photo credit: albertopveiga

Just over a year ago, I was invited to comment on Peter Adey’s book Aerial Life for an ‘author meets critics’ panel at the at the RGS-IBG conference. It was a real pleasure to be afforded the opportunity/excuse to read and comment on Aerial Life. The book itself is a fascinating and challenging examination of the manner in which life becomes ‘aerial’. It examines not so much what it means to be ‘in-the-air’ but the condition of being ‘air-minded’. It is less about pilots and passengers – though these make numerous appearances – than the manner in which air power ‘condition’s’ the life of those on the ground. This ‘air conditioning’ is exmplfied in excellent discussions of air power in the Gaza Strip, Malayan Insurgency and London Blitz. The concentration on the affective dimension of biopolitics is a welcome addition to the literature on the production of forms of life. My commentary, along with several others, have just been published in Political Geography. If you have an interest in vertical geographies or the biopolitics of air power I strongly recommend taking a look here.

You can find my introduction, the reviews and my response, here: http://global-discourse.com/contents/urbicide-by-martin-coward/

As with all research, the monograph represents a snapshot of thought about this variety of urban violence, rather than the last word on it. Reflecting on that snapshot, I think there is much I still agree with, but there are also things I would change. This has thus been a valuable opportunity to reflect on my argument about the widespread and deliberate destruction of urban fabric and to highlight what I think its key contributions are as well as to ponder some of its limitations.

My thanks to the reviewers for their thoughts as well as to the editors of Global Discourse for both the original invitation and their work compiling and publishing the review section.

Click on the book cover on the right to see contents and read an extract

Urbicide is the first book length discussion of the deliberate destruction of cities. I examine the ‘killing of cities’ in cases such as the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the Russian Chechen Campaigns, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. I outline a theoretical understanding of what is achieved in such destruction.

From the publisher’s description:

The term ‘urbicide’ became popular during the 1992-95 Bosnian war as a way of referring to widespread and deliberate destruction of the urban environment. Coined by writers on urban development in America, urbicide captures the sense that the widespread and deliberate destruction of buildings is a distinct form of violence.

Using Martin Heidegger’s notion of space and Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of community, Martin Coward outlines a theoretical understanding of the urban condition at stake in such violence. He contends that buildings are targeted because they make possible a plural public space that is contrary to the political aims of ethnic-nationalist regimes. Illustrated with reference to several post-Cold War conflicts – including Bosnia, Chechnya and Israel/Palestine – this book is the first comprehensive analysis of organised violence against urban environments. It offers an original perspective to those seeking to better understand urbanity, political violence and the politics of exclusion.

In March, Cambridge Review of International Affairs published my review of Jon Calame and Esther Charlesworth’s book Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). I was busy teaching  this spring and so forgot to write about it at the time – but I have returned to thinking about some of these themes in the wake of recent riots in Belfast.

Calame and Charlesworth’s book is an interesting set of reflections based on rich fieldwork that offers scholars of urban violence much to think about. The central concern of the book is precisely the kind of divisions that are evident in the violence that erupted around the annual Orange Order parades in Northern Ireland last week. Indeed, Divided Cities is focused on the question of how urban environments become deeply divided and what might be done about this.

Calame and Charlesworth – as well as Lebeus Woods in the forward to the book – argue that divisions are likely to haunt the city in the present era as urbanisation leads to increased frictions between different communities and urban managers fail to provide the overarching security these groups need to allow them to live in proximity without fear. Overall they see divisions such as we see in Belfast or Nicosia as the formalisation of ad hoc arrangements to provide temporary security. Over time fences grow into walls and become indispensable to narratives of identity and safety.

What I find interesting is the notion of the city embedded into the book. Calame and Charlesworth take the walled city as their paradigm for understanding the contract that supposedly exists between city managers and citizens. This contract  is portrayed as one where citizens give up  some income or freedom in return for safety. Originally it is argued that this took the form of citizens in medieval walled cities being protected from those external to the city. But in the present era it is argued that citizens should be protected from forms of friction that might arise within the city. I find three consequences of this depiction of the supposed ‘urban contract’ of interest.

Firstly, it is – like most theories in International Relations – predicated on the idea that security is prophylactic action in which an individual or community is protected from an external threat by some form of gap or barrier. Conceptually this narrative is based on the idea that the walled city provided security by excluding dangerous others. But if this is the conceptual trope that underlies this narrative it is perhaps unsurprising to see urban managers moving the wall within the city to solve problems of urban friction. Moreover, if walls signify the exclusion of others, it is also natural for those who find their worlds cleft by walls to regard those on the other side of them as others. Basing the story on the walled city thus has the effect of normalising the relation of walls and security in a way that stores problems for the future.

