Fronts: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World

(Paperback)

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FRONTS uncovers a growing geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies of the developing world, which it increasingly incriminates. Military training sites provide a lens through which we can better understand the shape of the city to come. Military doctrine has recently and dramatically shifted to view the worlds cities as suspect sites of potential aggression. As the majority of new urban life will manifest in informal development, the world is now more than ever explicitly divided in two campsthose who view the informal city as an opportunity, and those who view the informal city as a threat. This paradigmatic shift has set the stage for impending conflict between security and development interests, which use the informal city as their site.

Reviews

"As security regimes expand into either the remainders of the nation state or territories outside of law, spatial evidence gains new authority within the usual legal or economic assessments. FRONTS tracks and graphically measures those heavy precipitates of global capital and military conflict as they mix in toxic spatial cocktails of logistics, humanitarianism, militarism, training, and incarceration." Keller Easterling--Architect; Professor & Director of the Master of Environmental Design Program, Yale University; Author, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space--Keller Easterling "Keller Easterling " "Kripa and Mueller peel back the curtain on the spreading geography of urban simulation. This astonishing original research illuminates the future of military urbanism by interrogating it at its source." Trevor Paglen--Artist; Geographer; Author, Invisible: Covert Operations and Invisible Landscapes--Trevor Paglen "Trevor Paglen "

Author Bio

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller direct AGENCY, an interdisciplinary practice engaging contemporary culture through architecture, urbanism, and advocacy. Their projects range from media environments to guerrilla infrastructures, architectural projects, and speculative urban research. Seeking productive anomalies in the overlooked, the under-represented, and the everyday, the practice identifies and transforms emerging urban paradigms. Kripa and Mueller are recipients of the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, and are fellows of the MacDowell Colony and the New York Foundation for the Arts. AGENCY has been invited to exhibit internationally at the Venice Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale on Architecture and Urbanism, and others.