# Big ugly lumps? (Counter)terrorism and the everyday atmospheres of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation

Carrie Benjamin, Samuel Berlin, Sara Fregonese, Paul Simpson

► To cite this version:

Carrie Benjamin, Samuel Berlin, Sara Fregonese, Paul Simpson. Big ugly lumps? (Counter)terrorism and the everyday atmospheres of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation. City, 2025, 10.1080/13604813.2025.2526263. hal-05130175

HAL Id: hal-05130175

https://hal.science/hal-05130175v1

Submitted on 18 Jul 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Big ugly lumps? (Counter)terrorism and
the everyday atmospheres of Hostile
Vehicle Mitigation

Carrie Benjamin

School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham
[carrie-ann.benjamin@cyu.fr](mailto:carrie-ann.benjamin@cyu.fr)

Sam Berlin

School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Plymouth
[Samuel.berlin@durham.ac.uk](mailto:Samuel.berlin@durham.ac.uk)

Sara Fregonese [corresponding author]

School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham
[s.fregonese@bham.ac.uk](mailto:s.fregonese@bham.ac.uk)

Paul Simpson

School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Plymouth
[paul.simpson@plymouth.ac.uk](mailto:paul.simpson@plymouth.ac.uk)

**Abstract**

Adopting an atmospheric lens on the everyday and open-ended crisis of contemporary terror threats in cities in Western Europe, this article unpicks the contemporary logics, desires, and effects of the State in matters of urban counterterrorism by exploring the felt qualities and dispositions of the public around Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) measures in Birmingham (UK). It argues that the atmospheres around counterterrorism that security officials and business representatives aim to produce, which seeks to reassure the public rather than cause alarm, has led to ambivalent acceptance of HVM by city centre users. The paper shifts away from discursive and socio-technical discussions of urban counterterrorism and, and foregrounds instead practices and experiences of undramatic, ordinary, and ambivalent encounters with terror threat and counterterrorism responses that further nuance existing claims about the global militarisation of the urban. From this, our data shows a variety of public everyday experiences of HVM, revealing not only dislike of their aesthetics, but also hosts of dispositions and attitudes around mobility and sharing space, created by the interplay between the physical presence of the HVM measures and the human practices navigating them.

Keywords: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, Security, Hostile Vehicle Mitigation, Atmospheres.
Introduction

In the past decade, cities in Western Europe have witnessed an increase in frequency of “low-tech attacks against public spaces carried out with everyday items” (European Commission 2017, 2), including vehicle ramming or vehicle-as-weapon attacks (Grand-Clément et al. 2021; EU Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, 2022). This is part of a longer evolution in terrorist methodologies globally. Increased securitisation of key infrastructures and built environments especially since the 11 September 2001 attacks has led terrorists to refocus away from high-profile targets (such as banks, embassies, army barracks, political events) and towards “softer, less well-protected targets” (Davis 2007, 163). These are publicly accessible, everyday sites found everywhere in cities – markets, cafés, shopping areas, busy pavements – and are permeable, ingrained in their urban surroundings. These ‘soft’ targets are particularly difficult to protect as the traditional target hardening used for high-profile sites would profoundly alter the users’ experience of these spaces (Coaffee 2017).

