on Le Corbusier and modernist urban design to the meticulous planners who devised and monitored the slaughter in Dresden, Tokyo and other targets in World War 2. Later episodes, some drawing on previously classified material, show how military thinking conditioned urbanisation in the Cold War and does so in the multiple ‘wars’ now under way—against ‘terrorism’ and the enemy within. City has carried some exceptional work on war and ‘urbicide’ but this paper argues that, for the most part, the social sciences are in denial and ends with a call for action to confront, reveal and challenge the militarisation of urban space.
Elite Avenues: Flyovers, Freeways and the Politics of Urban MobilityStephen Graham
Development and planning elites across many of the burgeoning megacities of the global south still work powerfully to fetishise elevated highways or flyovers as part of their efforts at “worlding” their cities. In such a context, and given the neglect of such processes in recent urban and mobilities literatures, this article presents an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the urban and vertical politics of raised flyovers, freeways and expressways. It argues that such highways need to be seen as important elements within broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and secession within and between cities which privilege the mobilities of the privileged. The paper falls into six sections. Following the introduction, the complex genealogies of flyover urban design are discussed. Discussion then moves to the vertical politics of flyovers in the west Bank and post-Apartheid South Africa; the elite imaginings surrounding flyover construction in Mumbai; the political struggles surrounding the ribbons of space beneath flyover systems; and the efforts to bury or re-appropriate the landscapes of raised flyovers.
Bunkering down the geography of elite residential basement development in londonStephen Graham
Much has been written about the “luxified skies” – “high-rise”, “super-prime” housing for the super-rich – that has been sprouting up across London. Thus far, less attention has been paid to what has been happening to the subterranean city. The “luxified skies” are highly visible reminders of elite “verticality” but, what we might term, “luxified troglodytism” is also an important aspect of London’s changing geometries of wealth, power and architecture. In this paper, we map out in detail the emerging subterranean geography of residential basement development across London since 2008. The very wealthy, it turns out, have been “bunkering down” across certain parts of London, to an extent hitherto little understood. Some 7,328 new residential basements underneath existing houses had been granted planning permission up to late-2019. Over 1,500 of them are of a size that their locations might best be thought of as marking out a distinct plutocratic “basement belt”.
Vertical : The city from satellites to bunkersStephen Graham
A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet
Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.
Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?
Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world.
Offering a critical response to the dominant vision of the smart city, this talk seeks to look beyond the seductive imagery and hype that surrounds emerging smart city paradigms. In their place, it explores arrange of critical perspectives to smart city planning that are emerging across the social sciences and activist communities, in various places across the world. These critiques centre, broadly, on ways in which smart city paradigms radically deepen urban surveillance ; the way they embed power into corporate urban operating systems; the way the glossy hype and marketing hides tendencies toward authoritarianism and centralized power ; and the way in which ‘smart’ city labels are used to camouflage the construction of highly elitist urban enclaves. The talk will finish by exploring efforts to mobilise digital media to more democratic and egalitarian urban vision.
Transcending the surface graham: The New Techno-Utopian Dreams (and Realities...Stephen Graham
A presentation about a range of utopian projects for moving about cities above and below the surface via tunnels. orbital travel, supersonic airliners and vertical take off and autonomous 'sky taxis'.
Subterranean urban politics: Insurgency, sanctuary, exploration and tourismStephen Graham
A presentation, drawing on my book 'Vertical', exploring the politics of the urban subterranean. The wide-ranging discussion explores the subterranean as a source of class threats and insurrections; as a sanctuary; as a space of exploration; and as a site for tourism.
