Social scientists have long considered cities engines of economic growth, cultural pluralism, political liberalism and technological innovation. Marxists view cities as arenas of class contention, whose future is up for grabs. But contemporary military theorists have grimly condemned ever-expanding cities as malfunctioning machines. A counterinsurgency expert who has advised the U.S. Army, the federal government and NATO, David Kilcullen, has suggested that cities are becoming “simply unable to absorb and metabolize” both licit and illicit flows of people, commodities, money and information, resulting in “urban dislocation, violence, crime, and social breakdown.”
For counterinsurgents, these social ills are addressed by military force. And it does not take much creative rewriting to envision how “military operations on urban terrain” can apply to the home front. One of the earliest theorists of this turn toward urban warfare, Army Maj. Ralph Peters, described cities of today as “the post-modern equivalent of jungles and mountains — citadels of the dispossessed and irreconcilable.”
Around the time Peters recommended that the military focus on urban threats, Congress approved a new program in 1997 to facilitate the transfer of military equipment to civilian police departments. Many police clamored for free or low-cost tactical gear, preferring to believe, like the military theorists, that insecurity and existential dangers were multiplying, particularly after 9/11. The result is the phalanxes of heavily armored officers that have been splashed across our screens for the past week.
But what this pessimistic view about inexorably increasing urban dangers gets wrong is that many cities experiencing uprisings now — like Minneapolis, Washington and New York — are highly desirable. Minneapolis, for instance, has one of the fastest-growing real estate markets, in terms of recent rent increases, outstripping even San Francisco. The District’s landlords gross the fifth-highest rent total in the country. These cities rely on the hard work of the dispossessed, who aren’t paid enough to afford these rising rents. The military theorists paint cities with a broad brush, as if rapid population growth naturally leads to instability. But instability at home is resulting from racial and economic inequality in the fruits of that growth.
“As cities grow, many governments fail to provide adequate security, employment, infrastructure, and services,” read the 2014 Army Operating Concept, the military’s vision for how to win future wars. The authors thought they were talking about Lagos or Kandahar. But this is also the exact problem urban dwellers face in the United States, painfully visible when new luxury boutiques pop up in SoHo, one neighborhood away from public housing that has remained unchanged for decades.