Citadel law

The continuing and expressed policy of the British government involves treating terrorist offences as crimes, typically prosecuted as criminal acts under ordinary criminal statutes, or under the broader provisions of the Terrorism Acts 2000 and 2006 (Walker, Reference Walker2011). Expressed in formal terms, such conduct is criminalised by the exercise of sovereign law-making authority of the Queen in Parliament. This ‘criminalisation’ is an exercise of the power of the sovereign over their territory, which directs the denizens of the city to obey these commands. In legal positivist terms, these rules repress certain acts as contrary to law through the exercise of power over persons and things. This is the projection of sovereignty across urban space, in both its traditional and modern senses of monarch and state. The continuity of this form of rule in the city of London can be seen in the initial hearing of these cases in the Central Criminal Court, which first began to hear treason and sedition cases some three hundred years before, to their final appeals to the House of Lords, which first originated in the Royal Court and has now become the Supreme Court, the highest British court of state. This repressive sovereign power is instantiated through the police force that detains, the law courts that judge, and the prisons that incarcerate. The chain of legal association links together the Houses of Parliament; the terrorist suspect who is detained by the police; the files of papers, physical evidence and digital data of the prosecution case; the courthouse in which the trial is heard; and the jail in which they are imprisoned. Through these material accretions of sovereign power, the city becomes dominion. It is ruled through the materialisation of sovereign power in urban space.

We will call this form of legal association ‘the citadel’, after its oldest urban form. The Central Criminal Court takes its more commonly known name, the Old Bailey, from the street on which it stands, and which follows the lines of Roman London's fortified walls. From its earliest establishment as a city, London functioned as a citadel, a walled fortress. The citadel is the military stronghold at the heart of the city of law. Often evolving from the military fortifications of an army or the military quarters of the king (or both, as in London), the citadel indicates a particular spatial organisation of power and violence both within its walls and without (Bottomley and Moore, Reference Bottomley and Moore2007, p. 177). The continuity of this form of ‘fortress urbanism’ (Coaffee, Reference Coaffee2004) can be seen in the latest version of the citadel, the Houses of Parliament, now a blockaded fortress protected from its citizenry by laws that prevent their approach and enforced by men armed with guns.Footnote ¹⁵

Following Foucault (Reference Foucault1975), this ‘citadel law’ functions as a form of sovereign rule. This form of legal association attempts to order urban relations through the exercise of repressive force. It attempts to extend the legal chain of obligation by commanding obedience or, alternatively, offering violence to those who do not obey. The exercise of power founds this form of legal association. As a form of association, it is centralised and repressive. It emanates from a single place of authority, which seeks to prohibit certain forms of social actions and relations while permitting others. It makes those relations, and structures those actions, through subjection, whether through the submission of obedience or by the enforcement of violence. In this way, this legal association structures urban space through the material projection of power.

According to Mumford's classic description, the citadel-city is a characteristic urban form of imperial power, as it creates and sustains territory itself.Footnote ¹⁶ The walls of the citadel function as both a mark of the internal boundaries of the city and as a means of projecting force outside these walls. The citadel is not simply a form of internal subjection of its denizens. It is also an external projection of power over others subject to the military and economic power of the city that it defends and projects.Footnote ¹⁷ London's formation and power as a metropolis flowed from its status at the capital of Empire, and even now the contemporary citadel law of London reiterates older imperial forms of rule over ‘racialised’ others (see Keith, Reference Keith2005).Footnote ¹⁸ For example, the designation of all of London as an area in which police ‘stop and search’ of any persons without reasonable grounds under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (TA) resulted in disproportionate numbers of members of minority ethnic communities, particularly African-Caribbean men, being searched by Metropolitan Police (see Travis, Reference Travis2009a; Bowling and Phillips, Reference Bowling and Phillips2007).Footnote ¹⁹

Contemporary citadel law also projects its power outwards, extending its forms of legal association beyond the city boundaries. This can be seen in the shift of concern from so-called ‘domestic’ or ‘Irish’ terrorism to so-called ‘international’ terrorist organisations in contemporary terrorist legislation. For example, ATCSA is largely directed at controlling the international movements of ideas, persons, money and weapons through the city of London. It reflects the global entanglements of contemporary London, the routes of new empires that twist through Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. In the contemporary city, we might then speak of the global, rather than local, form of citadel law.