Elite avenues: Flyovers, freeways and the politics of urban mobilityStephen Graham
Development and planning elites across many of the burgeoning megacities of the Global South still work powerfully to fetishise elevated highways or flyovers as part of their efforts at ‘worlding’ their cities. In such a context, and given the neglect of such processes in recent urban and mobilities literatures, this paper presents an international and interdis- ciplinary analysis of the urban and vertical politics of raised flyovers, freeways and express- ways. It argues that such highways need to be seen as important elements within broader processes of three-dimensional social segregation and secession within and between cities which privilege the mobilities of the privileged. The paper falls into six sections. Following the introduction, the complex genealogies of flyover urban design are discussed. Discussion then moves to the vertical politics of flyovers in the West Bank and post-Apartheid South Africa; the elite imaginings surrounding flyover construction in Mumbai; the political struggles surrounding the ribbons of space beneath flyover systems; and the efforts to bury or reappropriate the landscapes of raised flyovers.
This presentation is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of
radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward
Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention
in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality’—so
central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores
in detail how the dominance of these narratives have been central to elite takeovers, and ‘luxification’, of the urban skies through the proliferation of condo towers for the super-rich.
Case studies are drawn from Vancouver, New York, London, Mumbai and Guatemala City and the broader vertical cultural and visual politics of the process are explored. The discussion finishes by exploring the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling, the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities.
Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fictionStephen Graham
Unerringly, across its whole history, urban science fiction has offered up imagined cities that
operate about remarkably similar and highly verticalised visions. These are heavily dominated
by politics of class, resistance and revolution that are starkly organized around vertically
stratified and vertically exaggerated urban spaces. From the early and definitive efforts
of H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang, through J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, to many cyberpunk
classics, this essay – the latest in a series in City on the vertical dimensions of cities1 –
reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics and
contestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world. The essay has four parts. It
begins by disentangling in detail the ways in which the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang,
Ballard and various cyberpunk authors were centrally constituted through vertical structures,
landscapes, metaphors and allegories. The essay’s second part then teases out the
complex linkages between verticalised sci-fi imaginaries and material cityscapes that are
actually constructed, lived and experienced. Stressing the impossibility of some clean and
binary opposition between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities, the essay explores how verticalised
projects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginary futures, architectural schemes and urban theories
mingle and resonate together in complex, unpredictable and important ways which do
much to shape contemporary urban landscapes. The third section of the essay explores such
connections through the cases of retro-futuristic urban megaprojects in the Gulf and forests
of towers recently constructed in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The essay’s final discussion
draws on these cases to explore the possibilities that sci-fi imaginaries offer for contesting
the rapid verticalisation of cities around the world.
Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers Stephen Graham Stephen Graham
A presentation outlining some of the themes to my new book, 'Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers' (Verso, 2016).
"A revolutionary reimagining of the cities we live in, the air above us, and what goes on in the earth beneath our feet
Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map, but must now be understood as a series of vertical strata that reach from the satellites that encircle our planet to the tunnels deep within the ground. In Vertical, Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level: how the geography of inequality, politics, and identity is determined in terms of above and below.
Starting at the edge of earth’s atmosphere and, in a series of riveting studies, descending through each layer, Graham explores the world of drones, the city from the viewpoint of an aerial bomber, the design of sidewalks and the hidden depths of underground bunkers. He asks: why was Dubai built to be seen from Google Earth? How do the super-rich in São Paulo live in their penthouses far above the street? Why do London billionaires build vast subterranean basements? And how do the technology of elevators and subversive urban explorers shape life on the surface and subsurface of the earth?
Vertical will make you look at the world around you anew: this is a revolution in understanding your place in the world."
