Kuecker: Reorganizing the Urban Syntax

Recent events in Gaza City and Ferguson, Missouri, highlight the importance of a school of thought within urban studies.  Articulated by scholars like Mike Davis and Stephen Graham, but also expressed within national-security think-tanks and military academies, this school focuses on how contending with the insurgent potential of the urban form is one of the leading factors shaping 21^st century urbanism.  While focused on parts of the world where poverty persists amidst a stew of weak states and legacies of colonial injustices, the argument also applies to the global minority, in places like Ferguson, Missouri, through a blow-back mechanism.  Taking from Foucault’s “boomerang” of colonial domination, the idea is that militarized urbanism in the global majority results in internal colonialism in the global minority.  The prognosis of this school of thought is that 21^st century urbanism will be defined by urban warfare, perhaps one of the more challenging assignments for any military.  Combat within close quarters, where the tactical advantage of air superiority is significantly nullified, introduces an equalizing element within the asymmetries of war.  Urban warfare also adds to the “fog of war” as distinctions between civilian and combatant are compromised, a factor that adds to the advantage of insurgencies, while increasing the reality of high civilian casualties despite the smart bombs.

Also operating within the militarized urbanism thesis is a critical understanding of how military doctrine produces power and knowledge by the way it defines the problems of urban security.  We can find an example in Eyal Weizman’s discussion of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War in his fascinating essay, “The Art of War:  Deleuze, Guattari, Debord, and the Israeli Defense Force.”  Weizman is an architect interested in post-colonial understandings of conflict territories, a perspective that led him to discover that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) study critical theory in its military academies.  He illustrates how critical theory shapes the IDF’s thinking about urban warfare.  He quotes from Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, who described the 2002 assault on Nablus city as “inverse geometry”, by which he means “the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions.”

In more common language, “reorganization of the urban syntax,” constitutes countering the saturation of urban spaces by insurgents by creating “overground tunnels” through densely populated landscape.  These “tunnels” are actually blasted horizontally and vertically through the walls and ceilings of buildings, often the living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms of civilian residencies.  Weizman explains that the IDF tactic was to “redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares.”  He states, “the IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.”   Referencing Stephen Graham, Weizman maintains, “military urban research institutes and training centres… have been established to rethink military operations in cities,” which “could be understood as somewhat similar to the international matrix of élite architectural academies.”

The IDF was attracted to post-modern philosophical influences because it destabilized their existing war making paradigms, which allowed for new ways of thinking about tactics and strategies.   “As far as the military is concerned,” Weizman states, “urban warfare is the ultimate Postmodern form of conflict. Belief in a logically structured and single-track battle-plan is lost in the face of the complexity and ambiguity of the urban reality.”  One military instructor told Weizman, “we employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself.”  

The great irony, of course, is that thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari were seeking radical transformations in society.  As Weizman explains, they hoped to “challenge the built hierarchy of the capitalist city and break down distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, use and function.”  Weizman captures the irony by pointing out how theory that once challenged all forms of colonial power is now used by the military to enhance colonial and post-colonial relations of power.  

As the IDF reads cities as texts and uses “syntax” to deconstruct the rule-set governing the logic of the “sentences” constituting the urban text/form in developing military strategy, it becomes apparent that understanding the syntax of 21^st century urbanism is an important proposition.  The way we order the urban form and how that order constitutes meaning is being constituted through the Habitat III process, especially through techniques like the ordering of knowledge through data collection and reporting by national governments.  The Guidelines and Format for the Preparation of National Reports, for example, instructs National Habitat Committees to prepare reports that will serve as a foundation for developing the Habitat III agenda.  The Guidelines appear encompassing in scope, as it calls for written responses to 42 framing topics, which are ordered into 6 key areas of Habitat III knowledge.   The 6 areas are:  urban demography; land and urban planning; environment and urbanization; urban governance and legislation; urban economy; and housing and basic services.  Defining these areas of reporting constitute one of the ways Habitat III produces an urban syntax.  A fascinating puzzle emerges, however.  Habitat III guidelines are silent on the topic of urban insurgency and warfare, even though the leading military thinkers are using critical theory to deconstruct the syntax of the urban form in order to construct a new syntax.  At the UN Urban Forum in Medellin, or ICLEI’s Resilient Cities conference the topic of militarized urbanism is absent.  Indeed, if one is immersed in reading Habitat III surveys, conference proceedings, and reports, the topic of militarized urbanism is missing, as if this important form of urban power/knowledge does not exist.  

