Military Urbanisms and the Developing World

This book launch celebrates the publication of Fronts: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World by GSAPP Faculty Ersela Kripa ‘06 MSAAD and Stephen Mueller '06 MSAAD of AGENCY. Introduction by Ignacio G. Galan and moderation by Marco Ferrari and Gabrielle Printz.

The presentation, to be followed by a Q&A, will be hosted in Avery 114 with extra seating in Ware Lounge. It will also be broadcast remotely on zoom.

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Fronts: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World uncovers a growing geography of co-dependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies of the developing world which it increasingly incriminates. Military training sites, and the real-world self-built environments they replicate, provide a lens through which we can better understand the shape of the city to come.

While the world continues to urbanize, military doctrine has recently and dramatically shifted to view the world’s cities as suspect sites of potential aggression. The world is now more than ever explicitly divided in two camps—those who view the city as an opportunity, and those who view it as a threat.

This paradigmatic shift has set the stage for impending conflict between security and development interests, which take the city as their site. Invisible agents affecting our built environment— architectural typologies, covert simulation strategies, the far-reaching planning mechanisms of global security, and their subversions by resistant populations—are deployed by competing factions in the hopes of gaining a tactical advantage and strategic stronghold. A kind of silent war is being waged over the future of urbanism, implicitly indicting a host of peaceful and vibrant developing cities as sites of possible security concern. The self-built city is cast as a future and inevitable war zone – a Front in the struggle for global and personal security.

Organized by the M.S, in Advanced Architectural Design program.