Such terrorism still produces crisis events through the imposition of emergency security measures when an attack takes place and in the aftermath of such attacks. However, in Western Europe the threat of terror attacks has become a more permanent aspect of everyday urban life, and so a chronic and open-ended condition of a crisis with no clearly identifiable event horizon or temporality (Han *this issue*; Huch and Agoropoulos *this issue*; Trovato and Ariss *this issue*). This, in turn, has meant an increasing everydayness to counterterrorism responses in many European cities. It might be in the background presence of national threat level indicators and in the ubiquity of security announcements and other messaging efforts in public spaces (Drongiti and Masson 2023). But it also can mean that, rather than dramatic measures and security presences that might be described in terms of a “military urbanism” involving the deployment of military ideas and measures in “the prosecution of, and preparation for, war into the heart of the ordinary, day-to-day city life” (Graham 2010, XIV), the ever-present crisis condition of terror threat has led to, or even demands, vast but often subtle interventions into the urban landscape to make cities secure amid prolonged uncertainty and threat. Just as terror threat has become continuous and diffuse, so do such securitisation responses. This, in turn, is often part of the normalisation of such a terror-crisis and so the justification of that securitisation. As the editors to this special issue note in their introduction, here “crisis becomes embedded in social, cultural, and political processes and [so is] an element constitutive of (rather than exceptional to) social life” (Dimitrakou and Ren *this issue*).

In the UK, the spatial and temporal broadening of terrorist threat and targets marks a departure from a long history of IRA explosive attacks against politically high profile and financially significant buildings. In response to this shift, a variety of physical security measures under the label of *Hostile Vehicle Mitigation* (HVM) have become an increasingly common sight in UK cities (See Figure 1). HVM is defined by the UK's National Protective Security Authority (NPSA) as an integrated protective security approach that includes, besides surveillance and emergency response, and deterrent communications, “the deployment of physical obstructions such as vehicle security barriers and traffic calming measures” (National Protective Security Authority 2023). In this latter aspect, HVM aims to deter or mitigate a host of criminal operations and terrorist attacks that involve vehicle-born improvised explosive devices, vehicle-as-weapon attacks, and instances where vehicles are used to move attackers and weapons.

<caption>[FIGURE 1: Examples of HVM in Birmingham's Colmore Business Improvement District (BID)]</caption>

These physical measures are obdurate: they are often physically hard to remove, and are embedded into wider systems of mobility, maintenance, and security communication that are slow to shift (de Goede et al. 2014; Jensen and Jensen 2023). Consequently, the corporeality of HVM measures can potentially change the look and feel of ordinary urban public spaces and even, some argue, risk
"breakup of the urban" (Vradis 2016) whereby places of ordinary encounter are attacked by terrorists and then turned into fragmented thoroughfares by security (see Dirksmeier and Helbrecht 2015; Vieten and Valentine 2015).

The increasingly everyday and distributed nature of these developments means we need to expand the geographic frames of reference through which we consider terror threat and responses to it (Fregonese et al. 2024). There has been a longstanding interest among social scientists in the infrastructures and architectures through which cities are secured (Catterall et al. 2001; Graham 2004; Sorkin 2023; Smith and Walters 2018; Tamayo and Ariza 2022). Relatedly, scholarly debates since the 1990s have mostly focused on technical, regulatory, and discursive mechanisms, or on the aesthetics and social acceptability of counterterrorism measures (Coaffee 2017; also see Tursić 2019). Far less common though is a concern for how security and counterterrorism relate to their users' lived experience (Adey et al. 2013; Allen 2006; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019; Fregonese and Laketa 2022; Fregonese et al. 2024). In this paper, we are interested in how the everyday crisis of counterterrorism is experienced in quite banal ways: through the modification of practices, given its introduction of inconveniences into movements through the urban landscapes and, commonly for situations of 'perma-crisis', through the emergence of dispositions like indifference and detachment (Dimitrakou and Ren *this issue*; also see Bissell 2022).

In doing this, we adopt an atmospheric perspective to explore the everyday felt implications of the decision-making around, and implementation of, HVM measures in central Birmingham, UK. Adopting this perspective, we argue, allows to make sense of the quotidian landscapes that we are left with in the aftermath of and in response to (the threat of) terrorist attacks, given the way that it sensitises analyses of (counter)terrorism towards their felt dimensions. A such, this paper advances scholarly understandings of the everyday felt experiences of urban counterterrorism measures and security practices amidst the shifting nature of contemporary terror threats in two ways.

