ABSTRACT
This chapter pulls together the key arguments presented in the book and critically analyses how emerging strategies of counterterrorism can be amalgamated to enable proportionality of security approaches across different urban settings, ensuring that social, ethical and legal concerns are properly considered. Proportionality is crucial here given the growing centrality of cities to the rewiring of international affairs, meaning that security measures deployed should be appropriate to the risk faced to minimise disruption to everyday activities and, to the ability of individuals and businesses to carry out their normal social, economic and democratic activities. Using the recent phenomenon of vehicle-as-weapon attacks to showcase how everyday life is becoming weaponised, this chapter unpacks the difficult balancing act between individual freedom and collective security through the three lenses of the fortified, the watched and the prepared city. This draws on future-looking examples of counterterrorism interventions and management (including the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic), before concluding with a discussion of how the normalisation of urban security becomes manifested and mainstreamed as a result of physical interventions and advanced digital surveillance to become an accepted and legitimised as part of everyday urban management and regimes of resilience.
