Space and Culture http://sac.sagepub.

com/

Introduction: Spaces of Terror and Risk

David Barnard-Wills, Cerwyn Moore and Joel McKim Space and Culture 2012 15: 92 originally published online 21 February 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1206331211430012 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sac.sagepub.com/content/15/2/92

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Space and Culture can be found at: Email Alerts: http://sac.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://sac.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://sac.sagepub.com/content/15/2/92.refs.html

>> Version of Record - May 21, 2012 OnlineFirst Version of Record - Feb 21, 2012 What is This?

Downloaded from sac.sagepub.com at Universitat Heidelberg on October 23, 2013

0012

SAC15210.1177/1206331211430012Barnard-Wills et al.Space and Culture

Articles

Introduction: Spaces of Terror and Risk

David Barnard-Wills1, Cerwyn Moore2, and Joel McKim3

Space and Culture 15(2) 9297 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1206331211430012 http://sac.sagepub.com

The interlinked discourses of terrorism and risk serve both to structure policies and drive the design of technologies, with implications ranging far beyond traditional issues of national security and international relations. Both the threat of terrorism and the policies and technologies intended to counter it affect the physical and social environment, potentially changing the nature of the space itself, as well as the way people use, inhabit, and think about places and spaces. This special issue intends to map these developments and provide theoretical accounts of such trends and phenomena. This editorial is written shortly after a devastating urban/rural tragedy in Norway that confirmed that not only does the threat of terror remain present, but it does so in close proximity to the encouraging events of the Arab Spring that demonstrated the role played by space, both physical and virtual, in the collective resistance of state repression and intimidation. Terrorism acts as driver for diverse policies of preemption, prevention, and prediction, including the substantial growth of surveillance. Frequently, terrorism is framed in terms of risk, with certain places, populations and activities identified as risky or suspect, and thus a proper target for monitoring and intervention. The logic of counterterrorism is risk averse. Attempts to secure space against terrorism or other associated risks and natural hazards raise questions about what exactly is being secured and for what purposes. Which populations or activities are included or excluded from a space? Which uses of space are privileged, and which are brought under the rubric of terrorism? The threat of terrorism and the counterterrorism responses raised against it, affect the aesthetic and affective dimensions of architectural and urban design, and could constrain movement and experience within the space of the city. These threats and countermeasures also have profound implications for urban ethical and political life. To what extent does the risk of terrorism foster a politics of secrecy as opposed to openness? Do these conditions prevent the development of a potential ethics of hospitality or cosmopolitanism? The spaces affected by terrorism and risk are not just physical but also include virtual spaces such as the Internet. These spaces too are designed, constructed, and contested in ways affected by conceptions of risk and terrorismthe decentralized communications potential of the Internet is seen by governments not only as a site of radicalization, but also of ideological conflict, as in the case of WikiLeaks and Anonymous. The architecture of these virtual spaces establishes code as law (Lessig, 1999). Software codes and protocols can be understood as frozen organisational
1 2

Craneld University, Swindon, UK University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK 3 University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Corresponding Author: David Barnard-Wills, Department of Informatics and Systems Engineering, Cranfield University, Shrivenham, Swindon, UK, SN6 8LA Email: d.barnardwills@cranfield.ac.uk

Barnard-Wills et al.