Firstly, this paper seeks to unpick the contemporary logics, desires, and intended effects of the State in matters of urban counterterrorism. The paper does so by building on critical literature on new urban militarism and the integration of international security and counterterrorism into everyday urban life (Graham 2009, 2010; Wekerle and Jackson 2005) as the ecosystem from within which the dynamics we discuss here stem (see Iveson 2011). However, we also acknowledge the distance travelled by such dynamics from the globalised, all-seeing, state-driven and often dystopic militarisation (Zeiderman and Dawson 2022) described by new urban militarism literature. Such literature has tended to focus on surveillance technologies, target hardening, and military-style policing as the "high tech acts of violence" in the militarisation of the urban global north which – "whatever the environment" (Graham 2010: xiii) – arguably adopt the same approaches as the urban governance of war zones (see McMichael 2012). By contrast, here we present primary research on counterterrorism urban planning measures that are based on the mundane interplay between different agencies (including the state) and different registers of urban security that grapple with a terror threat that has become ubiquitous, low-tech, and against everyday soft targets. We argue that we need to develop further the debate around urban militarisation to include more of its felt, sensory, embodied and, importantly, non-dramatic aspects in critical analyses of counterterrorism, given its increasingly subtle and/or banal manifestations.

Second, in doing so, the paper complicates discursive and socio-technical accounts focused on the militaristic advanced technologies of "tracking, identification, and targeting" (Graham 2010: xi) that have dominated discussions of counterterrorism and security more generally. Instead, we pursue a more experiential approach that broadens the geographical imagination of urban counterterrorism planning and infrastructure beyond that of a ubiquitous battlespace involving spectacular manifestations of military tech, target-hardening agendas, and pervading policing. In illustrating the interplay between different agencies and registers of urban security in decisions about, reactions to, and uses of HVM infrastructure, we account for the staging, designing, and engineering of atmospheric circumstances around counterterrorism and the felt experience of securitised cities.
These stagings and experiences, we argue, have implications and effects that are rather ordinary and non-dramatic.

The article begins with a discussion of the geopolitical context underpinning the emergence of urban HVM and of evolving concerns around acceptability and impact on the civic experience. It then considers experience from the perspective of the atmospheric management of urban securitisation. We then introduce the methodology and the Birmingham case study. This is followed by discussion of how security professionals are trying to produce an atmosphere that “feels normal”; how business improvement initiatives perceive the aesthetic and atmospheric impacts of HVM on the commercial areas of the city centre; and how the public has interacted with the materiality of HVM in everyday settings. We argue that the atmosphere of counterterrorism that security officials and businesses aim to produce, which seeks to reassure the public rather than cause alarm, coexists with an ambivalent acceptance of HVM by city centre visitors.

## The urban geopolitics of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation

The history of large-scale security measures against hostile vehicles in mainland Britain dates to the period of Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorism between the 1970s and 1990s. Systems of urban fortification also known as “rings of steel” were installed first around Belfast and then around the City of London designed to prevent hostile vehicles from approaching economically strategic sites. In London, the installation of these landscape-altering measures initially had to balance between several aspects, including: a general attempt to protect London’s financial hub from attacks; preserving its openness to global business; justifying the measures politically and economically within rapidly shifting IRA tactics; and the risk of displacing and exporting the risk of terrorist attacks to other neighbourhoods (Coaffee 2004). Subsequently, the expansion of protective measures in the context of the War on Terror generated scholarly debates on the impacts of such (often imposing) measures on the public. In this literature, the focus on everyday experience predominantly regarded transmission and representation of official agendas; landscape aesthetics and the real or perceived exclusion of specific groups; and the visual impact of counterterrorism measures (Coaffee et al. 2009).

