In order to ignite some thinking on the topic, here's an interview from Bryan Finoki (of Subtopia) with a leading philosopher architect of military urbanism, Stephen Graham. Quotes from the interview:
"Fear of ‘failed cities’ thus seems to be even more powerful than fear of ‘failed states.’"
The global mixing in today’s world renders any simple dualism between North and South, or Developed and Developing, very unhelpful. Instead, it’s more useful to think of transnational architectures of control, wealth and power, as passing through and inhabiting all of these zones but in a wide variety of ways. Extreme poverty exists in many ‘developed cities’ while enclaves of supermodern and high-tech wealth pepper the cities on South East, Southern and Eastern Asia.
...at least until recently – nation states have clearly worked to construct and maintain their monopolies on political violence in a way that rendered cities as mere targets. This reached its apogee within the Cold War imaginaries of full scale nuclear Armageddon.
"Many dreams of robotised and automated high-tech warfare, permanently projecting perfect power into global south cities, are emerging here [in the US]. The objective being to try and delegate the decision to kill to computer software embedded within networked weapons and sensors which permanently loiter within or above urban space automatically dispatching those deemed 'enemy'."
"As with so much of urban life, the key now is seamless merging of systems of electronic tracking, tagging, surveillance and targeting into the architectonic and geographical structures of cities and systems of cities. The production of space within the ‘war on terror’ thus mobilises an intensified deployment of these sensors and systems – through global biometric passports, global port management systems, glocal e-commerce systems, global airline profiling systems and global navigation and targeting systems – within and through the securitising fabric of urban places."