Introduction

This chapter will define the interdisciplinary field of urban security and highlight the increasing requirement to protect complex and evolving urban environments from multiple forms of terrorist attack. It will illuminate how scale in security has been rethought, highlighting the importance of localised urban responses to new security challenges that have become almost ubiquitous and are increasingly moving from the exceptional to the normal as they become accepted, often uncritically, in the everyday lives of cities and citizens. This chapter will also outline the main arguments of the book, highlight the wide range of international case studies that will be deployed and explain the structure of the forthcoming chapters.