Neoliberalism, Imperialism, and the Militarization of Urban Spaces

Abstract

In the epilogue of Planet of Slums, Mike Davis gives us a glimpse into the militarization of urban spaces and what the military elite are doing about the world's cities. Davis cites an article published in the US Army War College journal: "The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, industrial parks, and the sprawl of houses, shacks, and shelters that form the broken cities of our world…. Our recent military history is punctuated with city names—Tuzla, Mogadishu, Los Angeles, Beirut, Panama City, Hue, Saigon, Santo Domingo—but these encounters have been but a prologue, with the real drama still to come."… [T]he militarization of cities around the world, in both the core and the periphery, is the main focus of Stephen Graham's fascinating and accessible book, Cities Under Siege. For Graham…this book represents the culmination and synthesis of much previous research… The end result is a theoretically and empirically rich study of how violence, control, and surveillance have come to "colonize the city landscape and the spaces of everyday life in both the 'homelands' and domestic cities of the West as well as the world's neo-colonial frontiers".This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.