Over the past decade, HVM has been deployed in the UK to protect crowded urban areas from low sophistication vehicle-ramming attacks, with the design and implementation of HVM resulting from negotiations across state and private actors (Ilum 2022; Grassiani and Diphoorn 2019). Debates around the use of temporary or permanent HVM infrastructures have been particularly sensitive to issues of proportionality, liveability, and preservation of the civic experience of public space (Coaffee 2019). Counterterrorism officials are increasingly attuned to issues of acceptability and integration of HVM into the urban fabric and its civic and economic functions, with a growing attention to the need to future-proof security and resilience beyond target hardening approaches. What currently guides UK HVM strategies is a threefold attention to: how each public space presents unique sets of challenges; the evolution of terrorist modus operandi; and the terror threat level (Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure 2022).

Recently, there has been recognition that “whilst [...] meeting the needs of numerous stakeholders, [HMV] can provide proportionate security measures without impinging on the needs of local businesses or functionality of the public space” (National Protective Security Authority 2023). Within this focus on proportionality and integration is a wider trend of normalising the presence of HVM in urban landscapes. For this, security and government authorities have increasingly involved non-state actors in the governance of security as well as embedded securitisation increasingly seamlessly within urban landscapes (Coaffee 2013, 2022). Therefore, while counterterrorism and especially HVM have often been deployed on an exceptional, emergency, or temporary basis in response to attacks, they have increasingly become permanent urban landscaping fixtures.
Despite established scholarship in urban geopolitics emphasising that “the prosaic and everyday sites, circulations and spaces of the city are becoming the main battlespace” (Graham 2010, XV) of contemporary war, geopolitics, and security, the everyday, lived experiences of counterterrorism, especially in cities located away from conflict zones and contested areas, have remained less studied (Fregonese et al. 2024). Besides the normalisation of security requires more than the sole presence of “artefacts and technologies” in public spaces, and entails instead a control of the domains of “emotion, symbolism and culture” (Wood and Webster 2009, 264), or what Ghertner et al. (2020) name a “security aesthetics” that foregrounds the sensory and embodied as the terrain whereby powerful actors perform a public sense of security through building, screening and calibrating. However, these approaches still favour representations and imaginaries of security amidst powerful actors that “leav[e] little room for far more fractured, incommensurate, and incongruous relations” (Grove and Adey 2015, 81) and, we would add, for ambivalence in the actual practices of security. There is thus a need to understand how public acceptance of this new securitised “norm” is negotiated and “grappled with” beyond the visible presence and design management of HVM, and beyond the aesthetic approaches seen above. If HVM is becoming increasingly “normal” in public spaces, how is the normalisation of HVM actually felt and embodied on the ground, and what impact is this securitisation having on the everyday felt experience of urban residents in western cities?

For this, just as it is important to complicate the epistemological binaries between “conflict cities” and ordinary ones (Rokem and Fregonese 2017; Fregonese 2021; Rokem 2016), it is equally important to complicate approaches that conceive of *any* urban security infrastructure as the manifestation of one same global process of militarisation at play. For this, we unpick the contemporary logics, desires, and intended effects of the State (and other agencies) in the banal materialities and practices of urban counterterrorism and urban planning/design. We do so in a way that is mindful of local specificities, empirical evidence, and historical continuities, especially in the UK policy and planning context of IRA-era counterterrorism (Coyles 2017; Coaffee 2003). This attention to contextual nuance is conceptually important for two reasons.

Firstly, it allows us to rebalance the scholarly focus between urban geopolitical accounts of the securitisation or militarisation of cities at peace and of these processes in contested/divided cities or cities in warzones (Spanu 2023). While the latter have drawn considerable analysis (Bollens 2021; Gusic 2020), the former have remained relatively understudied. This is important, as cities at peace show specific dynamics around counterterrorism architectures that don't map seamlessly on the global claims of the military urbanism theory. Rather, those dynamics entail quotidian, messy, and ordinary practices that complicate the picture of a ubiquitously heavy militarisation blanketing contemporary cities. Moreover, epistemological distinctions between 'homeland' cities to protect (often in the Global North) and 'target' cities in war zones risk overlooking the high spatial nuance and deep inequality of cities in other urban contexts that escape this distinction (McMichael 2012).