Police law

The Belmarsh detainees were not prosecuted for criminal offences. Rather, they were detained without charge as foreign nationals under ATCSA. Due to the incompatibility of this detention with the ECHR, they were then released subject to the ‘control order’ regime of the PTA. These control orders were subsequently replaced by the TPIM regime. This regime, like its predecessor, restricted the movement, communication and association of the detainees through the urban space of London. Just as Greater London became a ‘designated area’ of special search powers under the TA so too its population and space have become objects of governance. The majority of control orders and TPIM measures have sought to regulate the interactions, movements and residence of ‘controlled persons’ in the urban space of London. A series of recent judgments on these measures have upheld the legality of this regulation of the relationship between persons, things and space.Footnote ²⁰

This legal regime system creates the urban space of ‘Greater London’ as a new and distinct object of government in law. It makes this space as an association between persons and things, and seeks to regulate those associations by categorising the city's inhabitants into ‘terrorist’ and ‘non-terrorist’ suspects, and its spaces into secure and insecure areas. The executive (rather than the judiciary) decides which persons pose a risk to the safety of London's population because of their ‘terrorist-related activity’, and hence who will be designated as subject to TPIM measures. However, this regulation is racialised, as particular categories of persons (African-Carribean, Asian) and things (prayer books, computer disks, travel tickets) will be designated as terrorist. These regimes discipline persons, not by incarcerating them, but by regulating their activities, movements, communications and residences in and through this urban space according to norms of terrorist and non-terrorist activity. The scope and consequences of such a regime are far-reaching. The simple act of photographing buildings can be categorised as a ‘terrorist activity’, and hence become the object of government regulation (Laurent, Reference Laurent2009). This form of legal association differentiates between how particular categories of ‘terrorist’ persons and things circulate through the city.

Drawing on Foucault's work, this shift from the punishment of persons to their administration can be seen as a part of a broader change in forms of government. It reveals the shift from repressive power, which rules through force, to productive power, which governs through new techniques such as disciplining the body and regulation of the population (Ewald, Reference Ewald1990, p. 138). Foucauldian theorists of the city, such as Osborne and Rose (Reference Osborne and Rose1999) and Valverde (Reference Valverde2008), argue that urban populations emerge as the objects of government through new technologies of spatial regulation, such as policing and surveillance. In this account, the processes of urbanisation gave rise to new forms of risk that were seen as requiring new forms of legal regulation (Valverde, Reference Valverde2008, p. 9).

We can call this form of legal association ‘police law’ after its first urban manifestation. The earliest police were formed in London in the eighteenth century to govern an increasingly unruly and expanding metropolis. By the nineteenth century, the Metropolitan Police Service, the first modern police force, was established. Its function was not only to prevent crime, but also to enforce civil order, and many of its practices were developed to deal with ‘civil disorder’ in colonial Ireland (Emsley, Reference Emsley1996). As the name suggests, the Service was responsible for policing London. The Metropolitan Police District, the geographical area for which the Service was responsible, came to define the Greater London area (Waller, Reference Waller1983, p. 25).Footnote ²¹ This correlation between the Metropolitan Police District and the Greater London area continues to be assumed in the TPIM regime's descriptions of residence, movement or association included or excluded from this urban space.

