Skylines: the modern urban conflict manual is available from Amazon, the publishers or the author, either at the respective sites of here via The Conflict Conversations
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
If we think of the world’s future, we always mean where it will be if it keeps going as we see it going now and it doesn’t occur to us that it is not going in a straight line but in a curve, constantly changing direction.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
More and more, contemporary warfare takes place in supermarkets, tower blocks, subway tunnels, and industrial districts rather than open fields, jungles or deserts.
Stephen Graham
It was becoming increasingly clear to me that terrible things happen when our leaders fail to think about data that are outside their typical focus.
Max Bazerman
Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.
Patrick J. Deneen
Cities have always generated fear and hatred among political and religious elites. Virtually every major religious or political movement in history has expressed a profoundly ambivalent feeling, at best, about the concentration of humanity in teeming cities.
Stephen Graham
The city [is] not just the site, but the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.
Eyal Weizman
Defining urban conflict as concept - locating urban conflict in the larger system of conflict studies and practice – an overview of the unique modern characteristics of urban conflict – the practical importance of a new understanding of urban conflict – a few initial thoughts
I was born in the small rural town of Cradock (now Nxuba), and when my parents relocated to the city of Port Elizabeth (nowadays Gqeberha) in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa in 1970, the change presented me with some of my most enduring childhood memories. My six or seven year old mind experienced the city lights and night-time walks with my parents and siblings through the commercial areas of our city as a place of wonder, a fairyland of magic and limitless potential. This new word, this “city”, was the perfect place to live, I could see no reason why people would choose to live elsewhere. Of course, few of those childhood fantasies and assessments have remained intact, and my ideas of the city as a safe and benign entity have changed in many respects.
I believe that most of us can tell similar stories of how cities feature in our personal and professional development and memories. Cities feature prominently in our personal and collective stories, our shared histories and experiences of the world, and in our various expressions of how we view the future. The city as canvas, as stage, inspire us to give expression to a full range of images that try to illustrate and explain our individual and collective experiences in these studies in communal living.
To the modern mind, conventional wisdom often holds that cities are where we find the best opportunities for the safe raising of our families, for establishing and building our careers, for reaching our potential in any of its latest conceptualizations. It is also becoming an increasingly complex arena for a variety of modern conflicts, including a few conflicts that are either caused or exacerbated by the way we generally manage life in our cities.This book tells a complex story, based on a simple premise: our cities influence our conflicts, and our conflicts shape our cities. How comprehensively we understand this interplay, this crucial part of modern reality, and how we respond to it on an organizational, professional and personal level will determine our future prosperity, our options and the possible developmental trajectories available to humanity.
Most of us live in cities. Approximately 56% of people globally live in cities, with 7 out of every 10 people expected to live in cities by 2050.
Modern cities have an incredible power to subtly shape the contours, direction and quality of our lives. If conflict is seen as a clash of interests, a dance in which we try to get at least our fair share of what we want and need, to at least prevent domination if not to dominate others, then we need to be aware of the signs whereby we can timeously notice these conflicts brought about or maintained by city life, and what our best strategies are in dealing with such conflicts.
Denying that they exist, taking a passive role in such management, blaming others, waiting for others to solve these conflicts for us all seem, in different ways, to be ineffective responses, as popular as they have become.One of the best, and easiest, places to start any assessment of conflicts in modern cities would be to form a clear understanding of what urban conflict is. What is it, how does it manifest, what risks and benefits are we exposed to in our interactions with these various forms of urban conflict?
One helpful way to start looking at urban conflict as a working concept would be this broad definition:
In a highly urbanized world like the one we live in, cities become the strategic place of violent conflict. Economic, religious, gender and ethnic differences are negotiated every day in the urban arena when tensions become conflict and conflict escalate into violence; the urban space becomes the battlespace. The process of city building with all its conflicts and tensions then is a tool for both violence and reconciliation. In short, the tools of urbanization are the tools of war in an urbanized conflict.
(MIT Open Courseware notes)
This informal, if possibly hyperbolized, definition gives us a good start to become aware of the multitude of aspects that all contribute to a working idea of “urban conflict”. It helps us to make the shift to seeing urban life as a series of interlocked conflicts, and not just economic, political, social and other sub-departments of interaction.
