ABSTRACT
The premises of urban terrorism are straightforward, and so, too, are the conclusions stemming from them. Terrorists attempt to use the city’s own strength against itself, forcing it to implode. A small and determined group can turn a city upside down by exploiting its freedoms, its openness, its interdependencies, and its very magnitude. Catalytic terrorism plays upon the city’s concentration of media to attract an audience by stunning it with acts of violence. Mega terrorism uses the city’s demographic mass and density as fodder for casualties and to inject fear. Smart terrorism takes advantage of critical assets and infrastructure within a tightly coupled urban territory to promote chaos.