See https://www.versobooks.com/books/2237-vertical
Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fictionStephen Graham
Unerringly, across its whole history, urban science fiction has offered up imagined cities that operate about remarkably similar and highly verticalised visions. These are heavily dominated
by politics of class, resistance and revolution that are starkly organized around vertically stratified and vertically exaggerated urban spaces. From the early and definitive efforts
of H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang, through J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel 'High Rise', to many cyberpunk classics, this essay – the latest in a series on the vertical dimensions of cities –reflects on how vertical imaginaries in urban science fiction intersect with the politics and contestations of the fast-verticalising cities around the world. The essay has four parts. It begins by disentangling in detail the ways in which the sci-fi visions of Wells, Lang, Ballard and various cyberpunk authors were centrally constituted through vertical structures, landscapes, metaphors and allegories. The essay’s second part then then teases out the complex linkages between verticalised sci-fi imaginaries and material cityscapes that are actually constructed, lived and experienced. Stressing the impossibility of some clean and binary opposition between ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ cities, the essay explores how verticalised
projects, material cities, sci-fi texts, imaginary futures, architectural schemes and urban theories mingle and resonate together in complex, unpredictable and important ways which do much to shape contemporary urban landscapes. The third section of the essay explores such connections through the cases of retro-futuristic urban megaprojects in the Gulf and forests of towers recently constructed in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The
essay’s final discussion draws on these cases to explore the possibilities that sci-fi imaginaries offer for contesting the rapid verticalisation of cities around the world.
Histories of the Future in Contemporary Megastructures
An exploration of the development of multi-level cities around the world, and their links to historic futurism
Super-tall and ultra-deep: The Politics of the ElevatorsStephen Graham
Entire libraries can be filled with volumes exploring the cultures, politics and geographies
of the largely horizontal mobilities and transportation infrastructures that are
intrinsic to urban modernity (highways, railways, subways, public transit and so on).
And yet the recent ‘mobilities turn’ has almost completely neglected the cultural
geographies and politics of vertical transportation within and between the buildings of
vertically-structured cityscapes. Attempting to rectify this neglect, this article seeks,
first, to bring elevator travel centrally into discussions about the cultural politics of
urban space and, second, to connect elevator urbanism to the even more neglected
worlds of elevator-based descent in ultra-deep mining. The article addresses, in turn:
the historical emergence of elevator urbanism; the cultural significance of the elevator
as spectacle; the global ‘race’ in elevator speed; shifts towards the ‘splintering’ of
elevator experiences; experiments with new mobility systems which blend elevators
and automobiles; problems of vertical abandonment; and, finally, the neglected vertical
politics of elevator-based ‘ultra-deep’ mining.
Vertical ground: making geology graham icus 2016Stephen Graham
Key note presentation at the Island Cities and Urban Archipelagos 2016. 07-12 March 2016, Hong Kong, University of Hong Kong
See http://www.islandcities.org/icua2016.html
Life support: The political ecology of urban airStephen Graham
Humans, increasingly, manufacture their own air. In and around the three-dimensional
aerial environments within and above urban regions, this manufacture of air reaches particular
levels of intensity. For a species that expires without air in two or three minutes,
this anthropogenic manufacture of air is of incalculable importance. Curiously, however,
urban air remains remarkably neglected within the political–ecological literatures. Accordingly,
this paper suggests a range of key themes, which a political ecology of urban air needs
to address. These touch upon the links between global warming, urban heat-island effects
and killer urban heatwaves; urban pollution crises; the paradoxes of urban pollution; horizontal
movements of polluted air; the vertical politics of urban air; the construction of vertical
condominium structures for elites; the vicious circles that characterise air-conditioned
urbanism; heat-related deaths of workers building air-conditioned structures in increasingly
hot climates; the growth of large-scale air-conditioned environments; and, finally, the
manipulation of urban air through political violence.
Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science...Stephen Graham
Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature
Lucy Hewitt and Stephen Graham
This paper seeks to intersect two recent trends in urban research. First, it takes seriously the recognition that established traditions of research concerned with urban space have tended to privilege the horizontal extension of cities to the neglect of their vertical or volumetric extension. Second, the paper contributes to the resurgence of interest among social scientists in the validity of fiction – and especially speculative or science fiction – as a source of critical commentary and as a mode of knowledge that can exist in close reciprocity with non-fictional work. From these two starting points the paper develops a reading of the dialogue between the representations of vertical urban life that have featured in landmark works of 20th-century science fiction literature and key themes in contemporary urban analysis.