93

and policy discourse (Bowker & Starr, 2000, p. 135), including political and social values even if these are unarticulated. Physical spaces are themselves divided up into zones of control, ranging from physical and electronic security cordons to free speech zones, and the fortified Green Zone of Baghdad (Chandrasekaran, 2007). These spaces are modulated through the differential application of protocol (Galloway, 2004). As forms of policy, the architectural and the code are particularly opaque to nonspecialists and the general public. If living in an urban setting is now the norm for the majority of the earths inhabitants, it has not precluded the space of the city from remaining uncertain, precarious and even fearful for many. These tensions can be explained in part by the growing social and economic inequalities in both finance- and service-based global cities (Sassen, 2006), and the swelling megacities of the developing world (Davis, 2006). The structural injustices of globalized capital produce civil unrest (in the form of crime and political instability), but they also engender creative coping strategies (such as informal economies and DIY construction methods) that significantly alter the spatial makeup of the city (Cruz, 2008). The fears associated with urban space are of course intensified when cities become embroiled in violent global conflicts. The urbicidal destruction of the 1992-1996 Siege of Sarajevo and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center made clear that architecture and the built environment are now the focal point, rather than simply the backdrop, for contemporary military aggressions and terror campaigns. The risks presented by terrorism are distinct in that they are of an inherently indeterminate nature, making the appropriate level of response at the municipal level difficult to assess. As Brian Massumi (2006) identifies, post 9/11, governmentality has molded itself to threat. A threat is unknowable. If it were known in its specifics, it wouldnt be a threat. It would be a situation . . . and a situation can be handled (p. 289). Under these conditions, in which threats appear fundamentally ungraspable, the definable fears associated with urban living are in danger of being displaced by a dispersed and potentially limitless anxiety. Yet Sara Ahmed reminds us that abstract fears and anxieties, particularly those triggered by proximity to racial or religious otherness, have very tangible effects on the spatial organization of the city. She explains, fear works to align bodily and social space: it works to enable some bodies to inhabit and move in public space through restricting the mobility of other bodies to spaces that are enclosed or contained (Ahmed, 2004, p. 70). The impulse to mitigate risk through acts of enclosure, containment or division has clearly had a profound impact on the current urban environment and the very notion of public space. Setha Low (2001) rather chillingly reveals that one third of all new homes now built in the United States are in gated residential communities (p. 26) and scholars such as Teresa Caldeira and Pow Choon-Piew confirm that a proliferation of fortified enclaves, separating the upper classes from the poor or marginal, is simultaneously redefining the public life of Latin American and Asian cities (Caldeira, 1996; Choon-Piew, 2009). The threat of terror has engendered its own forms of barriers and enclosures, including what Wendy Brown (2010) describes as the new walls striating the globe (p. 8) and the establishment of detention camps, where national and international rule of law is suspended indefinitely to protect state sovereignty (Butler, 2004). International relations theorists such as Didier Bigo have focused on the role of the border as a key site of surveillance in liberal democracies (Bigo, 2006). According to Stephen Graham (2010) these civilian and military processes of surveillance and policing are becoming increasingly blurred as we enter into an era he dubs the new military urbanism. Given the weight of these conditions, perhaps the greatest risk of all is that the openness, cosmopolitanism, and exchange that characterize the democratic city may not survive these security measures. The defenses and resilience of the Ideal City must now incorporate risk management and mechanisms of knowledge production. Its spaces consequently become sites of surveillance. Surveillance is an ordering logic and an attempt to render spaces known and knowable, and

94

Space and Culture 15(2)

therefore tractable for intervention by a range of security actors, but also to smooth the flow of commerce. Recurring narratives of attacks on urban space, combined with a perceived need for places to compete for resources and attention, has led to various security actors placing a high priority on security and surveillance, often framed through the concept of resilience (Coaffee, Wood, & Rogers, 2008). Surveillance studies has paid particular attention to the spread of visual surveillance in urban environments (Coleman, 2004; McCahill, 2002), but the information dimension becomes incredibly important in the smart city where the overlapping infrastructures of communication, socialization, smooth circulation, or intelligent transportation systems contain surveillance potential (Monahan, 2010). The tensions between knowledge/surveillance and physical architecture are important here. Sometimes these two modalities are opposed, and at other times they are brought into synergy. Technological surveillance may offer the guarantee of free-flow through a space, or the absence of physical barriers; however, architecture can be used to provide mechanisms of surveillance in space. How has a creative community of artists and designers responded to our current context of terror and risk? The latently menacing installation spaces created by artists such as Gregor Schneider, Miroslaw Balka, and Laurent Grasso are perhaps one manifestation of a collective state of anxiety. Architects and landscape designers, meanwhile, are faced with the considerable challenge of meeting security requirements while maintaining an atmosphere of openness and accessibility (Boddy, 2008). Nowhere is this imperative more explicit than in the design of U.S. government buildings (particularly since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City) and the recent completion of the San Francisco Federal Building by Thom Mayne of Morphosis provides one example of an attempt to reconcile this tension through the interplay of secure and public zones, transparency and opacity. But this balancing act is not always successfulfor many, the shift at Ground Zero in New York from the crystalline structures proposed by Daniel Libeskind to the reinforced concrete base of the current Freedom Tower symbolizes the failure of architecture to respond effectively to the challenges at hand. Indeed, Eyal Weizmans insightful account of the central role played by architectural form, theory, and infrastructure in the ongoing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories suggests that architecture may be more complicit in the production of contemporary spaces of conflict than the discipline would care to admit (Weizman, 2007). Evidently, political violence and more particularly terrorism has become an explicit concern in a range of different disciplinary contextsincluding international relations, political theory, and sub-branches of these disciplines such as Security Studiessince 9/11. Themes related to the study of risk have been slightly less explicit but nonetheless embedded in many theoretical discussions about the methods employed to mitigate threats. Of course, there were bound to be difficulties when reconciling the immediate and ever-present threat linked to terrorism, and more aesthetic considerations associated with the securitization of threats. However, this was not the real tension within these different disciplines. Rather the nature of terrorism and risk became entwined, providing a central pillar in much of the literature that sought to address contemporary forms of political violence. Onlookers might have predicted a small place among the less exciting theories of international relations for this type of work, but it quickly gained purchase, overwriting accounts of terrorism in urban settings. In the midst of the Cold War, Paul Virilio had illustrated the ways in which forms of war shaped the built environment and public space. Virilio (1983) writes, the objects, bunkers, blockhouses, anti-aircraft shelters, submarine bases, etc. are kinds of reference points or landmarks to the totalitarian nature of war in space and myth (pp. 2-3). Nearly 20 years before 9/11, Virilio signposted how the evocation of war fashioned the built environment, while also producing security strategies and pre-emptive policies. The evocation of a war against terror after 9/11 arguably only shaped urban space obliquely, but the war myth was certainly used to

