Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham review

There's a reproduction in this book of a recruitment poster for the US Special Forces. It shows three skydiving soldiers in formation, performing a High Altitude-Low Opening jump, seemingly propelling themselves towards the viewer. They look pretty scary. But the text above runs, in capitals: "The Halo jump wasn't the hard part. Knowing which Arabic dialect to use when I landed was."

This, as Professor Graham notes, was part of a Pentagon counterinsurgency strategy known as "the cultural turn" and centred on what they call the "Human Terrain System". It was also, in Graham's rather well-qualified opinion, "completely fraudulent".

Look, you're just going to have to read this book. Because what's happening in Baghdad and other contested or occupied cities – not just the surveillance, but the militarisation too – is going to happen here. In some cases it already is, or there are in place contingency plans for it, should serious trouble arise.

Graham knows whereof he speaks. I wasn't aware there was such a post as professor of cities and society, but that's the one he holds at Newcastle University and on the evidence of this book alone I'm rather glad it exists. He's making good use of it. He has the facts at his fingertips, and he is able to make connections, all of which, you may or may not be dismayed to hear, are disturbing.

If you are one of those – and we are, I gather, in the minority – who are made uneasy by the increasing ubiquity and reach of the surveillance society (one of the very few areas in which this country can claim world leadership) you should read this book, although unease will metastasise into full-blown sick fear. Those who think that only the guilty have anything to fear, and were never even slightly freaked by the London Transport "secure beneath the watchful eyes" poster, should buy and read this book in order to think again. (That advert, reproduced in the book, featured lots of eyes with the LT roundel in the iris reassuring us that CCTV was making us all safe. Was its cod-1940s design deliberately chosen in order to remind us of Orwell?)

The point is, as Graham tells us early on, that the powerful, particularly those in the Republican party in America, do not like cities. For a start, they're ethnically diverse places full of liberals who don't vote for them. Look at all those maps which, after Bush Jr's last presidential victory, showed the beleaguered nature of the blue (Democrat) states, surrounded by a sea of rural and suburban Republican victories. "Perhaps surprisingly, US Christian fundamentalists and neoconservatives hold a view of the United States' core cities that is remarkably similar to that held by al-Qaida."

After a bit of scrutiny, and a few examples, this does not seem surprising at all. Combine this attitude to urban spaces and their inhabitants (a paranoid vision whose logical extension is John Carpenter's Escape From New York, in which all of Manhattan has been transformed into a lawless penal colony) with the kind of problems that the occupation of Baghdad caused, and the kind of solutions that the Israeli government have been applying to the threats posed against them by the inhabitants of, say, Gaza, and you have a mixture which is already producing the kind of society whose aim is to monitor and control every single inhabitant.

He does not say that it is but a short step from this to treating all cities the way Israel treats Gaza – "the now familiar discursive trick of labelling the entire urban fabric of Gazan society a mere 'terrorist infrastructure' to be destroyed in toto". But he does point out that the US army has seen how the Israeli army deploys its D9 bulldozers to raze entire communities, and is buying some of them back and learning how to use them too. (There are about a hundred mocked-up "Arab" cities, mostly in the US and UK, where soldiers train. Some have washing lines and wandering donkeys for added verisimilitude.) Add to this a vast capacity for intelligence-gathering and you are faced with something akin to the stuff of nightmares. After a while, you begin to wonder whether books like this will be allowed to be published for much longer.

At this point – although as Guardian readers, you will perhaps be more likely to assent to the propositions behind this book than others – you might wonder whether this is all some kind of scaremongering on Graham's part. And although this book is more of an academic treatise than a work intended to fly off bookshop shelves, there is something about it – the generous reproductions of scary graphs and adverts made sinister by context – that makes you feel as though you are watching an Adam Curtis documentary. But this is rather more disturbing than that: its sources and references are there at the foot of each page. And when you see the picture of the Hummer customised to attract Hispanic recruits to the US army, you will feel you've seen everything.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaGpnlJqwcH2SaJqirJmawG7BzZ2cq2WjnrKosYysq56omJq7brPRmp%2BapQ%3D%3D