City as Target or,
Perpetuation and Death[1]
For Steve Graham and Simon Marvin (eds.). Cities as Strategic Sites:
Militarisation, Anti-Globalism,
and Warfare. Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming 2003. (Reprint from R. Bishop,
J. Phillips, W.W. Yeo (eds.) Postcolonial
Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Globalization Processes. NY and
London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 61-83)
Prologue
The last substantial draft of this paper was finished on Sept. 5, 2001. We’d written it for the Perpetuating Global Cities workshop held in Singapore that spring, where the consensus seemed to be that it was interesting, perhaps even worrying, but peculiar. With the events of Sept. 11 we ceased working on it, partly because we were as immersed in the news coverage as everyone else, and because the piece was essentially done, but also because we were now uncertain what to do with a work entitled “The City as Target, or Perpetuation and Death”. Although the article was not about New York - our one reference to that city spoke of its relative security in comparison to its Asian counterparts –we knew that from now on, it would have to do with New York. One instinct was to re-write it, or at least write more. Another was to stop writing, and let the piece stand. We decided to stop. If it seems less than perfectly complete, given our current context, and strangely incognizant of the stunning events of autumn 2001, it is both those things. It’s is a record of what we were thinking in the first week of September, 2001. We’ve now followed it with a brief an epilogue, however, our attempt to continue a conversation that had prematurely collapsed in blood and complexity.
For a child it is extraordinary
to see to what degree a city can be obliterated in a single bombardment. For a
kid, a city is like the Alps, it's eternal, like the mountains. One single
bombardment and all is razed. These are the traumatizing events which shaped my
thinking. – Paul Virilio[2]
Life is
haunted and filled with the idea of protection. – Adolf
Hitler[3]
As the global city emerges ever more hegemonic, the
attention it reaps is not always welcome.
Attention is another word for targeting.
The city is a target for a range of catastrophes from natural disasters
(such as earthquakes, floods, tornados, hurricanes, tidal waves, and plagues)
to those of more obviously human construction (chemical spills, factory
explosions, mass transit accidents or derailments), strategic geopolitical
targeting (official military aggression to terrorist attacks), large-scale
macro-investments (International Monetary Fund or World Bank interventionism,
UN development schemes), more modest global investing (by multinational
corporations, advertising campaigns, IT networks, real estate speculation,
global capital maneuvering, currency markets, satellite imaging of
neighborhoods for marketing purposes),
planned (il)legal immigration (foreign labor
for menial tasks), or unplanned illegal immigration (refugees fleeing war,
famines, ethnic cleansing). The list hints at the range of the tropological and intellectual terrain proffered by the
city-as-target model. Their density of population, material goods, and wealth
have made cities, from their inception, simultaneously a given culture’s goal
(future and potential glory realized) and vulnerability (future and potential
destruction of the culture’s perceived trajectory).
The city is a lure to both settlers and sackers, something
to shoot for as well as shoot at.
In the earliest secular work in the Western intellectual tradition, The Iliad, Homer evocatively captures
the inescapable duality of the city by exploiting the pun in the Greek word kredemnon, which means both veil and battlement.
When Andromache watches from the walls of Troy as her
husband, Hektor, is dragged in death behind Achilles’
chariot, she removes her veil. Both she
and the city are undone by the failure of the veil/battlement to protect and by
its success in attracting undesired attention.
This sense of the city as both stronghold and Achilles’ heel, as it were
-- physically manifested in the walled
fortress -- was best realized in the collective Western imagination with the
metonymies of Rome and Carthage.
As the Enlightenment yielded to Modernity, however, the
memory of Carthage receded. Modernity,
especially, avoided the confluence of urbanism and catastrophe. We are not just referring to the imaginary of
catastrophe, but to the kind that produces bodies that have to be burned or
buried and rubble that has to be cleared.
Death on this scale was exceptional, exotic, or merely absent in the
official and academic literature of the “The City,” especially the dominant
stream produced by urban theorists in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. “Decay” and
related disease-terms were common, but these fell short of depicting
large-scale destruction and death. The
analogies were medical and therefore hopeful, rather than mordant or funereal. Biblical and Classical descriptions/celebrations
of urban extinction, in which walled enclosures are entirely wiped out to the
last inhabitant, had little counterpart in the The
City discourse. Urbicide
has been mainly encountered in politico-military histories whose central
characters were not cities but armies and nation-states. [4]
Why could catastrophe not be Modern? Beginning with the Bible and then reinforced
by the rise of ancient history and archeology in the 19th century, the
destruction of cities was a theme readily available to academic narratives, in
both their religious and secular manifestations. However, the theme grew increasingly
attenuated, and eventually petered out.
The demarcation between Modern and Ancient, from the perspective of the
19th century, was between the time when whole cities were destroyed
and their inhabitants slaughtered, and the time when that no longer happened --
when cities instead built glass exhibit halls for each other’s steam engines
and wallpaper. The hinge was perhaps the
Napoleanic War, when urban sacking was sporadic and
relatively contained. While Europeans
continued to raze African and Asian cities, it now came to be reported under
words like “retaken,” “pacified,” or
“civilized.”[5]
The destruction of cities became a show at the periphery.
The non-European world was read as still-Ancient and/or subject to rule by
Nature (including human natures in need of taming). Earthquakes, the most
newsworthy city-destroyers of the period between the beginning of the
Enlightenment and the Second World War, generally happened far from the North
Atlantic power-grid, in a geography largely coterminous with the orientalized world.
