ABSTRACT

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 displacement, 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 developments, 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 failure 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.

chapter 1|18 pages

Cities as targets

chapter 2|25 pages

‘But malice aforethought'

Cities and the natural history of hatred

chapter 3|20 pages

Targeting the imaginist city 1

chapter 4|28 pages

Thanato-tactics

chapter 5|29 pages

Theme park archipelago 1

Convergences of war, simulation and entertainment in urban targeting

chapter 6|14 pages

Rescripting visions

Towards a ‘subaltern' architecture

chapter 7|13 pages

The city as target – retargeting the city

French intellectuals and city spaces

chapter 8|8 pages

Tokyo

Water, earthquake, and island universe

chapter 9|24 pages

Vast clearings

Emergency, technology, and American de-urbanization, 1930–45

chapter 10|20 pages

Concealment and exposure

Imagining London after the Great Fire

chapter 11|8 pages

Moscow

Fortress city

chapter 12|10 pages

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

chapter 13|6 pages

London

The imperial target

chapter 14|35 pages

Keizu to Nendaiki

Making and erasing history in Tsukuba Science City at the edge of empire 1

chapter 15|16 pages

The city and the economy of “losing”

Targeting competitive bodies in an era of global competition

chapter 16|7 pages

Between targeting and display

Absorptive affiliations

chapter 17|18 pages

“The target is the people”

Representations of the village in modernization and national security doctrine