More than two millennia ago, Thucydides gave us a description of urban guerrilla warfare, involving Theban troops who were occupying the city of Plataea:
The Thebans immediately closed up ranks to repel all attacks on them. Twice
or thrice they beat back their assailants. But the Plataean men shouted and
charged them, the women and slaves screamed and yelled from the houses
and pelted them with stones and tiles; besides, it had been raining hard
all night, and so at last their courage gave way and they turned and fled
through the city. Most of the Theban fugitives were quite ignorant of the
right way out, and this, with the mud and the darkness, and the fact that
their pursuers knew their way about and could easily stop their escape,
proved fatal to many.
This description of classical Hellenic combat will reverberate remarkably through the urban conflicts to be examined in this volume.
A World of Cities
All across the globe, the human race is crowding into cities. Indeed, “a demographic upheaval of seismic proportions is today transforming almost the entire developing world from a predominantly rural society to an urban one.” After the decline of Rome, it required fifteen hundred years for a city to reach a population of one million: that was London. By 1900, perhaps 5 percent of the world’s people lived in cities of over one hundred thousand inhabitants; by 2000 . . .