![]()
Part 1
The search for urban security
![]()
Cities have always been crucibles of civilisation and modernity: sites of visionary planning, democratic forums, rich agglomerations of cultures and economies and a place where hope for a better, more modern future, resided. They have also always been places where risks, threats and vulnerabilities have been concentrated and equally where populations have been controlled and trades protected through various techniques of fortification, surveillance and ordering. Such a paradoxical relationship between security and urbanisation has long been highlighted, perhaps most notably by Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961) in his discussion of the origins of war and the city that questioned whether there is an inherent pathology within âdreamsâ of security, which leads inevitably to violence. As he famously noted, âno matter how many valuable functions the city has furthered, it has also served, throughout most of its history, as a container of organized violence and a transmitter of warâ (p.58). More recently, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) also saw the design and management of towns and city as âpunitiveâ or âcarceralâ where landscape markers continuously reinforced a code of control. As he noted,
Within this long-running historical context, this book concerns itself with the intersection of security and city life and, particularly, with the security interventions undertaken in the name of reducing the threat of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century urban terrorism. In doing so, the forthcoming chapters take a novel view of urban security and articulate this through reconfigured and rescaled approaches to international relations (IR) and geopolitics that in many ways decentre the traditional Westernised way of viewing and practising security that focused on identifying the referents, selecting the threats and determining legitimate knowledge. Conventional approaches to security and IR have commonly been conceived on a national, trans-regional or global scale and largely in terms of traditional notions of state sovereignty and broad governance coalitions or macroeconomic institutions or âinterestsâ (Booth, 2004).
Since the 1990s, emerging ideas of âhuman securityâ began to highlight the importance of sub-national and localised responses to new security challenges, which required analysis through a different frame of reference from the realist state-centric security studies orthodoxy, âplacing the needs of the individual, not states, at the centre of security discoursesâ (Chandler, 2012, p.214). However, whilst such work has tried to wrench security away from its institutional bias, to focus it on the needs of people and populations, such challenges have remained for the most part marginal within security studies until recently. Within this framing, this book will seek to rethink scale in urban security, highlighting the localised and everyday urban responses to new security challenges and grounding these in new forms of spatial practice and critical analysis. Particularly, since 9/11, security has been rescaled, as exemplified by the way in which major cities are dealing with terrorist threats to core business, financial and governmental functions and the protection of public spaces and events. Security as a concept and a practice has âcome homeâ: in other words, the discourses, procedures and, in many cases, material examples of national and international security are influencing and/or are directly employed at subnational scales, placing the needs of the cities at the heart of emerging security practices (Coaffee and Murakami Wood, 2006).
Although the empirical focus of this book is predominantly upon the present and future, importance is also placed on providing the historical context for such developments, including the targeting preferences of intruders or terrorists, as well as critically reflecting upon the conceptual ideas that sought to understand and influence the spatial and material security practices that emerged. Contemporary debates about the role of security in urbanisation have only had a minor role for historians, often limited to the observation that there is a long history and a brief summary of the accepted wisdom. Other accounts focus solely on âexceptionalâ events that are often viewed as one-off occurrences. Whilst this book intends to focus on emerging practices of urban security during the ongoing War on Terror, tracing the deeper development of both the discursive and the material aspects of the risks faced, and vulnerability felt, by city civilisations of the past is vital to understanding the roots of contemporary security dilemmas.
The initial chapters of this book (Part 1) are thus spent developing a historical perspective from the ancient world up to the end of the twentieth century â a longue durĂ©e1 sweep. Rather than solely focusing on what French sociologist François Simiand (1906) called histoire Ă©vĂ©nementielle (event-driven history), the foregoing chapters give priority to a synthesis of long-term historical processes that collectively symbolise the evolution of ideas and practices of security over time. Such a historically-driven analysis does not preclude the analysis of important âeventsâ that, in some cases, act as tipping points in the battle between the need for security and freedom in the everyday city. The focus on this long historical sweep is further undertaken in the broad spirit of the genealogical method advanced by Foucault (1980), where progress is not seen in terms of a linear evolution but rather as a form of counter-history where attention is placed upon the multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the past that reveal the influence of power on social development and everyday life. As Arais (2011, p.373) has argued,
Such an approach, as Erlenbusch-Anderson (2018) has more recently noted in her genealogical study of terrorism, is a form of engaged critique in which norms can be excavated from the historically contingent conditions that shape their emergence and, âfrom the practices of those who are fightingâ (p.179).
Boulevards of broken dreams
As cities evolved, particular morphological features came to symbolise the open, democratic nature of urban spaces. Notably, central public places where citizens assembled â what the ancient Greek city-states called an agora â came to represent the centre of spiritual and political life. Agorae were also the symbolic locations where citizens would meet for military duty or to hear proclamations from rulers and, in time, commonly morphed into a central marketplace. These were classically open and democratic spaces but were changed in character when city walling trends began as a result of war, social segregation and the underlying need to separate the known and controllable city from the relative chaos and danger of the outside world (Chapter 2).
