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....It's difficult you see
To give up baby
These summer scumholes
This goddamned starving life
All the majesty of a city landscape
All the soaring days in our lives
All the concrete dreams
in my mind's eye
All the joy I see
Thru these architect's eyes
David Bowie1
1. 2007 marks a milestone in human social organization. For the first time in history, more people will live in cities than in the countryside.2 With this threshold having been reached through enormous growth in the 1990s (when the urban population expanded by 36%), the result is a situation in which the 'right to the city' has never been a more contested political, social and geopolitical issue. Moreover, with the majority of urban growth taking place in the so-called developing world, more than 1 billion people now inhabit the slums, bidonvilles, favellas and other forms of pirate urbanism that frame the neoliberal city. Those residents are also disproportionately located in the global South. As Mike Davis notes, residents of slums, while only six percent of the city population of the developed countries, constitute a staggering 78.2 percent of the urbanites in the least-developed countries."3
2. As well as the more familiar debates about migration, multiculturalism, and inequality, this unprecedented scale of global urbanization is also directing intellectual attention in the arts, humanities and social sciences to focus on the role of cities as dominant sites of destruction, violence, insurgency and terrorism in the contemporary world. As traditional wars between nation states conducted in open terrain have become objects of relative curiosity, so the informal, 'asymmetric' or 'new' wars that centre on localized struggles over strategic urban sites have become the norm.4 The scale of global urbanization, combined with post-Cold War geopolitical upheaval, neoliberal economic restructuring, and a proliferation of well armed non-state militia, gangs, and paramilitaries, have forced what Appadurai has called an "implosion of global and national politics into the urban world."5 This is a tendency that was anticipated by students of Clausewitz (like Delbruck, who first theorized an ermattungsstrategie, or strategy of attrition), as well as modernist theorists of war like Giulio Douhet and J.F.C. Fuller, who suggested that future warfare would target the city because its objective would be the destruction of the "civil...