Secondly, I find the idea of the managed city somewhat idealistic. The notion of a bargain of income/freedom for security resonates with the idea of a social contract. And yet we know that no actual social contract exists – it is a hypothetical device to try to envisage how a political settlement might have been reached. In reality the political bargian a contract is supposed to capture is only ever implicit. More often this bargin is imagined by observers looking back into the past and seeking to explain why a political order managed to be stable for a while. In practice the particular configuration of politics at any one time is a result of the sedimentation of a number of non-linear processes. Moreover, attempts generate a contract are invariably disrupted by the contingencies of real life. To argue for a contract between urban managers and citizens is thus to imagine a political rebirth that, in reality, can never happen (nor ever really did happen). Perhaps the greater question is how accommodations can be made between currently antagonistic parties so that walls are removed without a central authority.

Finally, there is an interesting question at the heart of Calame and Charlesworth’s work about the friction that is inherent to the city. Of course it is undesirable to have walls that encourage us to fear the others that lie beyond them. This can only promote cycles of violence. And yet, cities are marked by a plurality that will always entail a certain irresolvable provocation or friction. It is this irresolvable friction that Jean-Luc Nancy refers to when he notes that the city has been philosophy’s problem. Because rationality likes to have single answers it hates the ambivalence of irresolvable tension or friction. As such it tries to impose its will on the city to remove the ambivalence that rises from continual friction. Urban planning and urban militarism are good examples of this lack of tolerance for ambivalence and tension. The question that must be addressed is how to acknowledge tension and friction without letting it solidify into walls.

So, while I enjoyed reading Divided Cities, it left me with many questions. You can read a pre publication draft here.

The project is based at the University of Manchester and Ralf Brand is the principle investigator (with Jon Coaffee as co-investigator and Sara Fregonese as Research Assistant). Overall the aim of the project is to explore the interrelation between the urban environment and  socio-political polarisation. Polarisation is assumed to have links with political violence (including radicalisation). You can read more about the project here.

The project is of interest to me precisely because it suggests that the urban environment has a constitutive role to play in socio-political dynamics. Rather than viewing the urban environment from an anthropocentric perspective, the project seeks to examine how material structures play a role in shaping (while also being shaped by) socio-political polarisation (and attendant dynamics of violence).  In a recent paper arising out of this project Ralf Brand has referred to the urban environment as a  ‘socio-active artefact’ in order to explain the relation between urban environment and socio-political dynamics. This speaks to the interest I have in understanding the manner in which buildings are constitutive of distinctive spaces as well as to the way in which certain forms of political violence attack buildings in order to destroy the spaces they constitute.  It is precisely because the urban environment is ‘socio-active’ that it is targeted, if it were inert (as some anthropocentric accounts assume) it would be of little interest. The idea that the building is a ‘socio-active artefact’ is thus very helpful when thinking about the mechanisms underlying urbicide.

For those interested in reading further, Ralf Brand has a paper in Urban Studies outlining some of the ways in which architecture and polarisation are inter-related: “Written and Unwritten Building Conventions in a Contested City”. There will also be a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology which will include a review of literature concerning urban polarisation.

Routledge have recently published an interesting volume on urban infrastructure. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, edited by Stephen Graham explores various cases in which infrastructure fails, revealing the extent to which contemporary urban life is predicated on technical structures.

It should be of interest to those exploring the nexus of violence, urbanisation and critical infrastructure.

Click on the book cover on the left to see contents and read an extract

A flyer giving 20% discount on the book can be downloaded here.

You can read the forum here (html) or download my review here (pdf) and Kyle Grayson’s response here (pdf).

For those interested in reading further, google books has a limited preview of Chasing Dragons. You can read Kyle’s blog here.

The piece outlines the main topic I will deal with in my next book (also entitled Cities Under Fire and due for publication by Routledge in 2011/12). Briefly these are the organised violences that are arrayed against the contemporary city: urbicide, terrorism, military operations by advanced industrial states. The piece is short and so does not expand on the characteristics of these violences or their impact on urbanity. For more detail and an early formulation of the problematic central to Cites Under Fire see my recent piece in Security Dialogue: ‘Network-Centric Violence, Critical Infrastructure and the Urbanization of Security‘ (Security Dialogue, 40:4-5, pp.399-418)

The special issue includes my essay ‘Network-centric Violence, Critical Infrastructure and the Urbanisation of Security‘. In this piece I discuss the manner in which organised violence such as the American ‘shock and awe‘ assault on Iraq and terrorist targeting of transport infrastructure in New York, Madrid and London are exemplary of the dynamics of what I call the ‘urbanisation of security’. The urbanisation of security comprises a reciprocal dynamic in which security technologies are urbanised (i.e., oriented towards the logics of urban space) and yet at the same time urbanity is securitised (i.e., its spaces are reshaped according to logics of security technologies).

The copyright agreement I had to sign to have this article published prevents me from making the final version of the article available for free on this site (believe me, I wish I could). You can download a final draft of the essay here (pdf). If you have problems obtaining the published version email me and I will send you a pdf if appropriate.