As modern cities began to emerge from the 1700s, the construction of boulevards came to form a key skeletal element of the urban fabric, signifying the antithesis of the city wall, that had historically provided security but were increasingly becoming obsolete as a defensive measure. However, the emergence of the boulevard was infused with security meanings and etymologically comes from the French meaning bastion or rampart. Here a boulevard referred to the flat structure of a rampart, projecting outwards from the wall of a fortification, most commonly angular in shape. This feature offered greater scope for defence in the age of gunpowder artillery, compared with the medieval fortifications they superseded.
Whilst these early boulevards often replaced old city walls in encircling a territory, in later times boulevards morphed into wide avenues that radiated from the central city. The classic city boulevard emerged in France (Paris) in the nineteenth century as a tree-lined promenade that ran alongside the former city wall. In many cities, as with the classical agora, the boulevard became the centre of cultural life; a thoroughfare bordered by shops, flower beds, fountains and footbridges that came to symbolise the vibrancy, publicness and social benefits of open and accessible public spaces. However, beneath the conventional image of these modern boulevards lurked an implicit security function that enabled the easy access and egress of military troops into and out of the city to repel attackers, or to quell internal disturbance, as best exemplified by Baron Haussmannâs Paris master plan in the mid-1800s. Over time, the boulevard system also became a central element in Cold War military planning, providing an escape route from the city in the event of a nuclear strike (Chapter 2) as well as being exploited as a delivery corridor by car bombers in the late-twentieth century (Chapter 3).
Most recently, the accessible and straight-line design of the historical boulevard has become a relatively easy target of terrorism through vehicle-as-weapon attacks such as those on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France in 2016 and on La Rambla, Barcelona in 2017.2 These high-profile attacks, and many others worldwide, led to the increased defence of boulevards and publically accessible locations, with the deployment of protective security infrastructure and security personnel (Chapter 12). In essence, the public and accessible nature of these places of public gathering had been upended by the ever-increasingly requirements for security, and that were in danger of becoming sterile spaces where hyper-security dominated the urban scene. These once public corridors have, in many cases, become boulevards of broken dreams.
The rise of everyday practices of security
As urban areas evolved so too did the risks faced as well as the sophistication of security interventions intended to protect civilians, create liveable places and maximise the orderly flow of commerce. Notably from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, plagued by high crime rates and civil unrest, large tracts of Western cities became synonymous with risk and labelled dangerous and indefensible. In reply, urban authorities commonly resorted to pseudo-military responses to keep the population under control and to reduce the threat from crime and, increasingly, urban terrorism. In such circumstances, ethological and anthropological ideas of human territoriality commonly informed the deployment of security interventions, where territory was viewed as both the definition of a space and the attempt to influence thinking and behaviour with regard to that space. Creating a sense of territoriality, especially through urban design or boundary reinforcement, became associated with the filling of space with power and worked on levels from the purely symbolic to the material (Newman, 1972; Sack, 1986). Combined with the active targeting of urban areas in a Cold War era of mutually assured destruction, the Western city in the latter decades of the twentieth century was a place where defensive design, âbomb proofâ living and panoptical surveillance provided by new technologies, became de rigueur and, for many, an increasing part of everyday urban life.
Here, what is meant by the everyday city and how this intersects with terrorist risk is important. In the context of this book, it refers to how the discourses and practices of urban terrorism and counter-terrorism impact individual and collective experience, leads to new forms of collaborative decision-making regarding security and is conceptually framed by Michel de Certeauâs (1984) study of everyday spatial practices. These observation-based studies were inspired by views from the top of the newly completed (at the time) World Trade Center (WTC) in Manhattan, New York; a building that in time was to play a pivotal role in global security discourses as a result of terror attacks in 1993 and 2001. Gazing down from the newly completed WTC, de Certeau proposed his highly influential ideas about how individuals alter, re-appropriate or subvert the repetitive nature of everyday objects â from city streets to literary texts â to make them their own. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), he reflected on the WTC as an embodiment of structural polarity â of the commanding elevated, privileged optical point versus the space of the streets below â where the devices and tactics of everyday life were deployed, often invisibly, to subvert, resist and restructure the spaces of the city. From this vantage point, the geometric, planned and readable city was transformed from an âoperationalâ view to âanother spatialityâ as the everyday nature of the city created additional complexity, blind spots and opaqueness through the deployment of everyday spatial practices (ibid., p.93).
Moreover, the way individuals experience the everyday city through such spatial practices drew an important distinction between the top-down Cartesian-inspired spatial strategies, and the tactics deployed from the ground up. Strategies were seen as âthe calculation (or mani...
