Steve Graham
Early work as an urban planner led to an academic career that focuses on the way in which urban infrastructure is targeted by armies and terrorists. He talks to Olivia Edward about the way in which military techniques are increasingly being used to maintain control of urban areas and why governments need to learn to love cities rather than demonise them.
I became interested in military urbanism about a decade ago when I was researching urban infrastructure. During that time, I was invited to a conference in Israel. It was just after 9/11, and there was a lack of discussion about how the infrastructure of cities was being targeted for various acts of violence.
When we turned up (I went with Professor Simon Marvin of Salford University), we realised that the conference was being run by the US Marine Corps and the Israeli Defence Forces. It was a bunch of guys in uniform with machine guns talking about how they were going to take over Palestinian cities. We didn’t know what to do, but decided we should stay and learn about this totally unknown world. It really opened our eyes to the way the military and governments perceive cities.
There’s a huge amount of effort to understand cities among the world’s military, but they have such a limited view of the urban world. They tend to deny the cultural and social importance of cities, and instead see them as purely physical spaces that get in the way of their weaponry.
The infrastructure of cities is increasingly targeted during conflicts. The Israeli chief of staff referred to a bulldozer as being a ‘strategic weapon around here’. Israeli soldiers regularly demolish Palestinian homes as well as targeting people and infrastructure, as part of their strategy of repression and attempted control.
Governments also engage in strategic bombing of infrastructure. It’s a way of trying to put coercive power onto a civilian population. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, the USA used carefully designed weapons to take out Iraq’s entire electrical system. The bombs were full of carbon fibre, which short-circuits electric systems. The whole of Iraq lost power. This had a cascading effect. The water and sewage systems, whose pumps were electrically powered, stopped working, and the resulting waterborne diseases led to about half a million people dying prematurely.
[This behaviour] is below the media’s radar, which isn’t accidental. Wars are fought as public relations efforts these days. The state military was able to say that it was acting in a precise, targeted, ‘clean’ way, rather than carpet-bombing civilians, but if you take out the life-support systems of an urbanised society, that can only lead to death. It’s an issue that isn’t debated enough.
Currently, more than half of the global population lives in urban areas. By 2050, that figure could be three quarters. This creates huge management and planning challenges in a world of sea-level rises, global climate change and water, food and energy shortages, but what worries me is that governments seem to have an increasingly militarised view of these challenges.
The response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is a powerful example. After the hurricane hit, the [government] was very hands-off, only encouraging the largely white suburbanites to leave in their cars. Then they went into military lockdown for the centre, where the poor African Americans lived. They treated them as a security threat. There was even a debate in a US army magazine that discussed taking back the city from insurgents. It showed how thinking from the war in Iraq has permeated domestic urbanism, resulting in a militarised response to what was a humanitarian crisis among the USA’s own citizens.
There has been a proliferation of robotic ideas in the civil security and military fields. Drones have been used since the First World War, but they’re being increasingly used as the sheer scale of cities means governments don’t feel they can place enough security or military forces on street corners to maintain control. The next generation of these systems is being developed as we speak, and there are discussions about making them totally robotic, capable of launching weapons without human supervision.
The response to the challenges facing the world’s rapidly growing cities needs to move beyond the use of high-tech security and military forces. It really needs to be about building just and sustainable cities that feed the hopes and harness the energies of the people who live in them. Cities are fantastic engines of social and economic innovation. I think we need to have a very pro-urban approach and stop demonising cities. Too many of our military and security elites tend to view cities as hotbeds of problems, but they’ve always been so much more than that.
Curriculum vitae
1965 Born in North Shields, Tyneside
1978–81 Attended Ponteland County High School
1981–83 Attended Lord Williams’ High School
1983–86 BSc in geography, University of Southampton
1987–89 MPhil in urban planning, Newcastle University
1989–92 Urban planner, Sheffield City Council
1992–2004 Lecturer, reader and then professor, Newcastle University
1990–2005 PhD in science and technology policy, University of Manchester
2004–10 Professor of human geography, Durham University
2010–present Professor of cities and society, Newcastle University
April 2011
I became interested in military urbanism about a decade ago when I was researching urban infrastructure. During that time, I was invited to a conference in Israel. It was just after 9/11, and there was a lack of discussion about how the infrastructure of cities was being targeted for various acts of violence.
