Skip to content
Future of City Search
ES EN
Stephen Graham
Thinkers

Stephen Graham

1965

British geographer who studies infrastructure and security: the pipes, networks and walls that decide who gets what.

With Simon Marvin he described «splintering urbanism»: the breaking up of public networks — water, electricity, transport, telecommunications — into services of different quality depending on who pays. Infrastructure stops being a city's common minimum and becomes the instrument that divides it.

His other line of work is the militarisation of urban space: cameras, drones, crowd control and techniques imported from war zones that end up deployed in ordinary neighbourhoods. And in Vertical he turned to the axis almost nobody analyses, from the bunker to the penthouse, where inequality is also measured in height.

A British geographer, professor of cities and society at Newcastle University, Graham began by studying urban telecommunications in Telecommunications and the City (1996, with Simon Marvin) and with the same co-author wrote Splintering Urbanism (2001), the book that showed how water, energy, transport and data networks, unbundled and privatised, connect privileged enclaves and bypass the rest of the city. It is one of the most cited works in this century's urban studies.

He then turned to security: Cities, War and Terrorism (2004), Cities Under Siege (2010) and Disrupted Cities (2010) describe the new military urbanism, in which the techniques of war and surveillance travel from Baghdad and Gaza to London and New York and infrastructures become targets. Vertical (2016) added the dimension of height, from satellites to bunkers. Critics reproach him for a sombre tone; his contribution is to have made infrastructure visible as a field of power.

Videos on Stephen Graham (5)

Where Stephen Graham is cited (6)

Watch the channel