Cities Under Siege

Praise

“Look, you’re just going to have to read this book … after a while you begin to wonder whether books like this will be allowed to be published for much longer.”
—Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

“Superb … Graham builds on the writings of Mike Davis and Naomi Klein who have attempted to expose the hidden corporate and military structures behind everyday life.”
—Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times

“A rigorously researched, pioneering book packed with disturbing and at times astonishing information.”
—Icon

“Sharp, lucid and elegant prose … Graham is consistently insightful and compelling. Cities Under Siege is an indispensable analysis of the dark fantasies that the military imagination is seeking to realise in the coming century.”
—Red Pepper

“Roll over Jane Jacobs: here’s urban geography as it looks like through the eye of a Predator at 25,000 feet. A fundamental and very scary report from the global red zone.”
—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

“Cities Under Siege is a detailed and intense forensics of new urban frontiers, laboratories of the extreme where experiments with new urban conditions are currently being undertaken. In this fascinating new work Steven Graham has created a novel concept of the city, looking at war as the limit condition of urbanity and calling for an alternative urban life yet to come.”
—Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land

“A brilliant critique of the deadly embrace of military violence and contemporary urbanism. Steve Graham writes with immense power and lucidity, layering detail over detail and image over image to expose the shadows that are falling across cities around the world. This is not a dystopian future but the present, and Graham compels us to open our eyes to the dangers military urbanism poses to contemporary democracy.”
—Derek Gregory, Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia and author of The Colonial Present

“An enlightening overview of the security state’s impact on contemporary cities, from overt authoritarian control in war-torn areas to more subtle forms of behavioral influence in places supposedly at peace. Graham shows how military/police/security forces perceive urban places and urban dwellers as subjects to control, and how their inherently undemocratic tactics threaten freedom all over the world.”
—Nate Berg, Curbed