The most dramatic destruction of a major European city between Lisbon
(1755) and Warsaw (1939) was the earthquake-induced disappearance of Reggio/Calabria in 1907, cities on the Southern fringe of a
metropole that had moved decisively North and out of
the seismic zone in the 17th-18th centuries. The United States provided more regular
examples – Chicago in flames, followed by San Francisco. Here it was an East-West axis that projected
the images of natural disaster against geographies already considered
disordered, violent, and overly spontaneous.
Media-centers consumed urban catastrophe as exotic news, safe from any
sense of their own vulnerabilities.
In the natural sciences, the nineteenth century replacement
of “catastrophism” with “uniformatarianism”
made sudden disaster an epiphenomenon of natural history, and rendered steady
progress in historical time more natural as a result. Where the destruction of
Lisbon had given the Enlightenment pause, the destruction of Chicago (1871) or
Tokyo (1923) only accelerated the tempo of nascent global capitalism. In the age of trans-city finance, destruction
came to be seen as prelude to a reconstruction synonymous with growth or
evolution. Disaster was mitigated for an influential few. The rest suffered as before, but their damage
was now collateral.
Yet if the perpetuation of the The
City in modernist discourse was partly conditioned by catastrophe-avoidance,
the same cannot be true for The City in its post-WWII, hyper-Modern form. That war was, after all, an absolute orgy of
city-killing. The premeditated murder of
very large cities was one of its most salient characteristics, Hiroshima and
Dresden being only the iconographic examples.
The genealogy of catastrophe visited upon ancient cities was consciously
articulated in names bestowed on targeting plans. For example, the assault on
Hamburg was called “Operation Gomorrah.”[6] As in the Old Testament, all cities became
potential “cities on the plains,” with few fitting another typology found in
the Pentateuch: “cities of refuge.” The rise of modern architecture and “The
Architect” as a god-figure -- and of architectural history as about the future
more than the past -- was partly due to the opportunities to rebuild urban
centers laid flat by (mostly) Allied air forces. The modern bomber, a design icon for the prewar
Le Corbusier, became a major technological facilitator of his postwar
influence. And this was no irony. The
master-builders, especially from Hausmann onward,
were first master-targeters and master-destroyers,
although their acts of ground-clearing have left far fewer traces in the
historical record. The bulldozer was as
much a legacy of the Second World War as penicillin and DDT.
To renew the question, how is it that, in the aftermath of
1940-45, the most sustained period of urban disaster since Tamerlane,
and continuing through a period of global targeting for future urban catastrophism on a near-total scale, The City remained a multidisciplinary discourse almost utterly
shorn of catastrophic tropes?[7] One reason is The City’s heroic status in
both capitalist and socialist storytelling.
It was not only the actor, but the stage, scenery, and audience in a
drama of irreversible world-historical change. The thunderous collapse into one
another of modernization and urbanization was one of the few “emperial” spectacles that collectively bound politicians
and intellectuals of all persuasions, at least until the final quarter of the
20th century. More mundanely, urban planning, architecture, art, and
journalism –the professions who most controlled the object of The City – were
also most dependant on cities as work-sites.
The suburb, and all that-was-not-The-City, was often constructed as
their enemy. Death – centered now in the
soul - was relocated outside the city gates. Until Stephen Spielberg’s portrayal
of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in the1993 film Schindler’s List, even the Holocaust was presented in media images
as mainly a suburban phenomenon. The
banality of evil that made Auschwitz possible, from certain abstracting
perspectives, can seem akin to the banality of postwar Levittown -- better to
leave The City out of it.
The absence of death within “The City” reflected the larger
economy of death within the academy: its studied absence from some disciplines
and compensatory over-representation in others.
History (the discipline) has been left largely by default to animate the
city of the dead. It is not just that
the dead are the historian’s actors.
Historians are actively interested in what killed them. They are particularly interested if people
have been killed, although the killed
arrange themselves into hierarchies of historical interest. Murder is more historically fascinating than
other forms of death, because it is “social, cultural, and political” (the
historian’s declaration of solidarity with his social science colleagues). Those who have been killed by Nature, as in
earthquakes, have traditionally not been considered to be “historical actors”
by a profession whose stage center remains The State (rarely The City) and
which shares only a short border with the natural sciences. Tokyo can burn up with most of its
inhabitants, for example, and yet barely register as an event(s) in survey
history texts of Japan. Epidemics,
likewise, seem to come and go like the common flu. Demicide,
the murder by a state of its own citizens, ranks high on the list of killings
that would attract progressive historical research, as history overlaps with
the law and investigative journalism in its studied instinct for the pursuit of
justice. The resulting imbalance in how
historians arrange and treat their dead sometimes makes them seem sloppy in the
eyes of social scientists. To
historians, on the other hand, the utter lack of corpses in social science
texts on The City is the problem, the puzzle, needing to be explained.
We don’t make these observations for the sake of morbidity, or from anti-urban instincts, but to demonstrate that a history of The City as a site of catastrophe – of urban densities as targets - certainly has been constructible from available evidence, particularly in our own time. The failure of Modernism to produce this history -- its writing of The City as a site of “processes,” development, and yes, perpetuation -- is thus worth noticing, especially when its own concentric zone models look so much like bull’s-eyes. Evolutionary models of the urban ecologists could not allow for emergency, in the form of the sudden and unpredictable event, a phenomena-set too closely associated with Fascism, the opposite of Planning. The City was, after all, the site of data-gathering and trend-setting par excellence. The principal “event” was growth, or decay. It was all botany. The power of biological metaphors in city development and planning, whether medical or botanical, rest in their ability to avoid agency and responsibility for the way cities have been grown, despite the rhetoric of planning, just as similar metaphors for the marketplace have elided human control over economic forces and conditions.
