Geopolitics
Urban geopolitics studies the city as stage and weapon of power between states and within them: the besieged, divided, fortified city; the capital built from scratch to found a nation; the port or financial node powers compete over. Twenty-first-century war is urban, and planning is part of it.
Stephen Graham documented the militarisation of urban space; Eyal Weizman, in Hollow Land, how architecture is used as a tactic of occupation. At the other extreme, cities like Singapore or Dubai are geopolitical projects: states making themselves visible by building a showcase city.
Videos on this term (13)
- Urban form
Learn how invisible borders define life in the neighborhoods
Two people pass each other on a street and take only seconds to decide how to behave. A glance can communicate…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Neil Brenner: Global Urbanization Goes Beyond City Borders
Neil Brenner argues that urbanization does not fit administrative boundaries: scale, state restructuring, extended…
Neil Brenner 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Why Cities Are the Key Nodes of Globalization: Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen explains why a dispersed economy needs global cities to coordinate it: command functions, social…
Saskia Sassen 3 min read - Public space
Richard Sennett's Open City: Open or Close the Public Space?
Richard Sennett defends the open city, designed for encounters with strangers, against closed enclosures. Ville and…
Richard Sennett 3 min read - Housing
Wacquant: Advanced Urban Marginality and Territorial Stigma
Loïc Wacquant explains how precarisation, social retreat and the penal state produce advanced urban marginality,…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Michael Peter Smith: Transnational Urbanism and Global Cities
Michael Peter Smith argues in Transnational Urbanism that globalisation is made by migrants and networks in…
Michael Peter Smith 2 min read - Urban form
Michael Dear: Postmodernism and Critical Urban Planning
Michael Dear led the Los Angeles School and brought postmodernism into urban planning. What the postmodern city is…
Michael Dear 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
David Theo Goldberg: Race, Space and Power in Cities
David Theo Goldberg shows that racism organises urban space: ghettos, peripheries and zoning manufacture race.
David Theo Goldberg 3 min read - Urban history
Divided Berlin: The History of a Fractured City, 1945-1989
Berlin Divided City, edited by Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, explains how the Cold War produced two Berlins.…
Philip Broadbent 3 min read - Public space
Thirdspaces: Soja and Bhabha's Third Space in the City
Thirdspaces are the hybrid places where the dichotomies of public and private, centre and periphery break down.…
Edward Soja 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: what makes a global city global
New York, London and Tokyo concentrate capital, information and decisions. Saskia Sassen explains what links them…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read - Urban economy
Deborah Cowen: Global Logistics, Power and Urban Transformation
Deborah Cowen shows in The Deadly Life of Logistics that global logistics was born in war and now governs ports,…
Deborah Cowen 3 min read - Surveillance / data
Urban Militarisation: Surveillance and Control (Graham and Davis)
Urban militarisation brings the tactics and technologies of war into the surveillance of cities. What Stephen…
3 min read