Secondly, nuancing the claim about a globalised militarisation of urban space can open conceptual connections between the scholarly area of urban geopolitics and geographical research into the affective aspects of securing cities. Geographical research has brought into proximity debates around the politics of counter terrorist vigilance and surveillance with questions around the affective spaces and sensing communities (both inclusive and exclusionary) that such practices produce (Adey et al. 2013). It has also highlighted how contemporary counterterrorism and vigilance strategies against ubiquitous and low-sophistication threats enrol and mobilise the sentient, intuitive, and situational experience of individuals (Fregonese and Laketa 2022). Our approach develops Adey et al.'s (2013, 301) endeavour to go beyond the "construction and maintenance of physical protection and observation" and focus instead on the senses, feelings, and dispositions that register through and around those materialities and their framings.
Producing and managing securitised atmospheres

In contrast to existing scholarship which has predominantly approach terrorism and counter terrorism in discursive terms and though socio-technical analyses of various infrastructures, here we turn to recent scholarship on atmospheres to explore the everyday felt experiences of counter terrorism. “Atmosphere” refers to the shared and felt characteristics of spaces which both emerge from and are affected by human and non-human bodies and materialities (Anderson 2009; on urban materiality see Angelo 2011; Brenner et al. 2011; Graham 2015; McFarlane 2011). An atmospheric approach allows us to access the felt experience of “everyday unnoticed environments ... [which] form the basis of our ways of being in the world” (Thibaud 2011, 213), and so sensitizes us to the sensory characteristics of ordinary situations and the various social-material factors that coalesce and give them consistency (Thibaud 2015; Thibaud et al. forthcoming). Such atmospheres change across time and space, and their variations can be felt as one moves through the city and its various public and private spaces. It is important, though, to note that this “one” is many. Atmospheres might form a collectively felt situation amongst the urban populace. It is likely, though, that differences will emerge in how such atmospheres come to be felt, registered, and interpreted and even managed or objected to, depending on the specific dispositions and histories, or “differential attunements” (Massumi 2015; see Butt 2017), of the bodies that find themselves amongst them (Anderson and Ash 2015; Simpson 2014; Sumartojo and Pink 2019; Paiva and Sánchez-Fuarros 2021). An atmospheric approach allows us to understand varied, co-existing feelings of (in)security across a variety of subjects as well as how these feelings are shaped by state security agendas.

Geographers are increasingly considering such experiential dimensions of security (Anderson 2015; Fregonese 2017; 2021; Fregonese and Laketa 2022; Tulumello 2015). There is interest in how “security is becoming ... attuned to what we might call affective atmospheres, whilst it is itself becoming atmospheric” – atmospheric in the sense that, through its operation, “security produces atmospheres and it even becomes atmospherically distributed and immersive” (Adey 2014, 835). Of chief concern in this work is how security influences collective experience in public and semi-public spaces (either by making people feel reassured or vigilant in their surroundings) as it becomes pervasive, unfolding through a combination of expressive security infrastructures and security practices. This atmospheric operation and unfolding have been considered in terms of the background methods employed to make spaces seductive (Allen 2006), comfortable (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2016), or tranquil (Adey et al. 2013).

Indeed, the management and production of atmospheres have been targeted by various agencies, from commercial actors (Edensor 2012; Healy 2014), to architecture (Kraftl and Adey 2008), urban planning (Schwabe 2021; Löfgren 2014), and policing (Adey 2014; Wall 2019). There is an increasing body of scholarship that explores the subtle ways that “particular settings are atmospherically charged by designers in the service of power, primarily in reproducing spaces of state and commercial significance, to stabilize the meanings and feelings of place and maintain an even, consistent atmosphere” (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015, 253). However, questions remain about the efficacy of practices of atmospheric management. It is important to not forget the agency of individuals in the co-production of these atmospheres. More generally, atmospheres are by their nature contingent and provisional achievements of a host of different relations (Simpson 2021a; also see Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2016).

