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Thank you very much, George, for that very kind introduction.
I'd like to thank the Institute for Geography for the invitation to come and speak today.
I'd like to thank the Kunstpalast for hosting the talk, and I'd like to thank you all for coming.
So it's very nice to be here.
What I want to do is to say a little bit more about this more recent area of work,
which I think does relate quite closely to the theme of the wider cultural programme
that's going on in the Kunstpalast at the moment.
And I'd like to start by perhaps explaining how I made the transition personally
from this broader debate about infrastructure, digital media and urban life
into this more problematic and worrying area of urbanisation and politics
to do with political violence, to do with terrorism and so on.
And the transition really started in 2002 when I was invited along with Simon Marvin,
the co-author of Splintering Urbanism, to an event in Israel.
And we were quite ambivalent about going because of all the problems to do with the occupation in Israel.
But we were invited to go along to an event that was labelled War on the City in the 21st Century.
And we debated whether to go, but in the end we thought we would attend.
We turned up to find this was not an academic conference.
This was a military conference organised by the Israeli military, the British military and the US military.
And the guys were wearing camouflage.
They didn't quite have the urban camouflage that George was talking about, but perhaps.
And the whole debate of the two or three days was about how the urbanisation of space and society
changes the challenges of military activity.
How on earth can militaries take on this radical transformation of space, of architecture, of morphology?
How can they control insurrections, insurgencies in a world where they're not necessarily mobilising
against state militaries anymore, or at least not at the moment.
They're mobilising instead against a whole range of non-state enemies.
Civilian enemies, social movements on the one hand, and they will class those as enemies very often,
going right the way through to questions of full-scale insurrection.
During that time it was a profoundly politicising event because it was just before the 2002
Operation Defence of Shield where the Israeli military went in and destroyed the centre of Jenin.
It was just in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and we would have coffee with the US Marine leaders
saying we're going to go into Iraq, we're going to take out Saddam, and so on.
And everything since then in terms of the politics of the world has reaffirmed, if you like,
the importance of building a more critical social perspective of this neglected area of debate.
What we found in that conference was a whole load of research going on, organised by the police,
by the security services, by the militaries, into cities.
But it's a hidden world. It's a hidden world of research that social science is really not addressing.
And I was really struck during that period that I needed to make that transition.
So, you know, the book Cities Under Sieges, an attempt to try and expose this world where
warfare and political violence are being urbanised and the city is being seen as a highly troublesome
and problematic space, as defined here in 2005 by an MIT PhD student.
Social geographers around the world were celebrating cities as sites of diversity, sites of cosmopolitanism.
The military and the security services tend to see the city as a problematic space,
a space which is hard to control, which is full of huge populations, which is full of political opposition,
which is full of anti-state activities. And these things are as old as cities.
You know, these perceptions of trying to control cities are as old as cities.
I think what we're seeing now is the re-emergence of long-standing fear of urban life
and urban spaces in the post-Cold War environment where states are mobilising against,
not state militaries, but this whole range of vague threats that lurk or are deemed to be inside cities,
Presenters
Prof. Stephen Graham
Zugänglich über
Offener Zugang
Dauer
01:08:16 Min
Aufnahmedatum
2012-05-14
Hochgeladen am
2012-08-02 08:17:25
Sprache
de-DE
It is now well established that both the "war on terror" and its descendents have been heavily constituted through highly urban discourses, materialities and practices. This lecture, which draws on a major book with the same title published recently by Verso, seeks to demonstrate that new ideologies of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying the militarization of urban life in the contemporary period. The lectures delineates the ways in which contemporary processes of militarisation -- 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 normalise the permanent targeting of everyday urban sites, circulations, and populations. Focusing primarily on US military security and military doctrine, culture and technology, this lecture explores the new military urbanism’s five inter-related foundations in detail. These are: the urbanisation of military and security doctrine; the links between militarised control technologies and digitised urban life; the cultural performances of militarised 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 lecture concludes by identifying ways forward for critical urban research in exposing and confronting the normalization of the new military urbanism.