Julia Brown Jkb2126 U6367 Global Cities and Global Slums Prof.

. Sassen Question 1: The Role of Cities in War Throughout history, the city has played an important role in war. As Stephen Graham points out, in early history, urban fortifications turned the city itself into an agent of war. The city-state was most often the target of war, and the sacking and killing of fortified cities and their inhabitants was the central event in pre-modern war (166). Even now, the capture of strategic and politically important cities has remained the ultimate symbol of conquest and national survival (167). It is the city itself that is under attack, rather than being just the backdrop or environment for war and terrortheir buildings, assets, institutions, industries, infrastructures, cultural diversities, and symbolic meanings have long actually themselves been the explicit target [emphasis in original] (ibid, 167). Martin Coward echoes this idea, arguing that the destruction of the built urban environment is a distinct form of political violence that is an end in and of itself, rather than a means to some other goal. This urbicide, then, means the killing of what is specifically urban, including both a particular built environment and a way of life specific to such an environment (428). Within this idea of the city as a target for war is the idea of the city as the location of specific vulnerabilities and sites of resistance to war. Although in the past the city-as-fortress afforded protection from attack, the infrastructure-dependent nature of most modern cities increases their vulnerability. Everyday technics, spaces and infrastructures of urban life airliners, metro trains, computer networks, water systems, electricity grids, trade networks, food systems, medical systems, scientific research grids may be easily assaulted and turned into agents either of instantaneous terror or debilitating demodernisation (Graham 182). As Prof. Sassen has argued in class, however,

a complex web of interdependencies can also serve to limit military action through international norms that constrain the military power of states.1 The specificities of a citys vulnerabilities and sites for resistance depend on the type of warfare. War is variably defined, from traditional confrontations between nation states, to civil wars (including gang wars) that pit individuals of the same country against each other, to asymmetric wars in which states battle non-state actors. How vulnerable a city is in each of these types of war depends also on the city itself and the extent to which it has made itself a target. One site for increased urban vulnerability is the global city. The global city is the product of the processes of neoliberal globalization. Saskia Sassen argues that the international economic systemhas changed rather dramatically over the last decade as a result of privatization, deregulation, digitalization, the opening up of national economies to foreign firms, and the growing participation of national economic actors in global markets (xviii). Global cities therefore become nodes in a vast network of global business centers. Brenner and Theodore have argued further that these cities not only come from neoliberalism, but are strategic sites in the construction and reproduction of neoliberal policies. Citiesincluding their suburban peripherieshave become increasingly important geographical targets and institutional laboratories for a variety of neoliberal policy experimentsthe overarching goal of such neoliberal urban policy experiments is to mobilize city space as an arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices (368). One of the results of neoliberal policy is the deepening of inequalities both within the city and between cities, countries and regions. The growing numbers of high level professionals and high-profit making specialized service firms have the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socioeconomic inequality evident in these cities (Sassen xxi). This in turn increases the citys

Sassen, Saskia. Presentation to class, November 9, 2009. Retrieved from Columbia University Courseworks 12/21/2009.

vulnerability to outside attack, as the deepening polarization of cities, caused by neoliberal globalization, is providing many conditions that are ripe for extremes of civil, and militarized, violence (Graham 169). In no instance was this clearer than in the 9/11 attacks on New York City. Osama bin Laden, explaining the attacks on the World Trade Center, stated, Bushs hands are stained with the blood of all of those killed from both sides all for the sake of oil and keeping their private companies in business.2 The attacks were meant to break down the neoliberal structure of the American economy. Inequalities also subject the city to internal violence in the form of gang warfare and other civic unrest. Urban war zones are becoming armed camps, driven wholly by implosive forces that fold into neighborhoods the most violent and problematic repercussions of wider regional, national and global processes (Graham 169). For example, Arjun Appadurai shows how ethnic violence in Mumbai was a direct result of the politicization of ethnic identities at the national level and the competition for housing in the area. In this sense, the city is not the direct target of violence, but rather the medium through which conflict is expressed, as it is the location of intersection between conflicting groups. In direct contrast to this are cities, primarily in the global South, that constitute sites of resistance to external threat. Here, Sassen has argued, the city is able to resist annihilation through its insertion into new systems of international norms. She states that countries with powerful conventional armies (like the US), can no longer afford to repeat Dresden with firebombs or Hiroshima with an atomic bomb (In-class slides, Nov. 9). Instead, both domestic and international political pressure mandate that battles in cities be conducted on the ground. This in turn increases the effectiveness of low-tech, low-skilled resistance fighters, as they are fighting on their home turf, so to speak. Graham concurs: The complex, congested and contested terrain below, within, and above

bin Laden, Osama. Full Transcript of Bin Laden Video. ABC News. Nov. 1, 2004. Web. Accessed through Columbia University Courseworks, Dec. 22, 2009. Transcript.

cities is seen by many within the US military as a set of physical spaces which limit the effectiveness of high-tech space-targeted bombs, surveillance systems, and automated, network centric weaponsThe widespread urbanization of potential battlespace is therefore seen to reduce the ability of US forces to fight and kill at a distance (184). While I agree with Sassen that cities engaged in asymmetric war can resist annihilation, I disagree with her as to why. A key justification of the war in Iraq was the freeing of the people of Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. In this way, Iraqis were constructed as people deserving of rights and protections. The war is against terrorism, not against the Iraqi people (although of course the Iraqi people are the principle casualties of the war). In contrast, in World War II, we were fighting fascism, but we were also fighting the German and Japanese people, as dehumanized enemies. It would be impossible to repeat Dresden and Hiroshima in Iraq not because of new norms surrounding the legitimate use of force against civilians during a war, but because of how American politicians and media have represented the Iraqis as victims rather than as aggressors. Nevertheless, this fact of resistance to annihilation on the part of a marginalized people becomes a strategy of resistance to invasion at the level of the city. Creating the city as the site of battle changes the ways in which the battle must be fought and privileges non-conventional combatants. Thus the city has and will have a role to play in war. However, what this role looks like will be determined by the specificities of the city itself and the war it is engaged in. The global city represents a new vulnerability to warfare, at the same time as the non-global city is gaining strength as a site of resistance to war.

Works Cited Stephen Graham: Postmortem City: Towards an Urban Geopolitics, City, Vol. 8, No. 2 (July 2004), pp. 165-196 Martin Coward: Against Anthropocentrism: The Destruction of the Built Environment as a Distinct Form of Political Violence, Review of International Studies, (2006) Sassen, Saskia. 2001. New Preface to the Second Edition pp. xvii-xxiv in The Global City. Princeton: Princeton University Press Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore: Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism, Antipode, Vol. 3, No.4 (2002), pp. 2-32 Arjun Appadurai: Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai, Public Culture, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 2000)