Urban Militarisation: Surveillance and Control (Graham and Davis)

Urban militarisation is the transfer of tactics, technologies and ways of thinking proper to war into the surveillance and control of cities: police equipped like armies, cameras and drones inherited from battlefields, defensive architecture and a discourse that treats whole neighbourhoods as enemy territory. The British geographer Stephen Graham described it in Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (2010), and the historian Mike Davis had anticipated it in City of Quartz (1990) with his portrait of Los Angeles as a fortress city. Both show that urban security has become a market and a form of government that redefines who may be in the city and under whose gaze.

Mike Davis: the ecology of fear in Los Angeles

Davis opened the way. In City of Quartz he describes how Los Angeles responded to the Watts riots of 1965 and to growing inequality with an ecology of fear: fortified shopping malls, benches with spikes to prevent sleeping, gated communities, a police department using helicopters and counter-insurgency tactics in Black and Latino neighbourhoods, and an architecture Davis calls bunker-like, with public buildings designed to be impregnable. His thesis is that the neoliberal city replaces social policy with security, and that security is distributed by class and race.

Stephen Graham: the boomerang between war and urban policing

Graham widens the analysis to the global scale. Cities Under Siege documents the Foucault boomerang, as he calls it: the technologies and doctrines tested in the wars of Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinian territories, drones, facial recognition, smart walls, checkpoints, return to Western cities as tools of policing and of managing borders, protests and poor neighbourhoods. Armies, he argues, have redefined the city as the battlefield of the twenty-first century, and security companies sell to city councils what they once sold to defence ministries. The US programme that transfers surplus military equipment to local police, visible in Ferguson in 2014, is his most cited example.

Total surveillance, segregation and the end of protest

The consequences for urban life are three. The first is total surveillance: cities such as London or Shenzhen accumulate cameras with facial recognition that track millions of people, and mobility and network data turn every journey into police information. The second is segregation: militarised security concentrates on the edges between rich and poor areas, and treats stigmatised neighbourhoods as spaces to control rather than to serve. The third is the erosion of protest: riot equipment, exclusion zones and the criminalisation of occupying public space shrink the street as a place of politics.

Demilitarising the city: proposals and debates

Graham and Davis agree that militarisation does not answer a real increase in threat but a political economy: industries that need a market after wars, governments that prefer security to redistribution and an imaginary of fear fed by media and campaigns. Their critics accuse them of a catastrophist tone and of neglecting cases in which security technology protects vulnerable populations. But later evidence, from smart cities with integrated surveillance to the global export of border-control technology, has confirmed much of the diagnosis.

Against the militarised city, both authors and the movements that have read them propose demilitarising: democratic control of the police and its purchases, moratoriums on facial recognition such as those approved in San Francisco in 2019 and in several European cities, open rather than defensive public space design, and social policies that reduce the inequality that militarised security only contains. The question they leave is the one every city should ask before buying a camera or a drone: security for whom and against whom.