Military conflict of course also uses the term urban conflict, in a more specific sense, as referring to war conducted in and around a city. This is a much more limited use of the term, and our discussion here will not include that specific aspect of urban conflict, unless where specifically so indicated. We will be dealing with the conflicts in an urban environment in relative or actual times of peace, and our use of the term “conflict” here will be limited to the specialized use as we will expand on shortly.
Conflict in its many shapes in the modern city is so ubiquitous, so normalized, that I would think most people do not even think of these conflicts in any separate, structured manner. Like the fish not really taking notice of the water that it swims in, our cities are, to so many of us, our natural habitat, it is simply how life is. We react, we are shaped and steered, with very little shaping and steering coming from our side. City administrations and politicians often struggle through ad hoc crisis management one problem at a time, without having the benefit of a structured framework of conflict management, often not even aware of the systems and solutions available to them, all eventually failing to optimally deal with various conflict symptoms, as we will see later in the book.
Our histories, myths, religions and stories are filled with tales of heroism, glory and defeat, morals and lessons where a city plays a central role in the telling of the tale. We are told that the walls of the city of Jericho came tumbling down, we read the story of the Trojan horse, the tales of ancient Rome and Babylon delight and intrigue us. Even our more recent history fascinates and horrifies us with the events in and around Nanjing in 1937 or Stalingrad during the Second World War. In good science fiction like Blade Runner, the city plays an integral part in the development of the story, and the characters live out their lives in this city of the future. In the unfolding drama of human development, our cities have always played their roles as the stages and backdrops of our operas, our tragedies, our plays.
But, as we will study throughout the book, our cities have become more than just stages and stage props. They are increasingly, as a result of a variety of factors and dynamics, becoming actors in themselves, in very real ways shaping our conflicts, our cherished traditions and our options. This is not to give anthropomorphism any undue place in our discussion, but I think it is helpful to allow a certain wistful acknowledgement of cities as actors on our modern stages. Gotham City features prominently in some of those tales for a reason.One of the interesting ways that these powerful and enduring tales of the cities of ancient and earlier times can be distinguished from the cities in modern urban conflict is the fact that those cities of old faced mostly external threats and attacks, while modern cities face a wider range of conflicts than those of earlier times.
While modern cities certainly still face these external attacks, at least potentially, it is helpful to approach a comprehensive study of urban conflict from the understanding that much of the modern threats to urban safety and prosperity should be viewed more as internal, structural threats, creating internal, structural patterns and cycles of conflict that are, as we will see, potentially far more destructive of the best interests of such a city than a temporary external attack may be. This realization has nothing to do with paranoia or scepticism, and everything to do with an understanding of how modern urban conflicts are caused and maintained, and the- 21 -downstream damage it causes.
The terrifying modern war potential that can be directed at cities, whether that is conventional war options, drones, artificial intelligence weapons that can turn off lights, water, sanitation and the internet in seconds, can be discussed elsewhere (see for example my book Hamlet’s Mirror: Conflict and Artificial Intelligence for an examination of that aspect of modern conflict).
(a) The premise of the book
While we will certainly be learning a few valuable lessons from urban warfare in its conventional military sense, the book is not about that specific aspect of conflict and warfare. The urban conflict that we will be dealing with in the main will be modern conflict in its urban setting, used in the context of the definitions and our discussions above, as well as a few manifestations of modern conflict that I believe are created or exacerbated by our cities and the city lives that we lead.
Urban conflict in this sense then, is a genre of modern conflict on its own, a sui generis facet of modern conflict that needs to be understood afresh and managed anew. Of course, this could have been said, to some extent, of the very first cities, wherever in history we choose to draw that line, but as the book will show, modern urban conflict has reached the stage where this recognition of it as occupying its own space is warranted and crucially important.
Too many of our modern urban conflicts are approached without this understanding, and efforts at managing such conflicts in isolation as, for example, conflicts of culture, migration, unemployment and so on, are doomed to failure or under-performance as a result of this limited, outdated view.
The term “urban conflict” as we will use it in the book will encompass concepts and terminology such as “urban violence”, “urban protests” and many other terms used in popular media and discourse involving the various levels and shapes of conflict we find in our cities. The term “urban conflict” is used rather widely and imprecisely across a range of academic and practical disciplines, but it is also descriptive enough for our purposes here, and where I need to define the concept more clearly for specific use, I will do so.