‘Police law’ is characterised by ‘a high level of discretion and variability, at the level of rule making as well as the level of enforcement’ (Valverde, Reference Valverde2008, p. 9). This form of legal relation is regulatory, in which specific legal practices and institutions produce subjects and their relations to other subjects, things and spaces. These legal associations link persons, constituted as non-terrorist or terrorist; to things which are constituted as non-terrorist or terrorist ‘objects or actions’ (such as bathroom cleaner or bomb component, lyric or incitement). In police law, power does not emanate from a single authority ruling the capital. Rather, it disperses through the urban space, materialising in the new technologies of CCTV and movement tracking, as well as adhering in the older technologies of foot patrols and station houses. The city becomes a space of governance, and its inhabitants become an ‘urban population’ to be governed. Police law aims to prevent, rather than to redress, crime, so that ‘the contemporary city is thus visualised as a distribution of risk’ (Osbourne and Rose, Reference Osborne and Rose1999, p. 753). The chain of legal association links the Home Secretary, the TPIM subject, the Olympics site from which the terrorist suspect is barred, the appropriate housing to which they are restricted, the GPS tracker that locates them in this urban space, and monitoring company to which they must report. The policing of terrorism in London exemplifies this type of ‘urban risk-assessment’; where it is understood as a practice that defends the urban population against the threat of terrorism. This legal assemblage constructs urban associations against these norms of risk and threat, and through these practices of surveillance and discipline.

Laws of exception

Mohammed Ayub, the solicitor for AE, a ‘controlled person’ under the PTA, described the experience of life under such a regime: ‘for three-and-a-half years he [AE] and his family have had to live a life which has been controlled in every respect by the Home Office: where he lives, when he may go out, where he may go, who he may meet, what employment he may undertake’ (Travis, Reference Travis2009b). For those subject to these measures, the legal obligations that they impose might seem more like the full force of the sovereign power of the state. In the Belmarsh detainee cases, a key issue was the reasonable balance between the sovereign powers of the state to defend national security and the right of the detainees to liberty.Footnote ²² In the more recent control order and TPIM measures cases (in which the legal regime applies to both nationals and non-nationals), the issue was not whether the regime itself was unlawful, but rather whether in each case the measures suspending the rights of the person were necessary and proportionate.

These cases reveal the ‘grey zones’ in the city of London, in which the law of the city is suspended in the name of the law. These zones appear in the urban space like shadows on diseased lungs, revealing places where there is a paradoxical suspension and intensification of sovereign law. The sovereign state determines who will live in those zones of indetermination by classifying persons as members of the political community of the city and excluding others from it. Those it categorises as ‘suspected terrorists’ exist as exceptions to law. The concern of the experts who review these persons is their physical, not social, existence. Sovereign law determines its own suspension to create these shadow zones of ‘states of exception’.

Following Agamben (Reference Agamben2005), we can call this form of legal association ‘the laws of exception’. The legal defines certain categories of persons as belonging to the political community, such as citizens with rights, and excludes others from that status. It reduces this category of persons to ‘bare life’, which denies them political existence and confers only physical existence (Agamben, Reference Agamben and Heller-Roazen1998). For Agamben (Reference Agamben2005), ‘terrorist detainees’ are the archetypal example of the reduction of persons to bare life. Agamben connects this form of law to the state of exception, the zone in which there is a lawful suspension of law. As Humphreys (Reference Humphreys2006) describes, the law ‘legalises lawlessness’ by legally creating ‘the state of exception to law’. This is a space without law. Laws of exception create shadow spaces of lawlessness, zones of bare life within the urban polis.

Under certain conditions, this form of legal association comes to characterise an urban space, and to become a city as such. For Agamben (Reference Agamben and Heller-Roazen1998), the exemplary zone of exception is the ‘concentration camp’. He describes the ‘camp’ in conceptual rather than physical terms as ‘the space that is opened when the state of exception becomes the rule’ (1998, pp. 168–69). However, this space takes archetypal physical form in the Auschwitz concentration camp of World War II. The architectural historian of Auschwitz, Robert van Pelt, notes: ‘[t]his is an enormous place. This is a city. Originally, there were a hundred and twenty-five architects and draftsmen working here’ (van Pelt in Singer, Reference Singer1999). The inhabitants of this city of the dead numbered over one million, and came to cover an area of some 350 acres, excluding its satellite ‘suburb’ camps. When it comes to dominate an urban space, the law of exception becomes realised as the necropolis. What was a temporary and limited zone becomes a permanent form of urban life, the city of bare life and of the non-living.

