Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Michelle Eirini Padley, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

; ,

Description:

A large range of literature spanning several areas of geography and other disciplines, including work on urban geopolitics, has documented how urban development and city life has been impacted by imperialist ventures, geopolitical goals, and shifts in the allocation of military resources (Kaldor and Sassen 2020). In the US, for instance, cold war era initiatives drove the construction of highways that cut through contemporary cities (Farish 2010) while in addition city officials have competed to attract military bases and related industries to spur municipal economic development (Markusen et. al 1991). Imperial remnants and legacies of settler colonialism have laid the foundation for urban development through the making of ‘national infrastructure’ through settler colonial practices (Cowen 2020) while racist and classist notions of “improvement” permeate urban planning (Ranganathan 2018). At the same time, racialized and gendered meanings of national culture exist alongside narratives that have served as openings to both critique and promote the exercising of US military power (Meché 2020). Concurrently, Geographers have examined urban warfare from various perspectives (Amoore 2008, Fluri 2011, 2014, Ingram and Dodds 2015, Laketa, 2016, Loyd, 2009, Lopez et al 2015, Ojeda 2013, Pavoni and Tulumello 2020, Raleigh 2015).

This session intends to contribute to this scholarship by investigating how imperialist projects, geopolitical goals, war, and military actions have had an impact on urban space, governance, everyday life and mobility, and the built environment. Likewise, we seek scholars who are grappling with the ways in which political violence disrupts urban spaces while simultaneously becoming integrated into everyday life for civilians. Work within Urban Geopolitics has encouraged the study of transnational geopolitics with local acts violence and resistance to war or possibilities for peace (Fregonese 2012; Graham 2004). We recognize that geographic literatures about cities and war are often Anglophone-centric (Fregonese 2012) and thus, through this session, seek to bring together cases and studies from a variety of locations to think transnationally about openings for solidarity and rethink the geopolitics of conflict in urban studies (Peake and Riker 2013).

Citations
Amoore, Louise. (2009). “Algorithmic War: Everyday Geographies of the War on Terror.” Antipode 41 (1): 49–69.

Farish, M. (2010). The contours of America’s cold war. University of Minnesota Press.

Fluri, J. L. (2011). Bodies, bombs and barricades: Geographies of conflict and civilian (in) security. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2), 280–296.

Fluri, J. L. (2014). States of (in)Security: Corporeal Geographies and the Elsewhere War. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(5), 795–814. https://doi.org/10.1068/d13004p

Fregonese, S. (2012). Urban Geopolitics 8 Years on. Hybrid Sovereignties, the Everyday, and Geographies of Peace. Geography Compass, 6(5), 290–303. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00485.x

Graham, S. (2008). Cities, war, and terrorism: Towards an urban geopolitics. John Wiley & Sons.
Ingram, A., & Dodds, K. (2016). Spaces of security and insecurity: Geographies of the war on terror. Routledge.

Kaldor, M., & Sassen, S. (2020). Cities at War: Global Insecurity and Urban Resistance. Columbia University Press.

Laketa, S. (2016). Geopolitics of Affect and Emotions in a Post-Conflict City. Geopolitics, 21(3), 661–685. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1141765

Loyd, J. M. (2009). “A microscopic insurgent”: Militarization, health, and critical geographies of violence. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(5), 863–873.

Lopez, P. J., Bhungalia, L., & Newhouse, L. S. (2015). Geographies of humanitarian violence. Environment and Planning A, 47(11), 2232–2239.

Markusen, A. R., Hall, P., Camobell, S., & Sabina, D. (Eds.). (1991). The Rise of the gunbelt: The military remapping of industrial America. Oxford University Press.

Meché, B. (2020). Memories of an Imperial City: Race, Gender, and Birmingham, Alabama. Antipode, 52(2), 475–495. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12606

Ojeda, D. (2013). War and Tourism: The Banal Geographies of Security in Colombia’s “Retaking.” Geopolitics, 18(4), 759–778. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2013.780037

Pavoni, A., & Tulumello, S. (2020). What is urban violence? Progress in Human Geography, 44(1), 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518810432

Peake, L., & Rieker, M. (Eds.). (2013). Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban. New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Raleigh, C. (2015). Geographies of conflict. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography, 86.

Ranganathan, M. (2018). Rule by difference: Empire, liberalism, and the legacies of urban “improvement.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50(7), 1386–1406. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X18781851

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda