Description
Despite a relatively low number of terrorist attacks compared to other world regions, European cities are increasingly being redesigned through a series of material infrastructural interventions (known as ‘target hardening’) aimed at protecting crowds, buildings, and infrastructure from hostile threats (Coaffee 2021). While these visible manifestations of geopolitical crisis and domestic insecurity—including bollards, barriers, CCTV, and counterterrorism police patrols—often appear near the sites of attacks, they’ve proliferated in many English cities that do not have a recent experience with terrorism, particularly since the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. In the context of this heightened sense of threat, counterterrorism has become both an omnipresent and unremarkable part of the urban landscape, which is altering the felt experience of public space in cities. Drawing on ethnographic research in Birmingham and interviews with local and national security officials, police, private vendors, and residents, I demonstrate how various actors have sought to normalise this militarisation of urban public space. I argue that this banalisation of threat has been met with both reluctant acceptance and civil inattention by city centre visitors.
