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Stephen Graham (1) (1965–)

Autor von Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

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Stephen Graham is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. Between 1992 and spring 2004 he was based at Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape

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Andere Namen
Graham, Steve
Geburtstag
1965-02-26
Geschlecht
male
Nationalität
UK

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Если вам хочется узнать, где находятся самые динамичные экономики мира, забудьте о ВВП, статистике безработицы и трендах потребления. Все, что вам нужно, это ответ на простой вопрос: «Где самые быстрые лифты?» Неожиданно, но факт — синоним амбициозных инвестпроектов, километровые небоскребы требуют самых передовых технологий, а скоростной лифт — самое узкое место строительства. «Вертикаль» Стивена Грэма предлагает по-новому взглянуть на города и технологии: сверху вниз, давая срез от спутников до шахт и бомбоубежищ. Города действительно начинаются уже в небе: воздух в них на 3–10 градусов теплее, а летающих в Пекин пилотов учат садиться в смог. Другой совет инвесторам — покупайте акции производителей кондиционеров, поскольку самые бысторастущие гигантские города расположены в жарком климате.

Погружение в подземелья не менее увлекательно, чем подъем в небеса: под Парижем «проживает» 6 млн покойников — больше, чем живых, а под Лондоном в 2015-м с трудом уничтожили Fatberg, десятитонный ком жира.
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Den85 | 1 weitere Rezension | Jan 3, 2024 |
The first 9 chapters are pretty excellent at detailing out the whole mess of militarisation and greater "security" and control, importantly covering cities outside the US and Europe, although maybe not enough and focusing almost entirely on those explicitly involved in wars.

My problems with the first 9 chapters are that the theory is not very well connected to the actual events. He quotes a lot of people who all use very different vocabulary to talk about the same things. Some of it is, quite frankly, ridiculous. For example, here is a sentence: "Such notions of war as being literally unleashed from the boundaries of time and space - what Paul James has termed 'metawar'". The proceeding paragraph was quoting from a Chinese army document saying that acts against infrastructure is important. There's absolutely no connection and the claim of being "literally unleashed from the boundaries of time and space" is bizarre and hilarious. This is the worst example but I felt a lot of similarly grand claims were made with little evidence and not much holding the whole "theory" of the book together. To a certain extent this might be inevitable, but it just felt tough to read and the myriad of disconnected quotes didn't give me a better picture than the events described, which are important and well-described enough to stand on their own.

The last chapter purports to give ideas for countering militarisation and it's kind of crap. All the ideas given are basically "make art" and it's pretty limited. He highlights a poster as exemplary which basically just says "Fox News is bad" - I'm not denying that but it's not going very far in its critique and the same problem is shared by a lot of what he highlights. It ends with a typically beigy "left" commentary which is a bit frustrating. "Book wasn't Marxist" might seem a silly criticism but it's frustrating when they don't make links that seem obvious to me because they're not being critical enough of the system.

Neither of those two paragraphs is meant to say that the book is rubbish - I enjoyed it and I've learned a lot and the many descriptions of military actions etc are important and useful if you're interested in the subject. Just disappointed it didn't fully live up to my expectations with a deeper, better written analysis.
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tombomp | 1 weitere Rezension | Oct 31, 2023 |
Could've used better editing. A typo on every other page, it seemed.

Also, adverbs/adjectives to cut down on:
*radical/ly - way overused, in most cases could've been cut out altogether
*colonize/ation - "she's sitting on the bench" becomes "the bench is colonized by her"
*neoliberal/ism - really, even in context I still don't know what it means other than it's a current bogeyman word and so i just replace it with 'bad stuff' in my head. or, i guess it's just a new way to say 'capitalism'? i recall some quote by some dude being described in a neoliberal context with a footnote that stated he was part of a neoconservative think-tank. well, i'm not opposed to the word existing but it (along with these other words) seems to have just been peppered in gratuitously.

I mean, I like pepper...but even I know when my mashed potatoes have had enough.



THAT SAID.
I like the concept of exploring the use of space going from Space->Subterranean Earth. It was illuminating, if mostly unsurprising (we build up at the expense of the environment/working class/poor, we build down at the expense of the environment/working class/poor). The verbiage/jargon just started to annoy me after a while.

Also, I like that my area got a paragraph devoted to it.
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stravinsky | 1 weitere Rezension | Dec 28, 2020 |
It took far too long, but I finally got around to reading Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege. In the end, I'm not entirely sure it was worth it.

