ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses upon the growth of militarily hardened structures in the civic realm from the mid-1990s onwards and specific attempts to ‘design-out’ terrorism in and around valuable, targeted, buildings. This was linked to a growing realisation by terrorist groups that by targeting such buildings with high-profile ‘spectacular’ attacks, they could not only cause severe damage, significantly disrupt trade and economic transactions but also cause reputational damage to the city and nation where the attack took place. Conceptually framed by emergent ideas linked to the material turn in social sciences and the application of critical social theory to security and terrorism studies, analysis in this chapter looks at the significance of particular buildings before, during and after major terrorist events in the 1990s. Using the specific examples of the attacks against the World Trade Center in New York in 1993 and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, this chapter draws out how processes of production, protection and rebirth framed such events and were also deeply reflective of the political-economy and military-style decision-making. Here, civil planners were urged to ‘pad the bunker’, but with the added challenge of budgetary and aesthetic considerations in public locations that were never meant to accommodate blast hardening.
