The City as Target

337 Pages·2012·4.585 MB·English

by  Ryan Bishop, Gregory Clancey, John W. Phillips

The City as Target
Bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, The City as Target
provides a sustained and critical response to the relationship between the concept
of targeting (in its many forms) and notions of understanding, imagining, and
shaping the urban.
Among the many spatial and graphic terms used to describe cities in urban
studies, the word target is rarely encountered. Though equally spatial, it differs
from these others by implying some motive force and, more than that, a force
with some intentionality. To target is to aim, to project, and ultimately to impact. It
suggests a space of violence, or at least action, or movement resulting in displace-
ment, which most other terms do not. In that sense it is useful, underused, and
perhaps revelatory.
Rather than approach the city as simply a site of growth, processes, and devel-
opments, the contributors to this volume treat it as the recipient of attentions. The
work draws on a wide variety of geographical sites and historic monuments in
order to explore this concept, examining and challenging current urban theories. It
seeks to highlight both the power of the “global city” and the current vulnerability
and fragility of urban culture, exploring the city as a recipient and a culprit in
relation to issues including terrorism and urban warfare, the latest cyclical fail-
ure of global financial markets, and the relatively new spectre of environmental
unsustainability.
Offering a unique and relevant contribution to the literature, this work will be
of great interest to scholars of urban theory, international relations, postcolonial
politics, and military studies.
Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics, the Winchester School of
Art, the University of Southampton.
Gregory K. Clancey is Associate Professor of History at the National University
of Singapore, and the Master of Tembusu College.
John Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and
Literature at the National University of Singapore.
Postcolonial Politics
Pal Ahluwalia, University of California, San Diego and University
of South Australia, Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths, University of
London, Leela Gandhi, University of Chicago, Sanjay Seth,
Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Postcolonial Politics’ is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of
politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its
recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of ‘politics’ is beginning
to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed)
set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the ‘New
Humanities’ have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is
politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the ser-
endipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of
concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and
these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always,
political. Edward Said’s binary of ‘Europe and its other’ introduced us to a ‘style
of thought’ that was as much political as it was cultural, as much about the politics
of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street
as about a philosophy of being. A new, broader and more reflexive understanding
of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it
possible to ‘think’ politics through postcolonial theory, and to ‘do’ postcolonial
theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications.
Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive
practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read ‘difference’ con-
cretely, and to problematise our ideas of the modern, the rational and the scientific
by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and
Eurocentric. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh
visions of both the postcolonial and the political.
1. The Postcolonial Politics of Development
Ilan Kapoor
2. Out of Africa
Post-structuralism’s colonial roots
Pal Ahluwalia
3. The Everyday Practice of Race in America
Ambiguous privilege
Utz McKnight
4. The City as Target
Edited by Ryan Bishop, Gregory K. Clancey and John Phillips

The City as Target
Edited by Ryan Bishop,
Gregory K. Clancey
and John Phillips
First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
© 2012 editorial and selected matter, Ryan Bishop, Gregory K. Clancey and
John Phillips; individual contributions, the contributors.
The right of Ryan Bishop, Gregory K. Clancey and John Phillips to be
identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The city as target/edited by Ryan Bishop, Gregory K. Clancey and John
Phillips.
p. cm. – (Postcolonial politics; 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Cities and towns. 2. Violence. 3. Disasters. 4. Terrorism. 5. City planning.
I. Bishop, Ryan, 1959– II. Clancey, Gregory K. III. Phillips, John, 1956–
HM1101.C58 2011
307.76–dc23
2011022758
ISBN: 978–0–415–68722–5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–0–203–15435–9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman by Prepress Projects Ltd, Perth, UK.
Contents
List of illustrations ix
List of contributors x
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Cities as targets 1
RYAN BISHOP, GREG CLANCEY AND JOHN PHILLIPS
2 ‘But malice aforethought’: cities and the natural history
of hatred 19
NIGEL THRIFT
3 Targeting the imaginist city 44
JOHN ARMITAGE
4 Thanato-tactics 64
EYAL WEIzMAN
5 Theme park archipelago: convergences of war, simulation
and entertainment in urban targeting 92
STEPHEN GRAHAM
6 Rescripting visions: towards a ‘subaltern’ architecture 121
PAL AHLUWALIA
7 The city as target – retargeting the city: french
intellectuals and city spaces 135
VERENA ANDERMATT CONLEY
8 Tokyo: water, earthquake, and island universe 148
SUzUKI HIROYUKI
viii Unbombing the world, 1911–2011:
9 Vast clearings: emergency, technology, and American
de-urbanization, 1930–45 156
GREGORY CLANCEY
10 Concealment and exposure: imagining London after the
Great Fire 180
LI SHIqIAO
11 Moscow: fortress city 200
IRINA ARISTARKHOVA
12 Unbombing the world, 1911–2011: 100 years of
aerial bombing of the human habitat – a proposal for
an installation on the history and future of planned
destruction and reconstruction 208
TJEBBE VAN TIJEN
13 London: the imperial target 218
RAJEEV S. PATKE
14 Keizu to Nendaiki: making and erasing history in Tsukuba
Science City at the edge of empire 224
SHARON TRAWEEK
15 The city and the economy of “losing”: targeting
competitive bodies in an era of global competition 259
ROBBIE B. H. GOH
16 Between targeting and display: absorptive affiliations 275
JORDAN CRANDALL
17 “The target is the people”: representations of the village in
modernization and national security doctrine 282
NICK CULLATHER
Index 301
Illustrations
Figures
10.1 Area of London damaged by the fire (Wenceslaus Hollar’s
engraving) 184
10.2 One of John Evelyn’s plans, the first on 13 September 1666 187
10.3 Christopher Wren’s plan, 11 September 1666 188
10.4 Valentine Knight’s plan, published on 20 September 1666: ‘the
ground all put to the best profit’ 191
10. 5 Plan attributed to Robert Hooke, first presented to the Royal
Society on 19 September 1666; detail from Marcus Willemsz
Doornick’s 1666 plan 193
10.6 Richard Newcourt’s plan 195
11.1 Irina Aristarkhova’s propiska 205
16.1 Image no. 1 275
16.2 Image no. 2 276
16.3 Image no. 3 277
16.4 Image no. 4 278
16.5 Image no. 5 279
Table
2.1 A sample of facilities, maintenance and repair jobs 23