These deadly cities should not be confused with the ‘anti-cities’ that are often counterposed to the global metropolis (Hirst, Reference Hirst2005, p. 25). Hirst describes these ‘anti-cities’ as ‘decentred and post-public’, whose ‘very growth, driven by uncontrolled rural migration, renders them all but ungovernable’ (2005, p. 25). Largely located in the developing world, the megacities and sprawling urban agglomerations of Africa, Latin America and Asia are commonly characterised as lawless, with unchecked crime and violence, insecurity of tenure and forced evictions, and either dysfunctional or absent governmental and legal institutions (United Nations, 2004; 2007). Such anti-cities are often seen as existing, literally, without law. These urban spaces are seen as ungoverned and ungovernable, in which legal rules are either absent or failing. On this analysis, there is an absence of law and hence no form of legal association.

However, Santos (Reference Santos1987) reminds us that these cities are also inventing new modes of urban life. While often living in urban spaces unsupported and unstructured by municipal or national authorities, the inhabitants of these spaces are assembling urban life in dynamic and resourceful ways. For this reason, we require a more complex cartography than identifying simple dichotomies of the absence or presence of state law to map forms of legal association. Like London, these cities are legally plural. They have different legal orders running across their urban spaces, which range from international laws governing trade and finance to local communal agreements regulating daily city life. It is not the case that these cities simply exist without law. Rather, they are re-articulating older legal systems and inventing new forms of legal association (Fernandes and Varley, Reference Fernandes and Varley1998).

Writing of Douala and Johannesburg, Simone describes the ‘[n]ew trajectories of urban mobility and mobilization [in which] distinct groups and capacities are provisionally assembled in surprising, yet often dynamic, intersections’ (2006, p. 368). The same description could have been given for the first ‘megacity’, the London of the nineteenth century. Undergoing rapid and exponential growth due to urbanisation, early Victorian London was a city of slums without running water, electricity or sewerage. Its municipal government, where it is existed, was corrupt and ineffectual. Yet it was also the city that saw the rapid development of new forms of municipal government, labour and housing laws, and, of course, the development of modern company and tort law. New forms of urban life thus require the remaking of old systems of law, and the invention of new forms of legal association.

Urban rights

In 2004, the lawyers representing the Belmarsh detainees appealed to the House of Lords against the earlier decision of the Court of Appeal that their detention was lawful. They argued that these detentions breached the fundamental rights of the detainees. The grounds of the appeal ranged from ‘the right to liberty and security of person’ under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), to the ‘freedom from arbitrary detention’ deriving from ‘the long libertarian tradition of English law’.Footnote ²³ These arguments assert that all persons in the city possess fundamental rights, such as liberty to move through city space and freedom to associate with others in the city. The city's denizens thus become holders of rights, by virtue of which the state owes them certain obligations. As subjects of rights, these legal relations of entitlement and obligation bring these humans into a new relation to their built environment.

This type of legal association takes the form of rights claims. The hearing of the detainee cases in the Old Bailey reminds us of the urban lineage of such claims to have rights in the person. The jurisdiction of the Old Bailey was originally that of serious criminal offences within the City of London. The City of London Corporation retains the right to administer the ‘Square Mile’ (including police and criminal justice within this area). Its Constitution originates in the rights and privileges of the medieval charter of association of citizens of the city, which granted city residents the status of freemen (Frug, Reference Frug1980; City of London, 2009). The earliest rights of freemen included the freedom from arbitrary detention and the right to trial by their peers, which were guaranteed under the Magna Carta (which also guaranteed the ‘ancient rights’ of the City of London). These are the same rights in ‘the long libertarian tradition of English law’ upon which the Belmarsh detainees relied, and which entitled them to freedom of movement and association in the city of law.

