Subtopia: The City in the Crosshairs: A Conversation with Stephen Graham (Pt. 1)
In a recent speech before the National Press Club on C-Span, Newt Gingrich closed with a grim admonition that those protesting the infringement of civil liberties from the Patriot Act will be overwhelmed, if that surveillance doesn’t keep us from losing a city. Americans will surrender their “rights” for “Security”. This interview of a leftist British professor has many insights into the new Postmodern Late-Capitalist HyperUrban Medievalism. I am not so sure we are in the “post-capitalist” stage quite yet (though I’m sure that he thinks so). The Assymetrical “Long War” of Globilization will be fought in the cities. 
The global mixing in today’s world renders any simple dualism between North and South, or Developed and Developing, very unhelpful. Instead, it’s more useful to think of transnational architectures of control, wealth and power, as passing through and inhabiting all of these zones but in a wide variety of ways. Extreme poverty exists in many ‘developed cities’ while enclaves of supermodern and high-tech wealth pepper the cities on South East, Southern and Eastern Asia.
The histories of the city and of political violence are, of course, inseparably linked. As Lewis Mumford teaches us, security is, of course, one of the very reasons for the very origins of urbanization. The evolution of urban morphology, as you say, is closely connected to the evolution of the geographies and technologies of war and political violence: fortification and the bounding of urban space through defensive and aggressive architecture are especially central to this long and complex story. So, too, is the fortification of cities to the symbolic demonstration of wealth, power and aggression, and as the commercial demarcation of territorialities. The elaborate histories of siege craft, atrocity, the symbolic sacking and erasure of urban space, and cat and mouse interplay of tactics and strategies of attack and tactics and strategies of defence, are all central here. Much of the Old Testament, in fact, is made up of fables of attempted and successful urban annihilation. As Marshall Berman has argued, “Myths of urban ruin grow at our culture’s root.” Important, here, are the symbolic roles of urban sites as icons of victory, domination and political or religious regime change. Continue reading “Cities – The Medieval & Modern Battleground”