There are several possible solutions to the puzzle.  We might assume that the silence is jurisdictional, that the UN’s mission places its urban power/knowledge paradigm in a structure independent from the military and national security state.  Given the history of the tight association between development, especially in the form of foreign aid, and counterinsurgency we might come to see that the separate spheres argument is an inadequate explanation.  While militarized urbanism constitutes a reworking of the urban syntax, it is an immediate grammatical repair, as against a longer term fix that targets the root causes of insurgency.  From this perspective, Habitat III planners carry out their agenda setting business without engaging the power/knowledge paradigm of militarized urbanism because of the normative relationship between development and counterinsurgency.  Habitat IIIs liberal international epistemic constitutes an agenda designed to reconfigure the urban form so that the conditions necessary for militarized urbanism are eliminated. 

Sources:

Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Paperback ed. London ; New York: Verso, 2007.

Graham, Stephen. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism.  New York: Verso, 2011.

Weizman, Eyal. “The Art of War:  Deleuze, Guattari, Deboro, and the Israeli Defence Force.” Mute, August 3, 2006.  Available at:  http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/art-war-deleuze-guattari-debord-and-israeli-defence-force

UN-Habitat Urban Visions No. 3.  Vision for Habitat III. 

http://unhabitat.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Habitat_III_Vision.pdf

KARTIK: The problem with an agenda of global 'participatory' development

One night on a sidewalk in Kuala Lumpur I happened upon two men having some drinks. One of them I knew and had spent a lot of time with. He was the fish deliveryman for a small shop in the neighborhood. This neighborhood is known as Brickfields, and is one of Kuala Lumpur’s oldest.  The other man, I came to find out, was the deliveryman’s old friend who was born and raised in the neighborhood, interestingly right next to the building where my mother grew up. He seemed to be far drunker, and after talking to him for some time it became apparent why. This man was a member of Kuala Lumpur’s team responsible with carrying out the state's secretive shoot-to-kill program. He told me that he waited on standby until he got a call about a marked target. Upon approaching the target on a motorcycle, he would put a black hood over his face and commit extrajudicial murder. Like clockwork, he always returned not home, but to his childhood neighborhood to get drunk after doing what he was paid to do. He told me that so far he had killed five people in his neighborhood. Beyond this, I couldn’t get much out of him about the subject other than his frustration with having corrupt bosses and the fact that he hated his job. He wanted to change the subject.

What I witnessed was a direct contradiction to a statement made around August 21, 2013 by Malaysia’s Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar when confronted about the shooting of five suspected gang members in the city of Penang. However, in October Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Ahmad Zahid Hamidi made an off-handed remark that police should take a “shoot first” approach with members of organized crime such as gangsters. Many human rights workers have argued that such a remark validates the existence of a secretive program whose apparatus and process of actualizing extrajudicial killings are kept from the public.

On another night, a friend of mine tried calling me asking if I could keep her company. She wasn’t able to sleep because she knew that the police might come at any time to take her away for her crimes - according to a conveniently resurfaced law originating from colonial times - of poverty and homelessness. According to the government, Christine is not 'clean' enough for KL and if caught, she could be sent to a detention center without legal counsel. To illustrate briefly where she resides, down the road from my luxury condominium in Brickfields is a classy restaurant with its own website and uniformed waiters. Tucked in the alleyway behind this restaurant there is a tiny gate that opens up to an even smaller pitch-black hallway. After a few feet are narrow stairs leading up to small rooms where laborers stay. Using a bag filled with all of her possessions as a pillow, my friend Christine stays underneath these stairs every night pretending to sleep while holding a knife for protection.

Christine, a Portuguese Creole lady from the historic Malaysian port city of Malacca, has been living in Brickfields for almost two decades and did not have to worry about a not having a home until recently when her partner Shanta – a poor Tamil man descended from Indian indentured rubber tappers – was detained. Of the several races in Malaysia, Indians – especially those descended from rubber estate workers – have been historically marginalized in many ways reminiscent of Apartheid or Jim Crow. While regrettably not discussed further (due to space), please do note this aspect and that this story has a perverse racial dimension of oppression that I may hopefully get into in a later post, but is profoundly related to how things play out. Shanta has been detained for six months after testing positive for cannabis – a drug that should be legalized according to the well regarded 2011 United Nations report on drug criminalization. However, his detention was peculiar. He was initially released but asked to report back to sign some documents. Later, Christine became seriously ill. The couple called the office to notify that Shanta was unable to report back in time, to which they ambiguously responded, “Just leave it as it is.” A few weeks later Shanta was arrested and sent to rehabilitation. Christine tried to see her partner at the drug enforcement office (ADK) before he was sent away, but had to leave as soon as officers started harassing her. In all the commotion she was only able to catch a glimpse of Shanta’s black eye in the distance. Witnesses claim that the arresting officer hit Shanta in the face after he asked the officer what charge he was being arrested for.