We can describe this form of legal association as ‘urban rights’. In this form of legal association, rights bind the urban confraternity, and structure their relationship to the city space. Urban rights are a fraternal form of legal association, in which rights are claimed to equally bind all members of the city space without discrimination. This fraternal form can be seen in the Belmarsh case, where the House of Lords held that the detention of the Belmarsh prisoners was illegal due to the discriminatory nature of holding only non-nationals. Because of this ruling, the then Home Secretary was subsequently forced to apply the control system regime to nationals as well as non-nationals. In this form of legal association, citizens of the city become equal and individual right-bearers. The urban right constructs persons as autonomous and singular individuals, whose ties to others are given on a legal basis. These chains of legal obligation seek to build a new form of urbanity, which constitute new associations of fraternal publics and spaces. The claims of the Belmarsh detainees to a right to liberty in the person reiterate these models of the fraternal legal associations of communal urban life. These models repeat older urban forms of the city as a space of liberty, structured through chains of legal rights.

In the Belmarsh case, these urban rights are universalised. The denizen of the city becomes the human bearer of universal rights. When the Belmarsh detainees claim their right ‘to liberty and security of person’ under the HRA, they claim the right to be recognised as human, as the bearers of human rights. This fraternal recognition in law has its origins in notions of the rights of communal citizenship in the Athenian city. Hirst (Reference Hirst2005, p. 9) points out that this form of urban life has been central to the contemporary ‘imagining of political possibilities’, in which city life serves as a model of political life. Human rights universalise the rights of the citizen of the city by reiterating this urban imagining of political possibilities on a global scale. The city of rights becomes a universal model of relations between persons, in which the legal rights of the citizens of the city become the legal rights of humanity. It conceives this global polity as a city of the world, in which its citizens are equal, and their relations legally bound.

This universal legal chain of obligation, in turn, builds new legal networks in the city space of London. For many of the Belmarsh detainees, their claims under the HRA were already contingent on earlier claims to refugee status under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. These detainees claimed that they were persons entitled to the protection of the international community under Article 14(1) due to the failure of their state to protect them from persecution on particular prohibited grounds. The government was unable to deport these detainees to their home countries without breaching its obligations under the Refugee Convention. The Refugee Convention forms an essential part of the international human rights regime, from which the ECHR and the HRA ultimately derive, and which gives this regime a legal presence in the city. This regime is commonly characterised as a form of ‘cosmopolitan law’, the international legal regime guaranteeing the universal rights of all persons. In cosmopolitan law, the citizen of the city also becomes a citizen of the world, which in turn offers them refuge in another city, in another country. This universal legal chain of legal obligation makes new modes of urban life in London, long known as a place of refuge for those seeking asylum. While the law of London was brought to many parts of the world, the law of the world also manifests itself in London. This claim to urban rights reinvents the city space as belonging to all.

The right to the city

The idea of the urban as a space of consociation that deserves recognition and protection by law has become increasingly significant at an international level. UN-HABITAT and UNESCO are currently developing a new form of urban legal association, the so-called ‘right to the city’ (UNESCO, 2009). This ‘right to the city’, or the right to urban life, was coined by Henri Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre1996) to describe the right to participate in the making of collective life in a city by its inhabitants. Following Lefebvre, we can call these forms of legal association ‘the right to the city’. Despite the influence of this idea upon urban reform, the right to the city is rarely discussed in terms of the role of law in producing this space of consociation (Fernandes, Reference Fernandes2007). However, the city of law reveals three different legal associations that construct this right to the city.

The first is the right to the collective and public use of city space. It ‘is grounded in the entitlement to physically occupy urban space [and] emerges from the essential qualities of the urban – as a space of centrality, gathering and convergence’ (Butler, Reference Butler2009, pp. 325–26). It is precisely this right to participate in the life of the city that the counter-terrorism regimes in the UK seek to curtail, from restrictions upon movement, and relations to others within, in the urban space of London, to ‘internal exile’ from the city itself. Against this comes the invention of new legal claims to the city, which rebuild the association between private property, public protest and communal and political use of the built environment in law. So, for example, in the case of Gillan and Quinton v. United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that the designation of the entire area of Greater London as a security area for the purposes of stop and search without suspicion was not in accordance with law, and was also unlawful invasion of the right to liberty and privacy. Accordingly, the arrest of two London residents who were protesting at an arms fair in Docklands was unlawful.Footnote ²⁴ As the ECtHR describes, the right to private life protects ‘the right to establish relationships with other human beings and the outside world. It may include activities of a professional or business nature. There is, therefore, a zone of interaction of a person with others, even in a public context, which may fall within the scope of “private life”’ (Section 61). The right to the physical use of the city and to interact with others in this ‘zone of interaction’ constructs the relationship between the human protestors and the non-human ‘outside’ world of the physical city.

