ABSTRACT
Drawing on then popular ideas on human territoriality, this chapter highlights the synergies made from the late 1960s onwards between urban designs aimed at crime prevention and initial urban counterterrorism interventions when planners started to manipulate the built environment through ideas of ‘defensible space’ to curtail opportunities for crime and disorder. Focusing on the material and social responses to car bombing as a specific technology of terrorism, this chapter illuminates the strategic elements of this territorial reaction in three cities – Belfast, Jerusalem and Beirut – in the 1970s and 1980s. This is undertaken through a genealogical lens that showcases a number of asynchronous accounts that emphasise context and historical contingency in understanding the local webs of relations that determine what decisions regarding security were made, by whom and with what level of authority and effect. These exemplar cases demonstrate a truism, long accepted in the spatial sciences, that the design and organisation of space is a political and strategic activity, despite urban planning being seen as a depoliticised activity in the popular imagination. In reality, in these instances, planning functioned as an arm of the modern nation-state and was focused on security and social control as its chief priority.
