War and the city in the new urban century.(Defence)(Essay)

No matter how many valuable functions the city has furthered, it has also served, throughout most of its history, as a container of organized violence and a transmitter of war.

--Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961)

London, his part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities.

--Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005)

SINCE THE END of the Cold War, cities, particularly those of the developing world, have emerged as one of the most common environments for armed conflict. The nexus between globalisation, urbanisation and rapid demographic growth in the "global South" appears to be changing the character of warfare. We appear to be on the cusp of an "urban century" dominated by burgeoning megacities with a growing potential for violent implosions capable of causing major political crises. A new "literature of the megalopolis" has emerged in such disciplines as sociology, philosophy and geography. This new literature concentrates on the erosion of the rural-urban divide; on the shift in armed violence from landscape to cityscape and on the consequent need for metrostrategy over geostrategy; and upon the rise of urban hypertrophy and the phenomenon of the Zwischenstadt or "cities without cities" that defy effective governance.

During the Cold War, no Western army seriously considered a future in which urban warfare would be frequent. Today, every Western army knows that at some point it will fight in what are commonly known as "military operations on urban terrain". Yet even as military professionals have sought to prepare for the peculiar and daunting challenge of conducting urban military operations in an era of networks and globalised security conditions, the growing significance of the links between cities and war has yet to penetrate the mainstream of policy. Most policy-makers think largely in narrow terms of domestic urban counter-terrorism and defending critical infrastructure in which police forces and emergency services predominate. They appear to be unaware that we face a future in which crises in global megacities are likely to challenge the military resilience, demographic resources and political will of many liberal democracies.

WAR AND THE CITY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE