Contrageografías, interfaces abiertas y el nuevo urbanismo militar

Abstract: 

"In my recent book Cities Under Siege I identify a 'new military urbanism' – a complex constellation of antiurban imaginaries, practices and technologies amongst security and military forces, right-wing thinkers and political lobbyists --which work problematise and demonise the open, mixed-up and cosmopolitan life of cities in many parts of the world. In the ascendent globally, although with uneven power, the rise of new military urbanism is manifest in a wide range of related phenomena: paramilitarised policing; miltarised paradigms for addressing urban social problems; a blurring of policing, intelligence and military deployment; shifts toward invasive, preemptive, military-style tracking and surveillance; and the wholesale privatisation or legal reengineering of city spaces and streets within capsular enclaves, either permanently or for temporary events. This is evident in through a boom in both ‘homeland security’ industries which profit from these developments.

In this intervention I seek to explore how the open interfaces of urban spaces fused with digital media can be mobilised to contest and undermine the various dimensions of the new military urbanism. Within the complex elements that contribute towards the emergence of a global civil society, centred on multiple media circuits circling the globe, there has been much experimentation to address here recently. Whilst far-from coherent, and often extremely ephemeral, these experiments offer some useful lessons in countering strategies of urban militarisation. They offer an important complement to the more traditional methods of resistance and political mobilization against colonialism, imperialism and militarization based on street protest, social movements, grassroots organization, and formal political organizing to re-regulate economies or re-direct or revolutionise state power. The starting point for such interventions is that the architectures and discourses sustaining the new military urbanism need to be countered in the crucial realms of public discourse ands spectacle where the flows and visualities of the media interact with urban places within a context of transnational media complexes.

The paper first looks at the key role of digital experimentation within contemporary urban public domains. It then traces a series of strategies to contest the new military urbanism by building urban open interfaces have different
relations to state and corporate power. These I label: exposure; juxtaposition; appropriation; jamming; satire; and collaboration." By Stephen Graham, University of Newcastle." Stephen Graham, University of Newcastle