Water Wars in Mumbai
Stephen Graham, Renu Desai, and Colin McFarlane
Beyond the Pale
The Mumbai Mirror, January 8, 2010. A photograph shows a line of proud Mumbai police officers standing behind row upon row of what appear at first sight to be rusted machine guns (see fig. 1). But this is not one of the arms caches regularly unearthed to demonstrate the force’s effectiveness against the myriad terrorist networks that regularly target urban sites in contemporary India. Rather, the objects are water booster pumps, confiscated in a new campaign of dawn raids targeting “water theft” by slum dwellers in the Shivaji Nagar and
Govandi districts (see fig. 2 map below).
“Stealing Water to Earn a Few Bucks?” the headline reads. “Pay a Hefty
Price!” (Sathe 2010). The article details how the raids are being backed up by new legal moves to criminalize certain uses of water. Hundreds of people, arrested for installing and using the pumps, are to be prosecuted under draconian and nonbailable laws such as the Prevention of Damages to Public Property Act. All this activity is portrayed unproblematically as a heroic response to the threat that water theft in slums poses to the wider, formal, legitimate, and law-abiding city. “Pilferages, if not controlled,” writes the author, “could exhaust the potable water reserves before the next monsoon” (Sathe 2010).
Such statements tap into a mainstream discourse according to which recent poor monsoons have led to a major “water crisis” in Mumbai, necessitating radical, emergency measures to address widespread “water theft” or “water pilferage”— especially by the urban poor. What such discourses occlude, however, are the ways that current systems of urban water provision work to systematically dehydrate and profit from urban slum communities, while water wastage by the affluent and their preferred urban facilities goes unchecked.
Super-tall and Ultra-deep: The Cultural Politics of the ElevatorStephen Graham
Entire libraries can be filled with volumes exploring the cultures, politics and geo- graphies of the largely horizontal mobilities and transportation infrastructures that are intrinsic to urban modernity (highways, railways, subways, public transit and so on). And yet the recent ‘mobilities turn’ has almost completely neglected the cultural geographies and politics of vertical transportation within and between the buildings of vertically-structured cityscapes. Attempting to rectify this neglect, this article seeks, first, to bring elevator travel centrally into discussions about the cultural politics of urban space and, second, to connect elevator urbanism to the even more neglected worlds of elevator-based descent in ultra-deep mining. The article addresses, in turn: the historical emergence of elevator urbanism; the cultural significance of the eleva- tor as spectacle; the global ‘race’ in elevator speed; shifts towards the ‘splintering’ of elevator experiences; experiments with new mobility systems which blend elevators and automobiles; problems of vertical abandonment; and, finally, the neglected ver- tical politics of elevator-based ‘ultra-deep’ mining.
1. Dreams of Omniscience:
Urbanization and the US ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University
2. I Dreams Frustrated? Urbanization and the US
‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA)
“It is now possible to use America’s military might with a
greatly reduced chance of suffering friendly casualties or
equipment loss. The reduction of American casualties
afforded by the marriage between stealthy aircraft and
precision guided munitions has had a profound effect on
America’s willingness to intervene militarily. The military
must also adapt to its new role as a tool of choice, rather
than a tool of last resort” (O’Mara, 2003)
11. From Battlefields to ‘Battlespace’
• ‘Fourth generation’, ‘networkcentric,’ ‘non-traditional,’
‘assymetric’, ‘full spectrum’
warfare
• ‘Battlespace’ is “deep, high, wide,
and simultaneous: there is no longer
a front or a rear” (Blackmore,
2005)
• Multi-scalar: nano to planetary
• Nonlinear, ‘swarming’ forces
operating within and through cities,
infrastructures, spaces across
transnational scales
• All terrain a ‘battlespace’ within
permanent state of exception and
hyper-militarisation: ‘new normal’
• Collapse of military-civil distinctions
12. Global South Cities as Prime Battlespaces
“For Western military forces,
asymmetric warfare in urban areas
will be the greatest challenge of this
century. The city will be the strategic
high ground – whoever controls it
will dictate the course of future
events in the world” (Dickson,
2002)
US: 26 conflicts: 1984 and 2004: 21
have involved urban areas; 10 have
been exclusively urban
14. But Fast-Growing Cities
Seen as Interrupters
of Global and Vertical
Networked Omniscience
“In simple terms walls tend to get in the way of
today’s battlefield communications and sensor
technologies” (Hewish and Pengelley, 2001)
“The technologies traditionally ascribed to the
current Revolution in Military Affairs phenomenon
will have negligible impact on Military Operations in
Urban Terrain” (Harris, 2003)
15. RAND: A Consequent
‘Urbanization of Insurgency’
“Opposition forces will
camouflage themselves in the
background noise of the
urban environment.