Barnard-Wills et al.

95

securitize political space. Importantly though, terrorism during the Cold War had already informed many of the governance strategies deployed to counter threatsincluding data retention, the targeting of terrorist financing, and pre-emptive security policies. Indeed, the use of political violence in urban settingsepitomized and advocated by the Brazilian Carlos Marighella (2002) in his Minimanual of the Urban Guerillahad a long history. The Minimanual was published in English in the early 70s shortly before a wave of terrorism, which led to a series of countermeasures, including internment, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In a sense then some of the theoretical claims about the novelty of the politics of precaution, are limited, partly due to the under-appreciation of the urban aspects of terrorism. In another sense, some overzealous theoretical reading of risk may need to be balanced or offset against works that are firmly linked to policies and history. The city has long been a site of risk and fear, if not always terrorism (Joyce, 2003; Schivelbusch, 1987). The development of this special issue was, in part, inspired by the desire to address the issues of terrorism and risk through a multidisciplinary perspective. The aim was to bring together a range of different, but nonetheless linked, areas of research interests and researchers. A key aspect of each article included in the special issue relates to the theoretical discussion of governance. A methodology based on the study of strategies and tactics, as well as ways of seeing and regimes of truth (Dean, 2010; Miller & Rose, 2008; Tully, 2002), is particularly relevant to understanding the politics of risk, terror, knowledge, and surveillance in the modern city or virtual space. The diagrams and intentions of security policies are fundamentally important objects of study, as are the efforts that seek to make space knowable. Foucaults point is not that society is a panopticon, but rather that the panopticon was a particular form of governmental diagrama way to arrange both space and information to enact governance (Foucault, 2008). Such diagrams are presented as answers to the problems of security, risk, and terror that government poses to itself. Therefore the way that spaces of terror and risk are imaged, both retroactively and for the future, is vitally important. The past is a selective reading based on exception and novelty, a patchwork of CCTV images, and recirculated photographs of events or attacks (Reinhardt, 2007). The future is built up from imaged scenarios, based on possibility rather than probability. The complexity and vividness of such scenarios contributes psychologically to our sense of their terrifying plausibility (Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982). In their contribution to the special issue, Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster directly engage with this mode of thought and politics of knowledge. They argue that contemporary politics is increasingly defined at the horizon of unknown, yet catastrophic future events. Exploring spatiality and temporality, the authors demonstrate how the practices entailed in the governance of an unknowable and unexpected future inform counter-terror policies. The article by David Barnard-Wills and Debi Ashenden focuses on cyber security and the securitization of virtual space, offering a reading of ways in which risk and an account of the ambiguity of space are used to drive current policies. The focus on technological possibilities and cyber war, highlight the ways in which virtual and digital space are securitized. Kevin Haggerty and Camille Tokar seek to contribute to the growing literature on ID scanning and surveillance in their article on the appeal of nightclub scanning systems. Using ethnographic work, the article interrogates the diverse appeals of such devices to institutional audiences, offering insight into cultural practices and the role of institutions in advancing the use of surveillance. They also engage with the postjustificatory epistemology that often features in technological security interventions. Teresa Stoppani engages with the symbolic role of architecture, even at the moment of its destruction. The artificial disaster is interpreted not only as an attack on what architecture symbolizes but also indirectly on the disciplinary practice of architecture. Destruction triggers the questioning of the role, meanings, weaknesses, and responsibilities of the discipline. Stoppanis