The city-as-target, a reading long buried under layers of academic Modernism, did find a certain robust expression in popular culture. As Mike Davis and H. Bruce Franklin have recently reminded us, cities have been insistently destroyed, and over a more sustained period, in novels, movies, and comic books.[8] At least in the last two art forms, however, destruction on a truly Judeo-Christian scale was arguably held in check through the end of the Cold War, as Hollywood and the American comic industry are relatively optimistic media. No imagery the West produced (until only very recently) could match that of a fire-breathing atomic-born Godzilla dismantling Tokyo cho by cho. Americans preferred that their giant screen-creatures live in the jungle or desert, and merely menace nearby cities. King Kong is defeated by The City, not the other way round. The same would generally hold for most of his Cold-War permutations.
Target Practice: Consuming Hiroshima, Hanoi,
Phnom Penh . . .
The Arab and Kurd... now know what real bombing means in
casualties and damage; they now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized
village (vide attached photos) can be practically wiped out and a third of its
inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines. -- British
Wing-Commander Arthur Harris (later Air Marshall Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris),
writing of his participation in the aerial bombing of Iraq in 1924[9]
Japan
offers an ideal target for air operations . . . [Its] towns, built largely of
wood and paper, form the greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen . . .
Incendiary projectiles would burn the cities to the ground in short order. – U.S. General Billy Mitchell, writing in Liberty
magazine, January 1932. [10]
Because of Picasso’s
artistry, it is widely believed that the first aerial bombing of a concentrated
civilian target was the Luftwaffe’s raid against Guernica,
Spain in 1934. But the colonized world,
more specifically North Africa and Asia, experienced even earlier aerial
bombardments of concentrated populations, beginning with an ineffective but
symbolically important raid on Tripoli in 1911 and including some carried out
with deadly effect by the air forces of Spain.
Aerial bombing in the 20th century, of course, continued an
age-old tradition of bombardment by land and sea, but in seeking to distance it
from historic strategies and practices, its earliest advocates continually
suggested its use against not against walls or fortifications, but the
densities that they contained. The Hague Convention of 1907 prohibited the
targeting of civilian populations by airborne weaponry. In colonial territories, however, civilian
population didn’t necessarily count as a “civilian population.”
Italy, France, Spain, and Britain led the way in the use of
aerial attacks against colonial
populations as a means of “pacification.” France, in fact, called their first
systemized form of air attack “colonial bombing” and developed a specific plane,
Type Colonial, for just such a purpose. Anticipating the benefits of contemporary
long-range high-tech weapons, Britain called its air targeting of colonial
cities “control without occupation.” The
expansion of such bombing to target cities like London, Berlin, and Paris
during World War I constituted an expansion from colonized cities to
cosmopolitan ones. In fact, if the “civilizing” of colonial areas occurred
through means of urbanization, then it also converted colonial populations into
potential aerial targets. The colonial
city was the paradigm for the city-as-target that has dominated the military
imagination in the 20th century.[11] Although countless cities, towns, and
villages across Asia have been consumed (literally) in aerial and naval attack,
the histories of their destructions have yet to be consumed (figuratively)
through images or even, in many cases, texts. They have, with few exceptions,
lacked their Picassos.[12]
To suggest that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not fully
consumed seems at first unreasonable. Did not their very names become metaphors
for destruction of the most complete, nearly Carthaginian type? Yet the catastrophism
these words evoked was always about the future more than the past -- about your
own place rather than their place. Alain Resnais
articulated tis in his film Hiroshima Mon Amour, in its opening sequence and its sustained
meditation on the consistent external construction of the city as a global
metaphor for, of all things, “peace.”
“Hiroshima” came to mean, for many who deployed it, the possibility of
the end of the world in its entirety, an event “beyond history.” History (and specificity) often stopped with
the towering white cloud that symbolized all nuclear explosions from Hiroshima
to the final one(s). How many people
could ever pick out Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s unique death-columns from the
dozens of mushroom-clouds that might merely have been tropical tests? Post-Occupied Japan cooperated by
reconstituting the victims in universal rather than ethnically specific terms.
Whatever the good intentions, moral or geopolitical, the dead of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki suffered a second act of disappearance. An image of a little girl, bodily whole and
holding her head and arms hopefully aloft, cannot begin to represent what
actually happened in both those places.
Nor, it seems, is she meant to.
So passionless, disembodied, and consumable was the
mushroom cloud image that it became the icon on many American consumer products
in the middle to late 1940s, helping flog everything from toothpaste, drive-in
movies, and a terrific Count Basie album, to special
drinks at bars. Indeed, the U.S. Post Office very nearly issued it as a
Hiroshima commemorative stamp in 1995.
The stamp was subsequently taken into private production by a group of
American veterans angry at its last-minute cancellation, and it is now
distributed via the website of Brigadier General (retired) Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay and leader of the 509th Composite Group over
Hiroshima. According to the same website, the great-grandson of the Enola Gay Tibbets is a pilot in the present 509th Bomb Wing, recommissioned
in 1993 specifically to receive the new B-2 bombers.[13] It was the 509th, whose
shoulder-patch emblem is the Nagasaki mushroom cloud (archivally
correct), which flew B-2s against Belgrade.
The “509ers have every intention” boasts their own website, “of
equaling, if not surpassing, the past accomplishments of the 509th Bomb Wing.”