The second is the right to the use of the physical and social infrastructure of the city, particularly in terms of access to urban resources and services. This form of legal association aims to rebuild city space in more equitable ways. It uses legal mechanisms to undo and reconstruct existing networks of persons and resources. These mechanisms range from urban planning to property taxes, which are designed to construct new legal chains of obligation ‘leading to social inclusiveness and sustainable development’ (Fernandes, Reference Fernandes2007, p. 208). The political stakes of this right have become evident in London as a global city of law. As Saskia Sassen describes, in global cities there is an apparent withdrawal of law in the face of the intensification of ‘privatization and deregulation and the associated strengthening of globalization’ (Reference Sassen2001, p. xvii). This creates a sharp disjuncture between the national and municipal taxation base that funds and manages the urban infrastructure, and the privatisation and deregulation of the use and access to urban resources and services. In this context, the demand for the legal redistribution of capital in the form of the taxation system becomes reformulated as a crucial mechanism for building this right to the city. This demand now appears to have driven recent changes to the taxation regime governing London, which the Coalition government sought to describe as ‘one of the largest ever packages of tax avoidance and evasion measures’ (Bowers, Reference Bowers2013). This does not produce the ‘practico material realization’ of the use value of urban space that Lefebvre calls for (Reference Lefebvre1996, p. 158). However, the legal formulation of this demand offers the possibility of a new use value of urban space in the city of law, reconstructing the relation between surplus and use value in the legal assemblage of the city.

The third right to the city is ‘far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is the right to change ourselves by changing the city’ (Harvey, Reference Harvey2008, pp. 23, 40; Reference Harvey2012). A common rather than an individual right, this form of legal association claims the right to participate in the collective life of the city in order to ‘institute new modes of urbanization’ (Harvey, Reference Harvey2008, pp. 23, 40). If the Greek notion of ‘cosmopolitanism’ first articulated the shift from ideas of the citizen of the city-state to that of the city of the world, nevertheless it relied on cosmopolitan modes of life. For Diogenes, the cosmopolis, or the ‘worldwide city, should be regarded as … an ideal of enlightened persons united not by local or relational ties but by the common values they share’ (Long, Reference Long2008, p. 55). The term ‘cosmopolitan’ still retains its sense of urban living, describing the making of lives defined not by geographical and cultural locations but by the city itself. Writing of contemporary London life, Paul Gilroy (Reference Gilroy2006) renames this ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ ‘multiculture’, in order to capture these everyday exchanges and interactions that make up a common urban life. These exchanges and interactions include the laws that entwine within them, which imagine the ideal of the city of multiculture and seek to represent the ‘common values’ that its inhabitants share. This making of the city of multiculture in legal associations can be seen in the important case of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, and of the systemic failure by the Metropolitan Police to investigate and prosecute his murderers. Due to the efforts of his family and anti-racist campaigners, this case led to the invention of a new form of discrimination (institutional racism), and a new form of right (the positive statutory equality duty of public bodies to eliminate racial discrimination, and promote racial equality). This invention of a new right to the multicultural city has become a citizen-right under the Equality Act 2010 in the form of the positive statutory duty upon public bodies to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster ‘good relations’ across race, disability and gender.

These rights to the city assemble collective urban life in the city of law by symbolising and shaping the different ways in which the inhabitants of a city can live together. In London, laws articulating these norms of urban public life range from anti-discrimination to hate crimes, from public housing legislation to such statutory duties imposed upon public institutions to ensure non-discriminatory provision of services.Footnote ²⁵ To follow Iris Marion Young's (Reference Marion Young1990) classic argument, if laws can serve to legitimate existing inequalities, they can also articulate ways of recognising both the differences between members of a polity and of their shared ways of living together in cities. In this form, these rights to the city attempt to assemble more just modes of collective urban living.