Weapons hidden beneath a
cloak, in a child’s carriage, or
rolled in a carpet, can get
past security personnel
undetected” (DIRC 1997)
16. Forced Proximity and Groundedness
• Ralph Peters: ”The long term trend in openarea combat is toward overhead dominance
by US forces. Battlefield awareness [for US
forces] may prove so complete, and
‘precision’ weapons so widely available and
effective, that enemy ground-based combat
systems will not be able to survive in the
deserts, plains, and fields that have seen so
many of history’s main battles.” The United
States’ “enemies will be forced into cities and
other complex terrain, such as industrial
developments and inter-city sprawl” (1997).
”The long term trend in open-area combat’, writes the leading U.S. ‘urban
warfare’ commentator, Ralph Peters (1996, 6), “is toward overhead dominance
by US forces.” As a result, he predicts that “Battlefield awareness [for US forces]
may prove so complete, and ‘precision’ weapons so widely available and
effective, that enemy ground-based combat systems will not be able to survive in
the deserts, plains, and fields that have seen so many of history’s main battles.”
As a result, Peters argues that the United States’ “enemies will be forced into
cities and other complex terrain, such as industrial developments and inter-city
sprawl” (1997, 4). Grau and Kipp, (1999 4), concur, suggesting that:
“urban combat is i ncreasingly likely, since high-precision weapons
threaten operational and tactical manoeuvre in open
terrain.
Commanders who lack sufficient high-precision weapons will f ind
cities appealing terrain […], provided they know the city better than
their opponent does and can mobilize the city’s resources and
population to their purposes.”
34. II Dreams Reclaimed? The ‘Urban Turn’ in the RMA
the perception
“The time has come to change
that the high-tech US war machine fights at a
disadvantage in urban areas” (Houlgate, 2004)
“Urban areas should become our preferred
medium for fighting. We should optimize our
force structure for it, rather than relegating it
to Appendix Q in our fighting doctrine,
treating it as the exception rather than the
norm. It is time to tell Sun Tzu to sit down.
Instead of fearing it, we must own the city” Lt.
Col. Leonhard, US Army (2003)
Focus of military technoscience moves from
ageographical and global networked power to
microgeographical treatment of urban spaces
35. 1. Reconfiguring urban space
Cities not a mere backdrop:
“Contemporary urban warfare plays
itself out within a constructed, real or
imaginary architecture, and through
the destruction, construction,
reorganization, and subversion of
space.” (Weizman, 2006)
48. Manuel Chaves, who runs the special effects suite built
into the urban warfare site at Fort Wainwright, Alaska:
“We have a wide variety of special effects smells we
can do. For instance coffee, apple pie, dead bodies,
burning rubber, diesel fumes. I can do nine different
buildings, nine different smells. Generally, if it’s a
burning building, we put something really nasty in there
like burning bodies.”
•
49. RAND (2006) on Playas, New Mexico: “The architecture
of the abandoned town [should be] modified to include
walled compounds of the type that US troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan must at times isolate and clear.”
62. 3. Unveiling Orientalised Space:
Surveillance Systems for
‘Unconventional War Targets’
• Defense Science Board (2004) US forces need another
“Manhattan Project” for tracking and locating targets in
‘assymetric’ urban warfare to “locate, identify and track
people, things and activitiesin an environment of one in a
million”
67. Combat Zones That See:
Persistent Urban Surveillance
• Observing ‘change’ rather than ‘scenery’
• Identify purported notions of urban ‘normality’ against the
‘abnormal’ behaviours and patterns that can then be assessed as
targets.