Shanta grew up exactly where my apartment now stands and has called Brickfields home his entire life. He used to work as a security guard for the luxury condominiums on my (his) street as they were being constructed. Working long nights, his meager wage of 40 Malaysian Ringgit (about $13) a day was not enough to sustain himself in his own neighborhood. As Kuala Lumpur and Brickfields modernized, Shanta and his boyhood friends found it harder to live meaningfully. To make ends meet, several tenants of a Brickfields apartment building (who were recently forced out to make way for another development) would give the couple their secondhand items to sell to working people in the area. To feed themselves, Christine and Shanta were essentially recycling. In doing so, they gave Brickfields’ working people a chance at purchasing affordable goods as living costs rapidly increased. Shanta’s detention without a proper explanation from the authorities has left Christine defenseless. Many of her belongings and items reserved for selling have been robbed. Waiting in the dark corner under the stairs, she both anticipates and fears the arrival of three things: thieves, heavy rain, and the authorities sworn to serve and protect the city. Christine is but one story of what remains in the dark crevices of a city that will once again host the annual World Class Sustainable Cities Conference, where special workshops - co-hosted by reputed organizations such as the UN - will aim to train the world's city leaders on urban sustainable development.

Newcastle University professor Stephen Graham argues in his book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism that “Fundamental to the new military urbanism is the paradigmatic shift that renders cities’ communal and private spaces, as well as their infrastructure – along with their civilian populations – a source of targets and threats” (XIII) My friends’ stories are examples of how this “source of targets and threats” is segregated according to their perceived challenge to the neoliberal urban landscape. Regardless of whether it was conscious or out of necessity, Christine and Shanta found ways to operate in spite of, rather than submit to, the formal politico-economic structure and its related urban spatial configurations, metabolisms, and rhythms. For this, they paid the price, and have endured criminalization under the categories of vagrancy and drug use for years. My drunk companion's victims were instantly murdered. Similarly, speaking on the growing trend of criminalizing threats to neoliberal order around the world, Graham goes on to say:

Instead of legal or human rights and legal systems based on universal citizenship, these emerging security politics are founded on the profiling of individuals, places, behaviours, associations, and groups. Such practices assign these subjects risk categories based on their perceived association with violence, disruption or resistance against the dominant geographical orders sustaining global, neoliberal capitalism. (p. XV)

These "security politics" play out in extremely troubling and highly undemocratic ways, all at the behest of capitulating and expanding neoliberal capitalism. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ refers to a state in which one’s existence “can be sacrificed at any time by a colonial power that maintains the right to kill with impunity but has withdrawn all moral, political or human responsibilities from the population.” In this sense, an individual’s status renders him or her outside of the law, yet in that state of exclusion is actually forced under the law in a singular manner – the right to be harmed. Proximate to Agamben’s ‘bare life’, I would argue that in the contemporary city, lives are deemed expendable through a variety of mechanisms that expose them to outright eradication under extreme conditions of structural violence, and more often than not immediate and murderous violence. Certain lives are deemed expendable under shoot-to-kill pretenses, while others such as Shanta engage in lifestyles that render their bodies expendable and completely removed from the spectrum of protections allotted to human beings from legal counsel to basic rights.

Habitat 3 possesses an implicit agenda that has very telling amendments to previous policies and discourses related to topics linked with global urbanization. That is to say, there are many examples of how Habitat 3 intends to place emphasis on localizing urban sustainability agendas with an emphasis on optimizing participation among stakeholders often left out of development discussions, policymaking, and implementations. This includes local organizations, private enterprises, councils, neighborhood associations, community members, etc. While the manner in which this is to be carried out in diverse and contested urban spaces remains ambiguous and similar historic efforts have had unaddressed problems, this push is nonetheless fascinating in its emphasis on the ‘right to the city’ as well as democratic and public participation.

Kerwin Datu and Naik Lashermes of The Global Urbanist have addressed some vital gaps in the Habitat 3 agenda related to the fact that it must account for routine conflict in urban areas. The conflict they refer to is in its most basic form political conflict, where spaces consist of stakeholders that often have conflicting agendas related to urban, sustainable, and community development. To address these gaps, they have followed up with recommendations on how conflict can be addressed through possible mechanisms that emphasize democratization, accountability, and proper monitoring to ensure historic and current forms of discrimination are avoided.

I would like to emphasize that there is another even more troubling dimension of urban conflict that is far more of a growing trend than is recognized in discourses on urban community-based and participatory action (ex. see: Local Agenda 21). As Stephen Graham illustrates in his 400-page analysis, this trend is the global militarization of the urban landscapes. Returning to the notion of prima facie political conflict discussed earlier, we must first ask how are we to truly actualize agendas of urban sustainable development when – as Datu and Lashermes point out – our urban landscapes come from inherent processes of discrimination and conflict? Now, adding militarization into the equation, historically discriminated populations, as well as newfound “threats” to the neoliberal capitalist apparatus, are discriminated in ways that render them expendable under even more extreme, direct, material, and life threatening forms of conflict. Do the Christines and Shantas of New York, Manila, and Lagos have any chance at contributing to a "democratic" and "participatory" initiative in their neighborhoods when their existence has only been made visible in order to mark them for eradication?