ABSTRACT
The paradox of defending crowded places Traditional approaches to crime prevention through design modification (most notably Secure by Design or Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) are being increasingly hybridised with military security planning to provide protection against explosions at ‘at risk’ sites. Such attempts to reduce terrorist risk are by no means unprecedented in the UK. During the 1990s, the experience of UK authorities in attempting to ‘design out’ terrorism was largely confined to efforts to stop car bombing by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) against the economic infrastructure in London (Coaffee, 2003). Before the events of 11 September 2001, threats of international terrorism predominantly came from VBIEDs targeting major financial or political centres. In response, attempts to counter terrorism often utilised planning regulations and advanced technology to create ‘security zones’ or ‘rings of steel’ where access was restricted and surveillance significantly enhanced (Coaffee, 2004; Coaffee et al., 2008). September 11th and subsequent no-warning attacks, often using person-borne improvised explosive devices (PBIEDs) aimed at causing mass casualties, made such counter-terrorist tactics appear inadequate, and security policy began to shift to proactive and pre-emptive solutions often involving changes in the way in which design solutions could be unobtrusively constructed and space could be managed. More recently, in the mid 2000s, concerns about the likelihood and impact of terrorist attacks on crowded public places using a combination of traditional and
increasingly innovative methods has heightened the sense of fear in many urban locations, with future attacks against ‘soft targets’ appearing more likely (Coaffee, 2008). This was especially evident in light of the suicide attacks on the London transport network in July 2005 and the London and Glasgow attacks in July 2007 targeting a nightclub and airport respectively. Crowded public places (e.g. shopping areas, transport systems, sports and conference arenas) in particular are deemed to be at high risk (Coaffee et al., 2008). Furthermore, in most cases, such spaces cannot be subject to traditional security approaches such as searches and checkpoints without radically changing public experience and creating ‘spaces of exception’. In the case of major event planning, such as the Olympic Games, the requirement to create more resilient urban areas that are less likely to suffer attack through ‘designing in’ effective counter-terrorism should, wherever possible, be done in a way that is as ‘invisible’ as possible to avoid creating unnecessary fear (ibid.). National policy-makers and the Security Services now perceive attacks against crowded public places as ‘inevitable’, and securing such locations has thus become one of their key priorities in the ongoing fight against terrorism (Coaffee and Bosher, 2008). As UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown noted in a ‘statement on security’ (25 July 2007):
The protection and resilience of our major infrastructure and crowded places requires continuous vigilance. I can confirm that over 900 shopping centres, sports stadiums and venues where people congregate have been assessed by counter-terrorism security advisers and over 10 000 premises given updated security advice.1