The restoration of the 509th, an intentional act of convergence
between B-2s and “the story of Hiroshima/Nagasaki” (a story of how the American
citizen-army was saved by adDeus ex machina which is also “the story of the Gulf War”
projected forward and backward in time[14])
was coincident with the restoration of the Enola
Gay itself for iconographic exhibit at the American National Air and Space
Museum. [15]
How little of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had really been
consumed became apparent in 1994, when even “liberal” American media like the Washington Post worked (successfully) to
prevent items such as half-
Hollywood, despite its remarkable stable of special effects
artists, never portrayed the actual bodily horrors of nuclear warfare. Such images exist, however, in the form of
often haunting colored drawings by atomic bomb survivors and photographs of
horribly disfigured living hibakusha (atomic bomb victims), such as the “Hiroshima Maidens”.
Hiroshima also has its Picassos in Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, the artist couple whose series of “Hiroshima
Murals”, completed over a period of three decades, have been described by
historian John Dower as displaying
. . . (an) anger, complexity, and humanism . . .
unparalleled in the Japanese artistic
tradition; indeed one is hard pressed to find counterparts in the non- Japanese traditions of high art.
Despite
their publication outside Japan, these and other images from ground-level
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have yet to find a secure place in the “global”
(western) economy of images of Modern war-related destruction. The perspective
of the bombardier, who sees his urban target only as a map through the clouds,
became (and arguably still is) the agreed-upon shared perspective of the
post-war war-consuming public.[18]
Even in Japan,
"Hiroshima and Nagasaki" have often beenmade
to stand for all the bombing victims, while the more numerous dead of Tokyo and
other cities have been less visibly memorialized. The proof is in the comparative anonymity of
the fire-bombing of Tokyo, in which more people were killed than in either
atomic blast. Even in Japan, “Hiroshima”
has been made to stand for all bombing victims, while the more numerous dead of
Tokyo are scarcely memorialized. Yet the firebombing of Tokyo was in no sense
conventional – it was not an episode of factory bombing that got out of
hand. Rather, the U.S. Army Air Force
constructed an authentic Tokyo neighborhood in the western desert and
experimented with various incendiary devices before arriving at the perfect
formula for a firestorm. The intentional incineration of whole urban
populations was invented there and elsewhere,
not at Los Alamos. The technology
was napalm, which would become (in)famous throughout the world only with the
Vietnam War.[19]
It was the disembodied, metahistorical
reading of Hiroshima that gave aerial bombing depiction its postwar style. Belonging to the realm of “communication”
more than atrocity – for the sake of its victims as much as its perpetrators -
targeting was invariably depicted from a God’s-eye perspective. It took the Vietnam War, uniquely productive
of images of death and maiming at ground level, to produce a picture of aerial
bombing comparable in its impact to that of the crying Chinese infant alone in
the ruins of Shanghai – the little girl running naked down a road was a victim
of the same technology that had killed Tokyo. Yet this was, for all its impact,
a “rural” scene “explainable” in terms of “collateral damage.” This last term would itself have little
meaning without the model of Hiroshima, this time as a towering column of
intentionality and completeness.
A history of modern urbanization in Indo-China could be
written with the B-52 bomber at its center.
Political theorist Samuel Huntington made this explicit in coining the
phrase “forced-draft urbanization” to describe the 20th-century
air-borne version of 18th century enclosure.[20] Thus did Phnom Penh double in size because of
American aerial bombing of the countryside around it. When the peasant-victims of Cambodian
carpet-bombing eventually took that city, they forcibly emptied it out in the
most infamous deurbanization of modern times. Hanoi also emptied out dramatically, but this
time under the direct threat of American bombs.
Less is remembered of the dramatic urbanizations/de-urbanizations of
South Vietnam as a result of military action.
The American air force likely killed more urban residents of the
southern cities it was “defending,” particularly during the Tet
Offensive, than it did in campaigns against the urban North. In most filmic and other popular accounts,
the Vietnam battlefield is remembered as countryside and jungle, and its cities
as the “normative” sector of a hellishly abnormal geography, or as the liminal space between the chaotic jungle and the “normal”
U.S. suburbs. Yet there was nothing normative about urban Indo-China during the
period of warfare, and the present shape and character of its cities are very
much artifacts of sustained military targeting.[21]
Retargeting
The City
Mechanical
and Electrical Engineers destroy targets.
Civil Engineers build them. ---
anonymous
7. To direct or aim on a course. Freq. const. to; Hence 
targeting
vbl. n.
1961 Guardian 24 Oct. 8/4 Being forced to
rely on so much inspection..that targeting
information would be given away to the other side. 1963 Newsweek 11 Feb. 23
Planners have recently put forward the notion of city-avoidance, a tacit
agreement between potential enemies to arrange their targeting so that missiles
are aimed at military objectives rather than civilian populations. 1968 Economist 8 June 65/2 A general complaint is that consultants
sometimes stick too much to their business precepts, such as ‘targeting’ and do
not bend enough to the particular needs of the company. 1976 National Observer
(U.S.) 27 Nov. 5/1 NCEC laid out $350,000 for candidates in 1976. That paid for
64 polls in 32 separate congressional districts and for computerized precinct
targeting and analysis in more than 40 districts. 1977 Time 21 Nov. 24/2
None of these possess as sophisticated a targeting system as the new Soviet
model's [sc. a T-72 tank]. 1982 Financial Times 13 Mar. 14/1 In terms of targeting ability. –
Oxford English Dictionary[22]
The examples of usage for the gerund form of the verb
“target” that are found in the Oxford English Dictionary unsurprisingly
reiterate the city-as-target applications in this essay’s opening
paragraph. Roughly contemporary with the
emergence of postcoloniality and the triumph of global urbanism, the OED
examples range from military, to business, to political notions of targeting,
all relevant to how the current global city functions as both imagined and
experienced entity. The convergence of
military and marketing designs on urban areas, of course, has political
implications, but also economic ones, for the technology that makes it possible
to so target the city in our current post-Cold War moment results from
concerted military-funded research and development that have become the basis
for the information technology revolution in the “new economy” of the global
order. This same technological
revolution remains in military hands, however, and allows us to imagine (and
visualize in popular culture and news broadcasts) wholesale urban destruction
with ever-greater intimacy. Tripoli, Beirut,
Belgrade, Grozney, Sarajevo, and Baghdad have
provided recent generations with images of urban targeting altogether more
insistent, clear, and technicolored, yet disturbingly
adrift from progressive narratives.