96

Space and Culture 15(2)

article moves through governmental attempts to map disaster, formal efforts to write the disaster or war on to the body of the city, and critically provocative responses within architectural theory that highlight the very violence of architecture itself. This ranges from urbicide in Sarajevo to Ground Zero after 9/11. The article is particularly relevant for the account of the way that architectural space is contested, both physically and symbolically, and for the ideological weight present in these conflicts. Erin Despards examination of the use of plant life in security architecture and environmental design for crime prevention demonstrates the limits of a purely aesthetic critique of the securitization of space. Calls for harmonious, green, and psychologically beneficial spaces risk co-option by sophisticated, designed security that fails to question the political drive behind these practices. Despards article also demonstrates the way that security design can shift between different modulations of the same core principles. Plants see use as barriers, indexes of care and control, and as boundary markers. Controlled and ordered plant life in the city also offers opportunities to increase the surveillance capacity of space. Despard also highlights the complex semiotic potential and legibility of plant life. John Hutnyk continues this complex reading of space through an examination of the framing of both the city and political violence in culture and storytelling. His accounts of films such as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and My Beautiful Launderette, and of The Satanic Verses, show how the complexity, legitimacy, and ambiguity of U.K. diasporic street politics of the 1980s has been reconfigured in terms of terror and a persistent everyday anxiety. This account of real and fictional spaces is carefully related to considerations of the loss of depth and multiplicity in diasporicAsian identity, demonstrating the way that both culture and space are implicated in politics of risk and terror. Given the turbulent year experienced in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, such a consideration of the political and cultural dynamics of street protest is more pertinent than ever. Together the pieces included in the special issue not only build on and extend existing scholarship in an emerging field, but their individual content and the connections between them offer new, innovative insight into the complex relationship between space, terror, and risk. It is hoped that the scope and collective contributions of this special ssue will influence future research and analysis of the links and tensions in these three areas. References
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Bigo, D. (2006). Security, exception, ban and surveillance. In D. Lyon (Ed.), Theorizing surveillance: The panopticon and beyond (pp. 46-68). Cullompton, England: Willan. Boddy, T. (2008). Architecture emblematic: Hardened sites and softened symbols. In M. Sorkin (Ed.), Indefensible space: The architecture of the national insecurity state (pp. 277-304). New York, NY: Routledge. Brown, W. (2010). Walled states, waning sovereignty. New York, NY: Zone Books. Bowker, G., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London, England: Verso. Caldeira, T. P. R. (1996). Fortified enclaves: The new urban segregation. Public Culture, 8, 303-328. Chandrasekaran, R. (2007). Imperial life in the emerald city: Inside Baghdads Green Zone. London, England: Knopf. Choon-Piew, P. (2009). Gated communities in China: Class, privilege and the moral politics of the good life. New York, NY: Routledge. Coaffee, J., Wood, D. M., & Rogers, P. (2008). The everyday resilience of the city: How cities respond to terrorism and disaster. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barnard-Wills et al.

97

Coleman, R. (2004). Reclaiming the streets: Surveillance, social control and the city. Cullompton, England: Willan. Cruz, T. (2008). Border tours: Strategies of surveillance, tactics of encroachment. In M. Sorkin (Ed.), Indefensible space: The architecture of the national insecurity state (pp. 111-140). New York, NY: Routledge. Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. London, England: Verso. Dean, M. (2010). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London, England: SAGE. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979. New York, NY: Palgrave. Galloway, A. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. Cambridge: MIT Press. Graham, S. (2010). Cities under siege: The new military urbanism. London, England: Verso. Joyce, P. (2003). The rule of freedom: Liberalism and the modern city. London, England: Verso. Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Lessig, L. (1999). Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York, NY: Basic Books. Low, S. (2003). Behind the gates: Life, security, and the pursuit of happiness in fortress America. New York, NY: Routledge. Marighella, C. (2002). Minimanual of the urban guerrilla. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Abraham Guillen Press. Massumi, B. (2006). 5 codes: The spectrum of fear. In S. Trby, G. de Bruyn, I. Markov, & D. Hundsdrfer for Igmade (Eds.), 5 Codes: Architecture, paranoia and risk in times of terror (pp. 286-299). Basel, Switzerland: Birkhuser. McCahill, M. (2002). The surveillance web: The rise of visual surveillance in an English city. Cullompton, England: Willan. Miller, P., & Rose, N. (2008). Governing the present: Administering economic, social and personal life. Cambridge, England: Polity. Monahan, T. (2010). Surveillance in the time of insecurity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Reinhardt, M. (2007). Picturing violence: Aesthetics and the anxiety of critique. In M. Reinhardt, H. Edwards, & E. Duganne (Eds.), Beautiful suffering: Photography and the traffic in pain (pp. 13-36). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sassen, S. (2006). Cities in a world economy. London, England: Pine Forge Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1987). The policing of street lighting. Yale French Studies, 73, 61-74. Tully, J. (2002). Political philosophy as critical activity. Political Theory, 30, 533-555. Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow land: Israels architecture of occupation. London, England: Verso. Virilio, P., & Lotringer, S. (1983). Pure war. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).