Graham's book is sweeping in its generalizations, its implications, and its conclusions. It broadly traces the rise of the city in military and popular conception as a hotbed of vice and perversion, as a target for military operations, and as an increasingly oppressed environment for its citizens. Cities Under Siege is split into sections covering such phenomenon of urban militarization as the rise of the SUV ("Car Wars"), autonomous drones and robot warfare ("Robowar Dreams"), the destruction and replanning of cities ("Lessons in Urbicide"), recreated urban training centers ("Theme Park Archipelago") and the nexus of the "military-industrial-media-entertainment network." It's a mouthful, as is much of this book.

Cities Under Siege is extensively footnoted - one might say too extensively, as Graham's own thoughts and writings tend to disappear into the morass of impenetrable academic and philosophical gobbledy-gook. The entire book averages almost four footnotes a page (1,386 footnotes in 385 pages), but few are explanatory, and few back up original thought. Instead, he seems to need these references to provide him with the very phrasing of the book - and most of them don't deserve any reproduction. Why is this Chris Hedges sentence worth reprinting?
[The new wars] take the form of mediatized mechanisms and are ordered as massive intrusions into visual culture, which are conflated with, and substitute for, the actual materiality and practices of the public sphere.

Graham has a puzzling attachments to all the nonsense phrases that warn of an Orwellian future ahead - but one wonders if any of his sources have read "Politics and the English Language." Far more than is necessary, Graham draws on Foucault and the 'Manichaean Worlds' of American military thought to produce such tongue-twisting sentences as:
We must see to it that socialized infrastructure, housing, and urbanism once again become axiomatic within a resurgent conception of Keynesian state politics, organized through multiple scales of intervention to match the contexts of accelerating globalization.

And yet his next proscription is simply stated: "neoliberal economics must go - in toto" [emphasis his]. He can be concise and to the point when he wants, but unfortunately those moments are far and few between.

Obviously, the book has a political bent, and usually I don't mind these kinds of things. I agree with much of what he's saying even if I might disagree with some of the particulars on Israel-Palestine or stateside urban training centers. But when Graham's agenda starts to degrade his language to a point beyond all comprehension, clearly something has gone awry.

The other major objection I have is to the overwhelming focus on New York and London as representative of all cities. Virtually none of the other major cities are acknowledged - Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo get a handful of mentions, there are offhand references to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, Madrid train bombings and the Olympic Games in Beijing, and Boston, Chicago, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Toronto are all entirely and conspicuously absent from the index. New York and London are crucial, important, Alpha level world cities - but there are so many others important in their own rights and with developments of their own worth exploring in more depth. For countries as small as they are, the few cities in Israel-Palestine are paid huge amounts of attention, to the detriment of all others across the world.

These shortcomings (which are in reality quite superficial) are all the more problematic because Graham really drawing some fascinating conclusions. The securitization of the city, the surveillance infrastructure created for and left by major world events (Olympics, G20 and WTO meetings, etc.), the convergence of law enforcement and paramilitarization - these are all important, subtle, and hugely consequential developments in cities around the world. They're even more troubling when perpetrated against the citizenry that elected a ruling body, but sadly it is left to others like Geoff Manaugh to really unpack these concepts fully.

The sheer scale and number of urban training centers both in the United States and around the world came as a shock to me. But like many of the issues Graham raises, I don't necessarily find their existence cause for alarm. As Richard Norton says, cities will be the battlefields of the future - wouldn't it make sense to prepare for that? If anything, recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan - particularly Afghanistan - are a break from what would be considered a normal battlespace elsewhere in the world.

I was less concerned with what Graham considers the latent indoctrination of youths into a militaristic culture through video games and other media violence. It's a claim that's been tossed around for quite some time, but I still just don't buy it. The actual convergence of Playstation controllers and military hardware is more interesting to me; unlike Graham I'm not terrified by it (wary, perhaps). Then again, I like playing video games and watching violent television, so I'm coming to that issue with a bias. The nexus of news manufacturing, 'shady' agendas, corporate interests, and privatized military operations is nothing new, but Graham does trace their contours well, even if reading "military-industrial-media-entertainment network" gets tiresome very quickly.

That, I suppose, is really the takeaway from Cities Under Siege. If you can stomach and muddle through the language, quote after quote, and at times sheer pompousness, you'll be able to glean some fascinating new insight into cultural attitudes towards the city. But I fear that for many, the book will prove too pretentious to finish. If you have a month to spare, dive right in.
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goliathonline | 1 weitere Rezension | Jul 7, 2020 |

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