Militant Urbanism: War Meets Critical Theory February 26, 2009

“We share more with architects; we combine theory and practice. We can read, but we also know how to build and destroy, and sometimes kill.” 

This quote, expressing an attitude that would enliven any episode of Grand Designs, is by Shimon Naveh, a former Israeli general who ran the Operational Theory Research Institute, a group whose purpose was to inform Israeli military strategy with theories of urbanism. At its height, the OTRI was a body better funded and larger than many international university schools of architecture. Their reason was simple: its students were inherently urban theorists, their practice entirely dependent upon their perception of the city. Israel’s recent engagements have been in dense urban settings, using a strategy based on targeting specific individuals or groups of fighters unlike the masses of a traditional army. Fighting in such places, the army’s enemy is not so much people themselves, but their conception of the city.

Urban war is characterised by chaos: plans are uncertain and dependent on a massive number of things, overall operational control is near impossible and there is a continuously changing spatial relationship between groups of people. Most teenage boys would be innately aware of this from their own video game war experiences, playing online with teams of people they’ve never met in real life. The distinction between front and behind, forward and backward is lost in a maze of buildings. To acknowledge this as part of your strategy is to open up a whole new interpretation of the city in which conceptions of what is public, private, inside and outside are continuously re-imagined and subverted. The war which Israel wanted to fight was one which specifically targeted certain people whilst avoiding the potentially deadly traps they would set; in the streets they might walk down, the doors they might enter through, the windows they might look out of. In effect, if they could invert the normal relationships of street and building, even that of interior and exterior, they would avoid engaging with their enemy’s city. 

Pictures from the recent conflict in Gaza showed soldiers entering and searching through private houses whilst families sat there, contained. A common remark about this type of war is the calmness of the city as it takes place. Fighting doesn’t take place in public, but the location of this realm could change at any point. Reports describe the strange sections drawn through buildings as Israeli soldiers were both above and below the floors occupied by Palestinian fighters as each passed separately through the building. Creating new city streets, the Israelis successively demolished the walls between connected buildings in order to march forwards. Imagine, in an instant, your house has become a street, the main artery of the city, through which an advancing army marches. Civilians, banned from the street, are in fact thrown out of their houses, onto the streets which are the new interior spaces. The entire city is turned inside out as one side imposes its militant urban plan.

“To really appreciate architecture you may even need to commit a murder. Architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as by the enclosure of its walls.” These words form part of The Manhattan Transcripts, a book by the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi published in the 1970s. In a storyboard composed of the architectural drawing conventions of plan, section and elevation, the work sought to examine the joins between architecture and the activities which take place within it. By no coincidence, Tschumi is the thinker whose influence is most valued by generals of the Israeli Defence Force. It perhaps seems odd to imagine the military as a body with an intellectual basis; if the Israelis are urban planners, maybe the French are poets, the Germans are analytic philosophers, forming a marauding force of beardy theorists.

Tschumi’s architectural writings attempt to merge the traditional distinction between real and idealised spaces. This he calls transgression. It is based upon the paradox of experiencing a place whilst simultaneously holding a critical position about it. “Transgression does not mean the methodical destruction of any code or rule that concerns space or architecture. On the contrary, it introduces new articulations between inside and outside, between concept and experience.” Born out of late 20th century critiques of capitalism and production, contemporary with the events of 1968 and Debord’s idea of an all-encompassing ‘Society of the Spectacle,’ this critical thread has arguably been co-opted by the market in western cities, but found its strongest expression in the military. Note the recent contrived use of choreographed ‘flash mobs’ to advertise mobile phones; an event which challenges the limits and rules of the city is made only to be repeated over and over as an image of spontaneous behaviour. Compare this with the army breaking down the walls, the reality of war continually creating a new form of the city. Then imagine these events changing location, perhaps taking place in Sheffield city centre.

Imagining the city for the purposes of war, however crude or immoral, is an exercise worth undertaking. We understand the space around us through the actions we make there. War is the most potent example that cities aren’t contained by clear, zoned distinctions of use. The regeneration of cities is often constricted by binary thinking; old and new, retail and leisure, artificial distinctions which limit the range of experiences. The war machine is, in a very perverse way, one of the most creative practices imaginable.