Thus with the end of the Cold War, “The Modern City” has begun to be subject to a new kind of catastrophic imaginary, this despite the immediate post-Cold War claim that the targeted city has lost its bull’s-eye. The recent intensification and increase in Old Testament-scale images of urban destruction in the convergent realms of journalism, film, military action, telecommunications, government policy-making, computer gaming, and the academic press show no sign of abating, as if the collective sigh of relief of having dodged “the big one” allowed the possibility – and invited the pleasure - of its representation in more “contained” forms. “The Postmodern City” is now visualized more commonly than before as a site of violent, sudden death writ large and small, a new economy of images that makes the old (Modern) one seem tinted and opaque.
This imaginary is still largely absent, however, from current urban planning, theory, and discussion. Current trends in global (read, North American and European) urban planning seek to fuse an eclectic, New-Age spirituality (emergent from unprecedented privilege that is the result of global exploitation) with notions of “ecology” and “nature” as kindly corrective and nurturing – sort of a cybernetic Bambi-ism. The result is a nostalgic reclamation of community and local color in the face of increasing corporate global homogenization. The fusing of spirituality and nature in constructed urban environments that reclaim “the local” points toward a “Romantic resurgence” by urban theorists and planners.[23] The built environment in this 1990s reaction against the corporatization of cities and the globe (which, ironically, fuels and drives the very technologies these thinkers claim as emancipatory) means “tribal groups” at spatial, but not temporal, distances can form communities no longer dependent on topographical proximity but rather on the proximity of “shared interests.” These interests, of course, are produced on, circulated by, and consumed on “real time” information technologies, themselves increasingly in the control of fewer and fewer multimedia conglomerates – the very organizations these groups wish to eschew while having that eschewal become instrumental in their built environment. Far from being an element in narrowing human and ecological horizons, technological virtualization, from this perspective, has helped us already actualize this delicate balance of urbanism and spiritual fulfillment in tune with ecosystems.
As we have seen, however, the foundation for this global reharmonization of nature and culture, ecology and city,
global and local, is composed of fragile electronic grids that can disappear in
the click of a mouse. Silicon Valley
residents and the rest of California experienced the many brown-outs and rolling
black outs of 2000 and 2001 as deregulation derailed electrical utilities. The ironies are heavy and manifest. An environmentally driven urban zeitgeist
dependent on plundering the earth’s natural resources, as in opening Alaskan
wildlife and nature preserves to oil drilling also manifests itself in
conflagrations such as the Gulf War.
But, as is the case with the long-distance high-tech weaponry now
favored by the U.S. military and with the exorbitant inequity of global trade,
the Romantic resurgence of contemporary urban planning operates in a mystified
and mystifying discursive and epistemological domain that obliterates the
relationship between cause and effect.[24]
The Romantic shift in current global urbanism is
simultaneously prospective and retrospective, as is all nostalgia. At the same time that the Romantic impulse
emerges as a dominant intellectual mode in global urbanism, with environmental
concerns taking a supposedly central role, the city-as-target of human-created
disaster, directly or indirectly, is elided from all public discourse and
memory of urban trajectories. Human habitats have been, and remain, the total
targets of total war in the 20th century, and, as Paul Virilio
reminds us, “scientific arms aim at the volatilization of environmental
conditions; what biological warfare accomplished for animal life, ecological
warfare did for flora, and nuclear warfare, with its radiation, for the
atmosphere.”[25] Cold War satellite technology used for urban
planning forgets its military origins just as the earliest uses of aerial
photography to plan cities at the turn of the 20th century forgot
its. Yet cities remain targeted sites
well within the military’s aerial and prosthetically
enhanced visual sights.
The retargeting of the city in the post-Cold War era,
bearing the full weight of real-time technology’s ramifications, is neatly
exemplified in both the 1997 Southeast Asian economic crisis and the Gulf War –
two events from the past century’s last decade that reveal the vulnerability of
urban space, urban dwellers and urban economies locked in the global
embrace. The Gulf War marked a return
to, or a retargeted application of, “conventional weapons” and “strategic intervention,”
which could render a city, a nation, and a military immobile. Bombing in the Gulf War took advantage of
real-time data transmission, sophisticated information technology systems, and
intelligent projectiles to reinvent bombing without Cold War vaporization ,
Vietnam War sledgehammer bombing, or WW II inaccuracy. This event reopened the city as a viable
military target, rendering urban space more vulnerable to airborne attack,
because it could be “contained,” The City was once more a legitimate military
option, moreso than at any point between 1945 and
1990. Just as the colonial cities of Africa and Asia pointed toward the later
aerial targeting of the metropoles that controlled
them, the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong pointed toward
the potential targeting of other cities. Though no new technology or restraint
prevented the wholesale destruction of North Vietnamese provincial capitals,
the attacks showed that it was possible to avoid the nuclear annihilation
embedded in Cold War policies while avoiding WWII-like practices.