• CTS “explores concepts, develops algorithms, and delivers
systems for utilising large numbers (1000s) of algorithmic video
cameras to provide the close-in sensing demanded for military
operations in urban terrain.”
• “Will produce video understanding algorithms embedded in
surveillance systems for automatically monitoring video feeds to
generate, for the first time, the reconnaissance, surveillance, and
targeting information needed to provide close-in, continuous,
always-on support for military operations in urban terrain”
80. Gordon Johnson, Leader,
‘Unmanned Effects’, US Army’s ‘Project Alpha’:
“if it can get within one meter, it’s killed the person
who’s firing. So, essentially, what we’re saying is that
anyone who would shoot at our forces would die.
Before he can drop that weapon and run, he’s probably
already dead. Well now, these cowards in Baghdad
would have to play with blood and guts every time
they shoot at one of our folks. The costs of poker went
up significantly. The enemy, are they going to give up
blood and guts to kill machines? I’m guessing not”
81. ‘Smart Dust’: Fantasies of Robotised Urban War
“Several large fans are stationed outside
the city limits of an urban target that
our [sic] guys need to take. Upon
appropriate signal, what appears like a
dust cloud emanates from each fan. The
cloud is blown into town where it
quickly dissipates. After a few minutes
of processing by laptop-size processors,
a squadron of small, disposable aircraft
ascends over the city. The little drones
dive into selected areas determined by
the initial analysis of data transmitted by
the fan-propelled swarm. Where they
disperse their nano-payloads.”
Defense Watch 2004
82. “After this, the processors get even more busy. Within minutes the
mobile tactical center have a detailed visual and audio picture of
every street and building in the entire city. Every hostile [person]
has been identified and located.
Unmanned air and ground vehicles can now be vectored directly to
selected targets to take them out, one by one. Those enemy
combatants clever enough to evade actually being taken out by
the unmanned units can then be captured of killed by human
elements”
83. “Behind the fighters, military police and
intelligence personnel process the inhabitants,
electronically reading their attitudes toward the
intervention and cataloguing them into a
database immediately recoverable by every fire
team in the city (even individual weapons might
be able to read personal signatures, firing
immediately upon cueing. Smart munitions track
enemy systems and profiled individuals. Drones
track inhabitants who have been ‘read’ as
potentially hostile and ‘tagged’”
Defense Watch, 2004
84. Conclusions
• The ‘Urban’ Turn in RMA is a distillation of stark
bio/geopolitics of exception, technophiliac
ideologies of permanent war, sci-fi omnipotence
fantasies + supply-push
• Complex intersections of imaginative geographies,
popular geopolitics, surveillance, simulation and
entertainment
• Cities ‘battlespace’; residents ‘targets’; war=forced
and persistent reorganisation of urban space
• Technophiliac and robotic fantasies especially
seductive to politicians and theorists of ‘NetWar’
and RMA after Iraq: The Pentagon’s idea of the
‘Long War’
85. But…
• Highly contested within US military (especially after Iraq)
• Unlikely to begin to reach levels of military effectiveness
and control in what are essentially unwinable wars/
unconquerable cities
• As with all imaginative, colonial geographies, ‘urban’
turn in RMA says much about domestic urban fantasies,
political economies and preoccupations
• ‘Insides’ and ‘outsides’ blur together: simulationsurveillance-corrections-military complex; Katrina as
‘urban operation’; biometric ‘gating’ of Iraqi cities ;
similar surveillance/simulation technologies for
‘homeland’ cities
• RMA “tells us more about Modern Western society than
it does about any objective assessment of military
options” Jeremy Black
86. Above all a (Geo)Politics of Verticality Visibility,
Tracking and (Attempted) Unveiling