ABSTRACT
The bombings of 7 July 2005, targeted as they were at London’s public transport system and its population, and perpetrated as they were by a group of young British men of Asian descent, brought into sharp focus questions relating to social integration and the meaning of citizenship in a liberal multicultural society. That the attacks were aimed at London, a distinctly multicultural space, and above all, a city characterized by its cosmopolitan character, might suggest that the target was not simply the city itself, its complex infrastructure, but the worldly aspect of its inhabitants. While the bombers themselves hailed from northern English towns, their victims represented the world in all its constitutive difference, the world present in London, the paradigm global city. The distinctiveness of cities such as London and New York exactly derives from their capacities to draw in the global, so that the landscape of the city, economic, social, political, is one defined by the intersection of the global and the local. In the cosmopolis, every street, every neighbourhood, comes somehow to reflect this mixing of cultures and identities and yet the spaces they traverse remain strictly London in character, so there is, as Peter Ackroyd’s Biography of London so clearly demonstrates, both fixity and mobility and each has historically relied on the other. While such complexity is celebrated in all the capacities it generates, at the same time it is drawn into practices of security that increasingly construct difference as a source of threat.
