Robert Warren
The Military Siege of Urban Space as the Site of Local and Global Democratic Practice
Cities and their streets are critical sites for democratic practice. They are places where people can act spontaneously, operate on the margins of the dominant culture, move within the city as they chose, exercise political voice in public spaces, and freely go about their daily activities. However, these components of the freedom of the city are being subject to militarized control, particularly in Europe and North America, through the conflation of the police and armed forces and their technologies and tactics.
Mass citizen political mobilizations and mega-sports and entertainment events now automatically produce martial law conditions. The economy, public services, and normal everyday life in a city's downtown core and well beyond can be shut down for days to insure the safety of a handful of international leaders during the summit meetings of hegemonic transnational entities. This transformation of civilian to military space is justified because of the risks to the leaders asserted to be created by the mass mobilization of citizens in the same or adjacent cities during the summit meetings.
This affects urban governance on two scales. It undermines both democratic control over a city by its residents and the critical ability of localities to provide public space in which citizens from a range of cities and nations can aggregate to express political voice on global issues when no democratic institutional means to do so are available.
This paper examines the growing privileging of the meetings of a small number of transnational leaders over the political rights and voice of citizens and the use the police and military in ways that disrupt the area's economy, interfere with the normal provision of public goods and services to residents, and negatively affect the everyday life of many people. Three summit meetings and their security linkages will be examined - the Ministerial Meeting of the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami, Florida (2003), G-8, Sea Island, Georgia, 2004, and G-8, Gleneagles, Scotland, 2005.
The discussion will also focus on the network created among police and security personnel that allows those planning for a summit to obtain information and counsel on tactics and weaponry from those who have experienced such an event; the negative social, economic, and political externalities created for adjacent large cities by locating summit meetings in tightly guarded wealthy resorts; the ways in which the state and major media tend to edit reality in justifying the imposition of military control and imposing substantial costs on residents in and even substantial distances from the summit meeting site; and the imperial-like status of those leading transnational hegemonic entities.
Dr. Robert Warren is Professor for Urban Affairs and Public Policy at the Institute for Public Administration of the University of Delaware. Dr. Warren's teaching, research, and publications have focused on urban and metropolitan governance, planning theory, urban coastal management, and effects of telecommunications and information technology on urban socio-economic, political, and spatial dynamics and organization. He has led in the design of policy forums and research in the IPA on telecommuting, information policy, e-commerce, the Digital Divide, intelligent transportation systems and telemedicine. Current research projects include multi-sectoral transit networks, video surveillance in urban public space, and the relationship of cyber and terrestrial space. Recent publications: "Situating the City and September 11: Military Urban Doctrine, 'Pop-Up' Armies, and Spatial Chess". In: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26, 3, September 2002, pp. 614-619; with Samuel Nunn: "The Intrametropolitan Distribution of Computer Services Employment, 1982 and 1993". In: Urban Geography, 21/5, 2000, pp.406-427.
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