Out of the Mountains (41 page)

There was another factor, too, one that relates directly to electronic connectivity. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, when governments shut down the Internet and cellphones in response to the protests, they gave ordinary people a personal grievance (denial of access to the connectivity they had come to count on) that brought them onto the streets in large numbers. Far from stifling the protests, cutting off connectivity spread the outrage—it suddenly gave the mainstream population a reason to support anti-regime movements, which until that time had been fringe activists with little wider appeal. It made every citizen feel a sense of repression directly in his or her own life, and thus broadened the opposition to the regime dramatically—sometimes, as we saw in the case of Egypt, literally overnight. In the United States, in virtually every case, Internet and cellphone systems stayed up. In one incident, however, authorities did disable the cellphone system, with remarkably similar results to what was observed in Egypt.

The place was San Francisco, California. On August
11
,
2011
, Occupy protestors tried to mount a demonstration against the Bay Area Regional Transit (BART) authority, with demonstrations on BART platforms and on trains across the San Francisco metropolitan area, to protest a shooting by BART police in July. BART officials responded by blocking cellphone services. “They turned off electricity to cellular towers in four stations from
4
p.m. to
7
p.m. . . . after BART learned that protesters planned to use mobile devices to coordinate a demonstration on train platforms.”
166
The backlash was immediate. Online protests broke out against BART from Anonymous and a collection of online democracy and civil liberties groups. The Electronic Freedom Foundation likened BART to the Egyptian regime, claiming on its website, “BART officials are showing themselves to be of a mind with the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak.”
167
Michael Risher, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “All over the world, people are using mobile devices to protest oppressive regimes, and governments are shutting down cell phone towers and the Internet to stop them. It's outrageous that in San Francisco, BART is doing the same thing.”
168
Although the planned demonstration was disrupted, the cellphone blockage gave ordinary commuters a shared grievance with the protestors and led to a series of even larger protests and an escalating online campaign against BART (under the punning Twitter hashtag #MuBARTek) that involved denial-of-service attacks, leaking of sensitive information, and cyberintrusions designed to shut down BART's computer system.
169
Protestors gathered for demonstrations that grew over time until BART was effectively “under siege—in cyberspace and underground . . . working round the clock to fend off a disparate group of hackers who penetrated the agency's Web sites [and] released sensitive information, in retaliation for the shutdown of the cellphone and wireless services.”
170

The San Francisco protests never escalated beyond peaceful demonstrations, primarily because there wasn't the violence against protestors (by police or security services) that occurred in the other examples we've looked at, and as a result the escalatory cycle of tit-for-tat protest and violent repression never got off the ground. The BART police should count themselves lucky, too, that there were no San Francisco Ultras. But as politically inaccurate as it might have been for the protestors to label an American city's transit system as a Middle Eastern dictatorship, the functional parallels with Egypt are actually quite clear: blocking access to connectivity was
in itself
a sufficient grievance to bring many people over to the side of the protestors, who otherwise might have remained a marginal fringe group. Just as in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, people rapidly came to rely on digital connectivity, counting on it and taking it for granted, and any disruption in that connectivity was seen as a major infringement on their rights. This was clearly puzzling to the BART spokesman, Linton Johnson: “The protest never materialized, but the action provoked outrage. The next day, Mr. Johnson was dismissive of complaints. ‘It is an amenity,' he said. ‘We survived for years without cellphone service,' he continued, but now people are ‘complaining that we turned it off for three hours?'”
171
Well, actually, yes: one effect of the democratization of technology, including weapons technology, that has emerged through the radically increased electronic connectivity of the past decade is that people have come to see systems such as cellphones, Wi-Fi, the Internet, and satellite television as theirs by right. Information access and information flow, especially in urbanized areas, have become almost as basic to urban dwellers' existence and to the metabolism of cities as flows of water, food, fuel, or shelter, and this has happened in a historically short time.

In all the examples we've looked at in this chapter, virtual or electronic connectivity wasn't enough, on its own, to spread or sustain an uprising. There had to be a virtual-to-real overlap. In the case of the Arab uprisings, this can be seen in the air-war/ground-war dynamic of online activists working with soccer fans and street-level demonstrators, providing a virtual hinterland for protestors, rioters, and eventually full-scale guerrilla war. It was seen in the way that remote warfare capabilities became available to urban street fighters who could now run remote command-and-control nodes as in Mumbai, crowd-source intelligence and logistics, and synchronize urban swarm tactics, as in Mogadishu—but with much greater precision. In the case of Libya, access to a long open coastline gave the rebels enormous opportunities for littoral maneuver and resupply. Combined with the improvised weapons and communications systems that urbanized populations proved able to pull together, and the competitive control behavior of both civilians and guerrillas in liberated areas, these capabilities add up to a significant shift in the way that conflict in connected, coastal cities is likely to occur in the future. And we've not yet seen the full effect of this shift. As John Pollock points out:

The world's nodes and networks are multiplying and growing denser: a third of the world's population is online, and 45 percent of those people are under 25. Cell-phone penetration in the developing world reached 79 percent in 2011. Cisco estimates that by 2015, more people in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East will have mobile Internet access than have electricity at home. Across much of the world, this new information power sits uncomfortably upon archaic layers of corrupt or inefficient governance.
172

Chapter 5 draws together the implications of this shift, along with insights from the previous chapters, to explore the ways in which communities, cities, companies, and governments can respond to the challenge of conflict in connected cities.

