Rings of Steel, Rings of Concrete and Rings of Confidence: Designing out Terrorism in Central London pre and post September 11th

For many years urban commentators have discussed the costs and benefits of urban authorities adopting counter-terrorism measures in the face of real or perceived terrorist threats (see, for example, Boal, 1969; Brown, 1985; Davis, 1992; Pawley, 1998; Graham, 2002). Some of the most historically explicit examples of such measures were seen in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s and 1980s where `fortress architecture' and principles of `defensible space' were used, by the security forces, to territorially control designated areas. This was most notably around the central shopping area in Belfast where access to the centre was barred, first by concrete blockers and barbed wire, and then later by a series of high metal gates which became known as `the ring of steel' (Brown, 1985; Jarman, 1993) Ð a term which was to gain new meaning in the 1990s in central London. In the 1970s Belfast became a laboratory for radical experiments on fortress urbanism, which became a recurring theme in urban research through the 1990s, especially centred on Los Angeles where connections were made to Belfast's approach. When prophesying about the future of Los Angeles in the new millennium Mike Davis (1992) noted that within the crime-infested future city the car bomb could well become the ultimate weapon of crime and terror, and predicted that the urban authorities might well enact fortress style rings of steel as a counter response. Similar sentiments to this `fortress urbanism' rhetoric have, out of necessity, been commonplace after September 11th. The attacks of September 11th were unique in terms of the combination of tactics employed Ð the simultaneous high-jacking of planes and the targeting of iconic buildings by aircraft which were used as missiles Ð as well as the destructive damage caused and insurance losses accumulated. September 11th also brought to the fore wider concerns about different types of `postmodern' or `catastrophic' terrorism (Laqueur, 1996; Carter et al., 1998), and a society based on living with an acceptable degree of risk and danger (Ewald, 1993; Lianos and Douglas, 2000; Beck, 2002). In the post September 11th world reconceptualized terrorist realities have led, in some cases, to new and dramatic urban counter-responses based on Belfast and LAstyle fortification as well as increasingly sophisticated military threat-response technology. For example, the Debates and Developments section of the September Volume 28.1 March 2004 201-11 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research