When we turned up (I went with Professor Simon Marvin of Salford University), we realised that the conference was being run by the US Marine Corps and the Israeli Defence Forces. It was a bunch of guys in uniform with machine guns talking about how they were going to take over Palestinian cities. We didn’t know what to do, but decided we should stay and learn about this totally unknown world. It really opened our eyes to the way the military and governments perceive cities.
There’s a huge amount of effort to understand cities among the world’s military, but they have such a limited view of the urban world. They tend to deny the cultural and social importance of cities, and instead see them as purely physical spaces that get in the way of their weaponry.
The infrastructure of cities is increasingly targeted during conflicts. The Israeli chief of staff referred to a bulldozer as being a ‘strategic weapon around here’. Israeli soldiers regularly demolish Palestinian homes as well as targeting people and infrastructure, as part of their strategy of repression and attempted control.
Governments also engage in strategic bombing of infrastructure. It’s a way of trying to put coercive power onto a civilian population. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, the USA used carefully designed weapons to take out Iraq’s entire electrical system. The bombs were full of carbon fibre, which short-circuits electric systems. The whole of Iraq lost power. This had a cascading effect. The water and sewage systems, whose pumps were electrically powered, stopped working, and the resulting waterborne diseases led to about half a million people dying prematurely.
[This behaviour] is below the media’s radar, which isn’t accidental. Wars are fought as public relations efforts these days. The state military was able to say that it was acting in a precise, targeted, ‘clean’ way, rather than carpet-bombing civilians, but if you take out the life-support systems of an urbanised society, that can only lead to death. It’s an issue that isn’t debated enough.
Currently, more than half of the global population lives in urban areas. By 2050, that figure could be three quarters. This creates huge management and planning challenges in a world of sea-level rises, global climate change and water, food and energy shortages, but what worries me is that governments seem to have an increasingly militarised view of these challenges.
The response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is a powerful example. After the hurricane hit, the [government] was very hands-off, only encouraging the largely white suburbanites to leave in their cars. Then they went into military lockdown for the centre, where the poor African Americans lived. They treated them as a security threat. There was even a debate in a US army magazine that discussed taking back the city from insurgents. It showed how thinking from the war in Iraq has permeated domestic urbanism, resulting in a militarised response to what was a humanitarian crisis among the USA’s own citizens.
There has been a proliferation of robotic ideas in the civil security and military fields. Drones have been used since the First World War, but they’re being increasingly used as the sheer scale of cities means governments don’t feel they can place enough security or military forces on street corners to maintain control. The next generation of these systems is being developed as we speak, and there are discussions about making them totally robotic, capable of launching weapons without human supervision.
The response to the challenges facing the world’s rapidly growing cities needs to move beyond the use of high-tech security and military forces. It really needs to be about building just and sustainable cities that feed the hopes and harness the energies of the people who live in them. Cities are fantastic engines of social and economic innovation. I think we need to have a very pro-urban approach and stop demonising cities. Too many of our military and security elites tend to view cities as hotbeds of problems, but they’ve always been so much more than that.
Curriculum vitae
1965 Born in North Shields, Tyneside
1978–81 Attended Ponteland County High School
1981–83 Attended Lord Williams’ High School
1983–86 BSc in geography, University of Southampton
1987–89 MPhil in urban planning, Newcastle University
1989–92 Urban planner, Sheffield City Council
1992–2004 Lecturer, reader and then professor, Newcastle University
1990–2005 PhD in science and technology policy, University of Manchester
2004–10 Professor of human geography, Durham University
2010–present Professor of cities and society, Newcastle University
April 2011