5

Crowded, Complex, and Coastal

Unless we imagine that such urban transformations are less gigantic than these linear projections indicate, and unless we hope that we are witnessing a retreat toward middle-rank towns, these great cities will essentially be no more than juxtapositions of flimsy houses without street maintenance, police, or hospitals, surrounding a few wealthy neighborhoods turned into bunkers and guarded by mercenaries. Mafias will control immense zones outside the law (this is already the case) in Rio, Lagos, Kinshasa, and Manila. Formerly rural people, with a few members of the privileged classes, will be the primary organizers of new social and political movements demanding very concrete changes in people's lives. It is on them, and no longer on the workers, that the great economic, cultural, political and military upheavals of the future will depend. They will be the engines of history.

—Jacques Attali, 2006

I. The New Normal

I began this
book by describing an incident that happened in early autumn 2009, in a remote Afghan valley, where watching a patrol fight its way out of the mountains helped crystallize some questions in my mind about the applicability of classical counterinsurgency theory to modern conflict. Four years later, the war in Afghanistan continues, but the outlines of a new environment are already emerging across the planet. This chapter summarizes the key elements of that environment, draws together the main ideas we've been exploring about the problems that will confront tomorrow's cities, and considers how we might choose to respond to them.

As we've just seen, one face of the new complex of urban problems is playing out in Syria today. As I write, rebels are fighting from house to house and block to block in several cities, while vast refugee settlements are congealing around the edges of towns in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Online activists of every ideological bent, in a dozen countries, are supporting the uprising; cyberguerrillas of the Free Syrian Army are blocking regime websites, running propaganda on YouTube, and using Twitter for command-and-control. Fighters are using cellphones, global positioning systems, and satellite receivers to enable their urban swarm, and they're building do-it-yourself weapons in the workshops of what has been called the first “maker war.”
1
Food, weapons, ammunition, medicines, and communications gear are flowing into Syria via overlapping networks—official and private, overt and dark, licit and illicit—that all use the same interconnected global transportation, financial, and communications systems. Flows of money, information, and fighters follow the same pathways. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad's Electronic Army has hacked the websites and Twitter feeds of a string of human rights NGOs and the U.S. secretary of state and is phishing for rebel supporters online.
2
A “siege mentality has taken hold” in government-controlled coastal cities, while a huge influx of displaced regime supporters puts these towns under further stress.
3
The Syrian army has fired Scud missiles against its own cities, and people fear the regime is using nerve gas to stifle the uprising.
4
Overhead, drones—flown remotely, by crews who drive home to their families after work through suburban America—are monitoring the fighting, and the CIA is reportedly considering Predator strikes against al Q
 
aeda–aligned militants fighting alongside the rebels. The CIA story, first reported by Ken Dilanian and Brian Bennett of the
Los Angeles Times
, is on Twitter, Facebook, and news blogs in minutes; in less than an hour it's on satellite channels across the globe—including Press TV (the official Iranian outlet), which predictably calls the plan “a dangerous escalation.”
5
It's not reported in Syria, though, because the regime has Iranian software that lets it scramble satellite feeds; word has it the Iranians got the software from China.
6

At the same time, halfway across Asia and at the other end of the violence spectrum, we can see another face of the new normal, in the world's fastest-growing megacity—Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, which is also experiencing severe unrest. A general strike and bombings on the streets stopped the city in its tracks in early
2013
, as opposition parties protested a government crackdown, which itself was prompted by violent riots a few weeks before. The riots were triggered by death sentences given to opposition leaders a few months before that, in government-run trials that the opposition argued were politically motivated.
7
Like Daraa and Benghazi, where the Syrian and Libyan civil wars began, Dhaka is an urban ecosystem under extreme stress, operating right at the edge of its capacity. Urban economic growth—combined with poverty, soil salinity, water contamination, and land-use conflict in the countryside—has brought a massive flow of rural people into the city.
8
Dhaka is growing at an incredible rate: a woman born in Dhaka in
1950
would have been a toddler in a midsized town of roughly
400
,
000
people; by her fiftieth birthday the place was a megacity of
12
million. Today, Dhaka's population is almost
15
million—nearly a
38
-fold expansion in a single lifetime.
9
This breakneck growth puts immense strain on governance: fire, ambulance, and health services are overstretched, local government is plagued by corruption and inefficiency, and the police have ceded whole districts to gangs and organized crime. Unplanned industrialization has given Dhaka the unenviable title of “least livable city on the planet,” according to an annual survey of
140
world cities.
10
Hundreds of unregulated brick kilns on the city's outskirts pump out toxic smoke as they produce the construction materials that feed Dhaka's urbanization—a process that's creating vast, polluted, overcrowded, marginalized shantytowns that lack water, sanitation, lighting, and even footpaths.
11
Since
1971
, when “Dhaka became the capital of an independent country, the pressure on it has been enormous, [resulting in] the growth of slums on any available vacant land.”
12
Government responses have sometimes been heavy-handed—as in
2007
, when authorities razed squatter settlements and expelled inhabitants by force—and this is closely connected with the unrest.
13

And then, of course, there's this:

Take one of the most unplanned urban centres in the world, wedge it between four flood-prone rivers in the most densely packed nation in Asia, then squeeze it between the Himalaya mountain range and a body of water that not only generates violent cyclones and the occasional tsunami, but also creeps further inland every year, washing away farmland, tainting drinking water, submerging fertile deltas, and displacing villagers as it approaches—and there you have it: Dhaka.
14