War, Urban

New Military Asymmetries

In the 21st century, when national states go to war in the name of national security, major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces. The search for national security is currently a source of urban insecurity, as, for example, with the so-called War on Terror, whereby the invasion of Iraq became an urban war theater. The negative impacts of this war also appear in cities that are not even part of the immediate war theater, for example, the bombings in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, Mumbai, Lahore, and so many other cities. The traditional security paradigm based on national state security fails to accommodate this triangulation. What may be good for the protection of the national state apparatus may exact a high (increasingly high) price from major cities and their people.

Global Warming, Energy, and Water Insecurity

Environmental challenges are going to make cities frontline spaces. These challenges will tend to remain more diffuse for nation-states and for the state itself. One key reason is the more acute and direct dependence of everyday life in cities on massive infrastructures and on institutional-level supports for most people—apartment buildings, hospitals, vast sewage systems, water purification systems, vast underground transport systems, and whole electric grids dependent on computerized management vulnerable to breakdowns. We already know that a rise in water levels due to climate change will flood some of the most densely populated cities in the world. The urgency of some of these challenges goes well beyond lengthy negotiations and multiple international meetings, still the most common form of engagement at the level of national politics and especially international politics. When global warming hits cities, it will hit hard and preparedness becomes critical. The new kinds of crises and the ensuing violence will be particularly felt in cities. A major simulation by NASA found that, by the fifth day of a breakdown in the computerized systems that manage the electric grid, a major city like New York would be in an extreme condition and basically unmanageable through conventional instruments.

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