The City as Target Revisited: Violence, Spatiality, and Militarization

This article returns to a book chapter written just before the 9/11 attack in New York to reconsider issues explored in it some twenty-five years later. The essay examines the role of targeting writ large for thinking about urbanism and city development generally and the increasing militarization of space and the suppression of urbicide in urban studies and public discourse. The approach is simultaneously historical, technological, theoretical, and contemporary in nature. If the public sphere has yielded to full militarization of it, as the article argues, then we can examine what the collective response to that condition is and how hope might still play a role in collective ambitions.