The Society for Curious Thought have posted a brief piece of mine entitled Cities Under Fire. You can read it 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)

Security Dialogue have published a very interesting special issue on urban insecurity. You can see the table of contents here.

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.