The rights of the city

Cities as spaces of consociation can be the specific targets of violence. The deliberate attack upon urban consociation has become known as ‘urbicide’, understood in the sense of the deliberate attempt to destroy the life of the city. The plurality and heterogeneity of the urban social space can be seen in its built environment, from markets to houses to places of worship (Coward, Reference Coward2007, para. 54). Urbicide indicates the deliberate destruction of this built environment in order to destroy urban consociation. The concept of urbicide first emerged in the US in the 1960s to describe the destruction of the fabric of working-class inner-city life by urban development (Campbell, Graham and Monk, Reference Campbell, Graham and Monk2007). In the 1990s, the concept re-emerged in the context of the urban destruction of the war in the former Yugoslavia (Herscher, Reference Herscher2007, para. 4). Strategies of urbicide included intentional shelling of buildings of cultural significance (such as libraries or mosques), deliberate attacks upon shared or historical public places (such as markets and city centres), and indiscriminate artillery and mortar fire upon housing and hospitals. This culminated in the shelling of Dubrovnik and the siege of Sarajevo, and came to represent a new form of destruction of the multicultural city. The aim of urbicide in this sense is to break apart the concrete manifestations of cosmopolitan life. As a strategy, urbicide intends to obliterate the ways in which the built environment expresses multiculture, and thereby to destroy the shared life of the city.

The bombing of London in World War II has been described as a ‘proving ground’ for urbicide through the use of strategic airpower (Hewitt, Reference Hewitt2009). As strategic centres of power, cities have long been sites and targets of war. The scars of the World War II bombing of London can still be seen in the pock-marked walls of the Tate Britain Gallery, the cracked lines in the upper brick work of Victorian terraces, and the building plaques marking bombing deaths. They can also be glimpsed in the spectral absence of destroyed buildings, now seen only as gaps between older dwellings or as clusters of postwar buildings. However, London also reminds us that the object of attack is not simply the physical, but also the social, element of city life. From the Luftwaffe to the 7 July attacks, London has been bombed not simply as a strategic target, but also as an important symbol of the British nation.Footnote ²⁶

The building of a new form of legal association, which we can call the ‘right of the city’, began after the total war of World War II. This new international legal regime was first built from the law of armed conflict, and is now developing through international criminal law in the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (incorporated into British law in 2001).Footnote ²⁷ This regime protects the right of the city to exist as such, that is, to exist as a space of social and physical consociation, by protecting both the civilian population and the civilian objects of the city. International law now specifically protects those buildings central to civic life, including ‘buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes’.Footnote ²⁸ It also characterises indiscriminate attacks upon cities as illegal. The foundational principle of the international law of armed conflict is the distinction between civilians and combatants, which gives rise to the rule that a whole city cannot be treated as a military target. Under this principle, civilian objects should not be the object of military attack. Any such attack must be limited to those objects that make an effective contribution to military action and whose destruction offers a distinct military advantage.Footnote ²⁹

This new right of the city seeks to protect the civilian objects and persons of the city, as well as to protect the city as a whole. The protected city becomes a city of the world, belonging not only to its inhabitants, but also to humankind. In international humanitarian law, the city once again becomes a legal concept, akin to a legal subject, a ‘personality’ whose defined identity confers certain rights.Footnote ³⁰ By recognising cities as specific objects of protection, this legal regime symbolises the city as a physical civic space of civilian populations and objects, and as a virtual space of consociation deserving of recognition and protection by international law. This right of the city assembles the city as such in international law. With increasing urbanisation, this right of the city has become one of the most important forms of legal association. As Alexandre Vautravers describes, ‘urban expansion in both north and south has made cities today the main theatres of military and humanitarian operations’ (Reference Vautravers2010, p. 437). This is also one of the most delicate forms of legal consociation. It requires immense resources, as the legal chain of obligation must capture militaries, governments and weaponry. It must also be able to extend across national borders, projecting this legal association across the global space. However, if it is correct to claim cities are being reshaped by a new military urbanism, which involves the blurring of urban and military spaces (Graham, Reference Graham2011), then building this right of the city becomes a pressing issue for our modes of urban life.