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Graham, Stephen. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. New York: Verso Books, 2010. xxx + 402 pages. Cloth, $34.95.
Occasionally a book appears that is so lightly edited and heavily footnoted that a reader is forgiven for not pushing too deeply into the text. Here, though, Stephen Graham, a professor of human geography at Durham University, makes the effort worthwhile despite those weaknesses by tracing the transformation of the modern city as an oppressed environment for citizens, a haven for vice, and a target for new forms of military operations. Most troubling is Graham's description of urban centers made ironically less secure by greater investments in surveillance infrastructure and the gradual convergence of paramilitary and law enforcement. Graham successfully documents how the new urban terrain has yielded zones of endless conflict, too often thought to be inhabited by hidden predators and city residents who require constant tracking and targeting. Even more disturbing, he describes a transformation of the military into high-tech urban guerilla forces, the persistent surveillance of international borders, the temptation to suspend civil law, and the restraint of domestic dissent too often described as itself "terroristic." With these, one comes to suspect an aggressive physical restructuring of the city that develops to simultaneously...