Globally, urban conflict is becoming more prevalent, more complex and more destructive. There is often a sense of inevitable decay and collapse involved in these assessments, debates and strategizing around urban conflicts. An increasingly desperate and urgent search for the right conflict strategies, for the Tolkienesque One Ring To Bind Them All strategy can be found in many modern approaches, often veering towards technological solutions that can make sense of seemingly intractable challenges. This book will show that there is no such single, over-arching conflict strategy available to us, that this understandable but futile search is doing more harm than good in its implementation, that urban conflict is one of the best examples of a complex conflict, and that in fact, we should not wish to lose the creative spark of urban conflict, but that we should learn to wisely and efficiently shape and guide these energies in the best interests of our communities. We need to understand, and then apply, the modern demand for better, not less, conflict.
These are the strategies and tactics we will be studying in the book, creating a complex, dynamic set of real solutions for the real problems caused by modern urban conflict. Where we point out and study strategic errors being made, in general or specific instances, we do so to learn from those mistakes, to build on them to the advantage of our cities, and to simultaneously create a much-needed realization that, as bad as things are in many cities, there is a better way of dealing with these conflicts and their outcomes.
During August 2024, speaking at the 9th NDB meeting in Cape Town, the South African deputy-president, Paul Mashatile, remarked that the country will move to greater heights through its cities. It is that type of focus that I believe we should share globally – effectively managing the conflicts in our cities will, at the very least, put a country well on its way to greater prosperity, stability and success.
Listening to a range of politicians and other leaders I often get the sense that, at least by implication, we tend to think of fixing a country, and from that the cities will improve. This is a natural conclusion, but one that I believe is mistaken, and that starting with our cities gets the sequencing of what needs to be done right, and starts us from the correct starting position.
There is also a simple point about inspiration and hope to be made here. Looking at the abyss that some countries find themselves in, may lead to despondency and despair, our challenges simply seem too enormous, too complex. We do not see a logical place to start, it is all too overwhelming for one person, one team, one political party. Slightly shifting our focus, our points of departure to the cities, to a city, places the control back in the hands of a city administration, a political party of leader, a conflict team and so on. We have a place to start, we can take that first step.This sharpened focus will require an important philosophical and practical recalibration of some our lenses, our political aims, our budgetary debates and allocations, the sources and use of power in conflict, and ultimately, the shape and essence of our involved leadership on professional and personal levels. A more realistic, but I believe, and intend showing, a more efficient and sustainable conflict strategy, is urgently needed.
(b) Who is the book for?
The book is a combination of global modern theoretical best practices as it relates to modern urban conflict, and the practical application of those strategies and tactics, including a few fresh approaches to existing problems and conflicts. It is written for politicians, conflict consultants and also for various levels of middle to senior management and decision makers, such as mayors, city administration officials, urban designers, security and law enforcement decision makers and their advisors. Hopefully, other disciplines such as the various levels of diplomats, conflict educators, students and the citizens of our cities will also derive some benefit from our study.
I strongly advocate a dedicated conflict team for every city, a formal or informal team of leaders and conflict experts, chosen and applied as the challenges of that particular city may require from time to time. I often refer to the conflict team throughout the book, and by this I simply mean a dedicated, highly trained team as allowed by budgetary and other constraints in any particular city. Every such team will have its own characteristics and potential, and the strategies we study in the book will help you create your own team. The book is obviously also for- 24 -that team. Maybe surprisingly, for some, the book is also a practical manual for the individual city dweller. Many of the skills and strategies we will be studying can, with minimal adjustment, also be applied in your everyday life in the city, to make you more conflict competent and more conflict confident.
While I may not specifically refer to individual city dwellers, nearly all of our strategies and tactics here will enhance the individual or family experience with urban conflict. While the book is written at an advanced level of complexity, and presupposes a certain level of conflict knowledge, we will be making sure that all relevant concepts and applications are established and explained with sufficient depth of detail to enable a working understanding of these conflict tools.
And, while complex modern urban conflicts should always be managed by a team of relevant experts, I do believe that an advanced level of conflict competency for these leaders and decision makers, in fact for anyone involved full-time or periodically in these conflicts, adds enormous value and content to their understanding and early detection of conflict challenges, their input and decision making abilities, their overall quality of leadership, and not to be undervalued, their conflict confidence in dealing with the ubiquitous nature of modern urban conflict. So many of the visible shortcomings and leadership mistakes that urban citizens are suffering from can be traced back directly, and with a clear causal series of links, to poor conflict competency in these decision makers.
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