As the Cold War
has vanished from our collective screens, the Cold War technology transfer to
the private sector has spilled over with unintended consequences in a variety
of ways. The very same real time technologies that allowed instantaneous data
transfer for identifying military targets during the Gulf War were used to
target global capital investments and pullouts during the Southeast Asian
economic crisis some seven years later. Technologies designed to take
snap-second decisions out of human hands in military situations – taking the
human element out of the loop – function similarly with currency exchange
markets and other global investment strategies. Maximum control by these
technologies led to maximum economic
The targeting can, and does, take on more ominous tones if we consider the Gulf War and the Southeast Asian economic crisis as two sides of the same complex geophysical, ideological, and techno-scientific coin. The globalization thrust that allows for the real-time surveillance of the earth and its networked nodes also provides the means for homogenizing the earth into a single market. And if a “rogue nation” refuses to play by the end-of-history political/economic rules, it can be (and has been) targeted for punishment, including strategic bombing. Stereoscopy telescopes the horizon (which has been lost in the vanishing point of perspectival painting and cartography) as well as market, economic, social and urban choices. The global market consumption predicated on and enacted in the name of “choice” works well enough for urban denizens as long as they (and their nation-states) choose correctly.
Just as currently constituted and understood globalization
processes emerged from Cold War policies, practices and technologies, so too
did the interconnected fate of global cities.
As nodes in the global, ideological grid of surveillance and
intercontinental ballistic missile targeting, each global city was potentially every other global city. A nuclear attack of one (which implied direct
attack of more because of Mutually Assured Destruction policies) meant
radiation fallout and environmental devastation for all others. Global cities became, and remain, global
insofar as they are targets for attack.
It is their status as targets that renders them, de facto, “global.” The
conversion of military technology into the bases of the “new economy” merely
shifts the targeting from directly geo-political to indirectly geopolitical,
while remaining wholly ideological. And as we have seen, this conversion can
easily be shifted back to direct military targeting -- as the convergence of
the Gulf War and Southeast Asian economic crisis attest.
Global cities bear the marks of
their global status by virtue of targeting in
myriad ways: civil defense plans, emergency operations, and military
infrastructure. This manifests itself as their various tools of implementation
for these procedures should the city-as-target find itself directly in the
crosshairs: bunkers/shelters, evacuation plans, and defensive military hardware
such as “Star Wars.” Many of these plans and the support to put them into
practice serve double duty. That is,
civil defense and evacuation plans also can provide clean up for chemical
spills, or natural disasters. The imprint of the Cold War can be found
everywhere in the great global city, in all of its technologies, in all the
distributed systems that link cities in nodes -- even in office designs of
workstations meant to expedite communication and decrease hierarchies, as does
that other great Cold War technology: the Internet.[26]
Cities bear the mark of their status as target at every level of empirical,
quotidian life. This has been true for a long time, as the etymology of city
planning terminology reveals. The French
“boulevard” is a corruption of the Dutch word for an artillery bastion, “bolwerk,” while an “esplanade” in today’s global city forgets its origins as the open space
lying before fortifications.[27] Singapore’s most recent investment in the
arts is a complex called “The Esplanade of Theatres on the Bay.” We are
constantly reminded of the necessity of city targeting for urban planning,
especially when we remember that city planning demands urban destruction before
urban reconstruction can occur. The Cold War and its New World Order aftermath
have simply upped the ante, through increases in speed of targeting, speed of
delivery to the target, and impact.
The Asia-Pacific
as Disaster Zone
Indeed,
we are today forced to produce the Metropolis and are given no other choice: it
is the savage and meager return for all that has been subtly and ceremoniously
expropriated from us. -- Sanford Kwinter[28]
I think no power to your refrigerator, no gas to your
stove, you can’t get to work because
the bridge is down--the bridge on which you hold your rock
concerts and you all stood
with targets on your heads. That needs to disappear at
three o’clock in the morning. --
Lieutenant General Michael Short, NATO’s top air-war commander, speaking to
the New York Times[29]
Most of the world’s earthquakes occur in a belt that
extends from the Mediterranean Sea, across central Asia, through northern
India, and around the Pacific rim: a geography strangely convergent with the
map of world power prior to the rise of Protestantism. Cities in this zone are
seen to have a fundamentally different relationship with their Earth than those
outside it. They can theoretically be
brought down without warning at any time, and sometimes are. They thus watch each other’s disasters more
closely than they are watched outside the region. Because seismology has never evolved into a
predictive science, there is nothing that cities in the Eurasia-Pacific earthquake
zone can do but fortify themselves and hope for the best. Yet earthquakes come so infrequently,
apocalyptic ones may never come at all, and good fortification is so expensive
(and surveillance-intensive) that if the great quake is truly unprecedented in
its ferocity the city may be destroyed despite everything. Such is the gambler’s logic that works
against putting too many of one’s resources into self-fortification, and makes
every new earthquake-disaster an occasion for intense, but temporary, recrimination.
But earthquakes and other potentially city-destroying forms
of nature (typhoons, tsunamis, floods, etc.) are not uniform in their effects
on Asia, despite the West’s historic construction of that continent as
peculiarly ruled by superhuman forces.
The cities of “Island” Southeast Asia (Indonesia and the Philippines)
are within the Trans-Pacific Earthquake zone, for example, while those of
“Mainland” Southeast Asia are not.
