Political and Experiential Geographies of Militarised Urban Europe

Since 2015, vehicle-as-weapon (VAW) attacks have upsurged in Europe, targeting everyday urban spaces within Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Barcelona and London. In response, cities across Europe erected military-style concrete barriers to protect crowded public spaces. However, these temporary measures have typically become permanently embedded within everyday streetscapes, with dramatic implications for everyday urban life. This project will investigate how militarised responses have become the legitimate and default solution to securitising VAW attacks in Europe.

Conceptually, this project is informed by geographical scholarship arguing that militarised security can radically (re)shape how cities are experienced by urban populations. Scholars are concerned these responses undermine the public spaces that encapsulate the very lifeblood of cities and amplify feelings of insecurity that such measures were installed to ameliorate. However, the experiential implications of contemporary militarised security in European cities have received limited scholarly attention, (re)producing a 'disembodied' understanding. Therefore, it is urgent to understand how such responses are affecting the everyday experiences of urban citizens.

This project's emphasis on militarised security is complemented by an interwoven focus on (post-)COVID-19 urban transformations. Materially, cities are accelerating pedestrianisation to enable social distancing and businesses to utilise outdoor space. Alongside securitising virus transmission, cities are also challenged to securitise VAW attacks against these reimagined, potentially unsecured, pedestrianised spaces. However, pedestrianisation has concurrently underpinned previous efforts to secure public spaces through subtler and integrative alterations to the built environment (e.g., street furniture), restricting vehicular access without detracting from its vibrancy. Thus, as cities undergo unprecedented transformations adjusting to a (post-)COVID-19 world, this provides a novel opportunity to identify how cities are adapting, and can adapt, to securitising virus transmission and VAW threats without militarising the urban landscape.

This project addresses the following questions:
1. How and to what extent can the mechanisms of legitimation of militarised responses to VAW be studied and deconstructed?
2. In what ways can the everyday experiences of urban citizens to contemporary militarised security be understood?
3. How do pandemic and security urbanism interact, and to what extent does, and can, such hybridity produce secure yet socially acceptable urban spaces?

This project employs a comparative case-study approach between Manchester and Milan, attending to how their contrasting genealogies (i.e., attack history, pandemic response) inform contemporary responses, geopolitical constructions of legitimacy and everyday (un)acceptance amongst citizens. Moreover, Milan's COVID-19 recovery project Strade Aperte [Open Streets], constitutes an empirical case to investigate whether such pedestrianisation securitises VAW and COVID-19 without militarising urban centres. This project involves: (i) semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders to interrogate the framing(s) of VAW and pandemic agendas; (ii) discourse analysis to deconstruct the delineation of VAW threats, prescription of policy solutions and the 'conditions' to facilitate acceptance amongst citizens; and (iii) walking interviews with residents around each city's militarised security to understand how embodied experiences are conditioned by and emerge through such spatial encounters.

This project pursues ESRC priorities by addressing concerns over pandemic responses and building enhanced, yet proportionate, urban resilience in unprecedented times, whilst advancing understanding of how innovative theoretical and methodological approaches can capture the experiential implications of militarised security.