ABSTRACT
The increased targeting of economic zones by international terrorists in the 1990s, combined with the emergence of fortress urbanism and postmodern and post-structural ideas of landscapes of defence that reasserted the importance of the relationship between space and society in critical analysis, saw the physical, regulatory and technological control of city spaces enhanced to minimise the disruption to commercial flows. Within this context, this chapter charts the changes to the urban landscape in the U.K. capital, London, during the 1990s, as its leaders and security agencies sought to defend its financial heartlands from terrorism through the construction of territorially bounded and technologically mediated security cordons. First, it will illuminate how a combination of regulatory management, fortification and digital surveillance strategies was utilised to explicitly categorise, divide and control urban space, and which resulted in new ways of examining security landscapes. Second, this chapter will detail the attempts made by local state actors and security professionals, to control and regulate space within the United Kingdom’s financial heart – the City of London – as the threat of attack from the Provisional Irish Republican Army, intensified. It will also be highlighted how such a security cordon was established in another part of London, based on the same territorial security and surveillance principles.