Singapore, despite the occasional tremor telegraphed from Sumatran epicenters,
experiences Nature as tamer and less threatening than Amsterdam or Minneapolis
do. Of all of the major urban
concentrations in the geographies of Pacific Rim and Asia-Pacific, Singapore is
arguably least aware of itself as existing in a natural environment that might
do it harm. No earthquakes, no typhoons, no volcanoes, no tsunami. Singapore experiences Nature not as threat,
but as an absence. The absence of
natural resources is what begins to trace the contours of the city’s sense of
its own vulnerability.
Singapore’s self-image as target is a dense collage of
memory, geography, and political science.
There is its identity as a small city-state between two much larger and
resentful neighbors, one of whom controls its water supply. There is its newness, its perceived
artificiality – the un-maskable fact of its colonial
creation and function (more easily masked in Bangkok and Jakarta) within a
region alive with ancient claims and anticolonial
mobilizations. It has a Chinese majority
far from “home,” again between countries that have been accused of persecuting
their own Chinese. And marbled through
these geopolitical and geolocal awarenesses
is the historical memory of what happened after the city fell to the Imperial
Japanese Army in 1941.
The Sook Ching
was a ceremony of concentration and targeting. The majority Chinese population
was gathered, examined, and some marked – often arbitrarily - for immediate
death. It was a moment of intense
emergency, from which some members of the later leadership emerged as
accidental survivors. It arguably set in train a whole series of emergencies,
including the unexpected emergence of independence in 1965. Emergency – “a
moment of anguish” colored with an acute sense of vulnerability, and even
regret – is the story the country chooses to tell about its birth, a narrative
relatively rare in the annals of nations.
This narrative undergirds a continued sense of
mobilization and preparedness, which both integrates Singapore into the grid of
global cities while subliminally questioning its purported securities. In
different forms, however, emergence/emergency are a not uncommon dualism among
global cities in the Asia-Pacific disaster zone. None has ever experienced the
“security” of New York, nor can they reasonably expect to.
Singapore’s emergence as a “virtual”
global city comes with protections and maskings. Because the strength of its geography (as a
world-class port) is also its greatest weakness (as the Japanese occupation and
proximity to a volatile Indonesia and recalcitrant Malaysia reveal),
Singapore’s full-bore plunge into the “new economy” has the added advantage of deterritorializion. In the contemporary moment, as space
yields to time – the world-time of real-time – Singapore’s economy becomes increasingly
spectralized, rendering the nation a less appealing
target, at least for aggressive occupation. Why would any potential invader
want to possess the intelligent island of Singapore? What gain could be had?
The infrastructure, like the web, is both here and not here; the city has
become not-a-city. Virilio could well
have been describing Singapore when he discusses a teleoptical
sleight-of-hand that also serves as a protective device: “While the topical City
was once constructed by the ‘gate’ and the ‘port’, the teletopical
metacity is now reconstructed around the
‘window’ and the teleport, that is to say, around the screen and the time
slot.”[30]
The screen provides a screen for the city-as-target to hide behind, just as the
timeslot allows an opening for space to disappear into real-time teletechnologies’ erasure of here and there. As the virtual replaces the material, as the uncarnate replaces the incarnate, a new type of
“protection” coincides with the new economy.
The new protection provided by the
new economy is just as illusory, of course, as any old protection ever was, a
point the 1997 economic crisis made painfully clear. Just as the mind-body split remains a
metaphysical desire always dragged down by inescapable embodiment, so too the
virtual metacity functions with the “betweeness” of stereoscopy.
In this space between the wired and the geopolitical worlds pulse
petrochemical plants, a real and really active port, and other
desiderata of the material world we would rather slough off. The ads for the Home office, painted on
double-decker buses with the slogan “there’s no place like home,” remind us
that a potential Sook Ching looms ever on the horizon. Similarly, the Civil Defence
ads remind us that “there is no place like home” because home cannot ever
really be a no-place, a utopia, free from the vagaries of the body and bodies,
no matter how neatly or centrally planned.
A mural outside the Civil Defence
station near Queenstown makes this point.
The mural depicts dedicated Civil Defence
workers armored in protective garb from visor to boot clearing some generic
toxic spill that never-was but could-be at any moment. The mural, in essence, memorializes a potential
future moment of the city-as-target that we might not live to
memorialize once it actually enters the past.
At the same time, the mural is meant to instill confidence and
well-being in the people who pass it, so they can go about their business in
the virtual, wired, real-time metacity knowing they
are protected from the troubles of other, apparently less-clean and less-safe,
industries – hang-overs from the old economy. But, as with nuclear fallout shelters, the
scene smacks of whistling past the graveyard, and that which is meant to
comfort can actually prove discomfiting.
The new economic order is just as much a target, if not more so, than
any past economic order, if for no other reason than it is almost exclusively
the result of targeting technologies.
City
Ruins (Targets Past and Future)
Ruin
is formal. – Emily Dickinson[31]
It is
easier to imagine blowing things sky high than to give up homogenized order as
a measure of urban success. – Herbert Muschamp[32]
When the architecture of cities
sported their target status – when they were fortified with walls – masonry,
ironically, marked the shift from “barbarism” to “civilization.” 19th
century Europe developed an especial fondness for the ruins left by cities and
empires past. As cities began to shed their walls and camouflage (their
potential-target status) artists, historians, writers, urban planners, and a
myriad of others found in ruins memento mori
at individual and collective levels, delineating the deaths of citizens,
cities, and states alike. Ruins both
humbled and emboldened their viewers.
