ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus upon the deep historical lineage of urban security, exemplified best by the ways in which pre-modern urban areas sought to territorially enclose themselves through boundary walls which provided protection from the ‘dangerous’ outside world as well as presenting those in charge with an opportunity to control populations. Divided into three main parts, this chapter foregrounds the development of more sophisticated modern approaches to managing collective security and territorially controlling populations through military-inspired city planning. The first part unpacks pre-modern and medieval notions of how best to cope with violent urban incursions and war, predominantly through walling and the generation of visible defensive landscapes. The second part focuses upon the surge in hybridising military strategy and urban planning during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that focused upon Baroque ideas, and notably the construction of boulevards as security corridors. The third part of the chapter draws on more recent history and deciphers Cold War notions of civil defence and the promotion of city-wide defensive schemes that served to distribute responsibility for preparing for an atomic strike amongst all of society, thus setting the scene for the holistic and multidimensional urban security and counterterrorism strategies we see today.