They reminded those who gazed upon their grim visage that no nation or
people had defeated the Heraclitian forces of
existence, and yet, at the same time, these piles of rubble and graceful
dilapidations could also be interpreted as embodying evolutionary theories of
science, as purported by Lyell and Darwin. Not only did the earth change, it actually
progressed. Ruins, as a result, played a
pivotal role in the 19th and 20th century European and
North American imaginary, and they did so in ways that had direct effects on
the understanding of cities as human habitats freed from the devolutionary ways
of the targeting past – or so it was believed. In the process, ruins bespoke
the present and future as much as they did the past.
If
the Civil Defence mural in Singapore memorializes a
potential future moment of the city-as-target and ruin, the 1997 Southeast
Asian economic crisis has also bestowed on the urban landscape futural ruins
resultant from the city-as-targeted by real-time teletechnologies
and the flow of global capital. Bangkok
flaunts a number such ruins: high-rise luxury condos abandoned in mid-flight to
the heavens, highways to nowhere ending in steel-cable tatters, unfinished
office skyscrapers made ghostly despite never having been inhabited. These ruins house squatters from rural areas,
suburbanites tossed out of homes they can no longer afford, and criminals and
drug addicts seeking addresses that do not appear on maps, not to mention rats
and other such urban vermin. Where
residents were once threatened with ho
Other
futural ruins litter the Southeast Asian city horizon. One such example is Singaporean architect Tay Khen
Lebbus Woods argues that the current wave of urban planners and architects in the grip of the Romantic resurgence ignore the long term effects of their building and buildings, not to mention the environmental processes necessary to build in the first place. The delusion operative in “green” building and urban designs manifests itself in environmental consciousness as decoration, not to mention as marketing tool. But the ruin “the Tropical City” really camouflages is the one that it purports to stave off -- that which would result from global warming. That is, the Tropical City camouflages the agency of global cities in the ur-environmental disaster, of which they are both belated victims and perpetrators. As with all of the urban plans swept up in the utopian visions of the Romantic resurgence, the notion of the Tropical City operates with an exceptionally limited view of the interaction between urban planning and ecosystems, as we have discussed earlier.
Vines and gardens no more hide the target that is The City than virtuality does. The city’s boundaries are always both veil and battlement. The current discourse about global cities and global urbanism emphasizes the positive elements of the various trajectories that make up its complex existence (what one shoots for) at the expense of the negative elements (that which is shot at), and the dearth of such discursive interaction and critical engagement must come at a cost. The cost might be found in the futural ruins that haunt our current cityscape today.
Epilogue
Having two authors, “The City as Target” had two goals, at least. One was to suggest the diversity, and relevance, of the city-as-target trope, and trace it across a number of normally disconnected domains, suggesting as we did so their deeply interconnected nature. Another was to point out how rarely targeting had appeared in modern academic discourse about The City, and how this instinct toward omission had strangely grown as the targeting became more intense and deadly. Because neither of us are urbanists, we actually began the article unprepared to encounter the silence about targeting in urban studies literature, particularly urban histories. We set out with the relatively straightforward goals of connecting things we thought belonged together, and beginning to construct a history, along the way, of how they came to be separated. Subsequent events in New York City and Washington D. C. showed in dramatic fashion the utter impossibility of separating the economic from the martial in considering the city-as-target model.
The ‘stunning’
nature of what happened in New York was at least partly conditioned by the
post-World War II consensus that discourses on death and urban densities not
closely overlap. They were separated
above all by discursive styles - for example the separation of process from
event – which worked their mischief in many realms beside the urban one. But
urban disasters were also lost to ‘urban history’ by folding them into
meta-narratives controlled by states.
It’s interesting, and disturbing, that so many American voices have
paired the New York bombing with Pearl Harbor – a battle between fleets of
warships far from major metropoles – while so few
have placed it within the long history of cities whose civilian inhabitants
have been mercilessly targeted for obliteration. “Pearl Harbor” abstracts the
tragedy of New York into a national (and nationalist) narrative and away from
an urban history (largely unwritten) redolent with terrorized cities from Troy
and Carthage to Groznyy. So too the idea
that a “Ho
The assault on New
York and Washington was an orchestrated collision of multiple components of a
more or less integrated high-technology system - jetliners, skyscrapers, and
television cameras/monitors - central to urbanization processes since World War
II. The timing of the second plane’s
impact on the World Trade Center towers was intended to take advantage of
real-time technologies that could broadcast the event of death “live” to a
global audience, as much as it was an attack on the global power these
real-time technologies perpetuate. The one ‘foreign’ technology at the center
of this implosion was a hand-tool called the box-cutter The extreme disparity
between this weapon (which under ‘normal’ circumstances is the most lowly tool
of the global commercial economy) and its effect was hitherto unimaginable to a
society whose security seemed to rest on its own technological sophistication. Indeed, it has yet to be fully absorbed,
given the immediate turn in the terrorism-related discourse toward increased
optoelectronic surveillance, heavier investment in high-tech weaponry, and
heightened concern with “weapons of mass destruction.” This seems a turn backwards in time, toward a
world full of certainties about the relationship between technological
capabilities and their effects, between invention and production, launch and
strike; that is, a return to the Cold War strategies and technicities
central to the urban shaping which our article foregrounds. The terrorists of Sept. 11 orchestrated a
targeted implosion of a system whose individual components were hitherto
considered benign, or at least outside the immediate rubric of violence and war,
by those whom they most benefited. That the general response to this targeting
has been an intensification of the very technologies and technicities
that conflate the economic, military and urban spheres reinforces our sense of
the density and momentum of the regime we were intent on describing in early
September 2001.