The affective means through which the atmospheres sought by security are implemented grant them a great deal of power. Yet it remains unclear whether such efforts to shape atmospheres can ever produce holistic security. In this paper, we wonder whether the atmospheric engineering that HVM entails can fully produce the atmospheric effects that planners and security practitioners envision. The trouble with affects is that they are highly distributed and resist centralized control. In the case of HVM, the role of centralized control in producing secure atmospheres may itself be illusory. There is a complex politics to the installation of HVM itself that plays out well before urban residents’
experience spaces securitised with bollards and planters. Still, the proliferation of HVM to relatively little fanfare shows that top-down atmospheric control can be achieved, at least in a partial and temporary sense, as HVM is largely accepted and banalized among most people whose routines pass through securitised city centres. However, beyond the efficacy of HVM infrastructure at stopping ramming attacks, it is not obvious that the desired effect of producing a pervasive and permanent sense of securitisation has been achieved.

## Researching atmospheres of (counter)terrorism in Birmingham

The research discussed here was conducted between November 2021 and September 2022 in Birmingham, UK<fnref n="1" />. Given that atmospheres are, by their very nature, vague and resist calculability (McCormack 2018), quasi-objects emerging at the intersection of the sensorial, material, and the subjective (Kazig et al. 2017), there is no 'correct' method to use to account for such matters. Therefore, the methodology developed here is threefold and recalls more a 'methodological style' that is open to the onflow of everyday life (see Vannini 2015; Simpson 2021a).

Firstly, it includes survey data for the West Midlands (n = 443), the conurbation of which Birmingham is administrative capital, on the impact of terror threats and counterterrorism measures on resident's daily lives and perceptions of public spaces (Masson et al. 2022). Secondly, it includes eleven interviews conducted with representatives from the National Counterterrorism Security Office (NACTSO), counterterrorism police forces, private security companies, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), Birmingham City Council, and emergency response and resilience planners. Thirdly, it employed ethnographic techniques such as drawing sketches and annotating *in situ* to sensitise us to the felt experiences and atmospheres emerging around counterterrorism physical measures and their human users, and so to "understand and to describe at a small-scale level how this relation is established" (Kazig et al. 2017, 13). Sensory observation took place both individually and collectively in the research team. This entailed walking in securitised public spaces between Centenary Square and New Street Station, usually lasting 30-60 minutes, and annotating aspects related to practices, habits, and micro-gestures of the urban populous. This included: the interaction between users and counterterrorism barriers; ways and patterns of circulation at/around such infrastructures; shifts in people's movements; interactions between users; and the presence and role of human security.

This mixed method approach aligns with our conceptual approach to (counter)terrorism measures as sites of the emergence of everyday practices and collective felt experiences where habitual public dispositions to securitised urban life form. HVM infrastructures are part of responses, agendas, and discourses by sites of power (government and the police, the business sector), something approached through our interviews. In addition, though, our ethnographic "Fieldwork encounters [...] gave a sense of people [...] grappling with blind spots and impasses" and, in that, the significance of ambivalence became clear (Bissell 2022: 72); we gained the sense that there is a realm of the unexpected that pierces through the expectations and plans of official urban actors.

While Birmingham has not experienced a recent terror threat or attack, political violence and counterterrorism measures have deeply reshaped its urban landscape. Birmingham was central in shaping national antiterrorism legislation. In the aftermath of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 was introduced, granting the police emergency powers. In

<footnote n="1">¹ The study obtained ethical approval from the University of Birmingham (ERN_21-0206; ERN_21-1365; ERN_21-1646) and the University of Plymouth (Ref numbers: 2624; 3051; 3110).</footnote>
2014, 'Trojan Horse Affair' – a controversy about the alleged plans to introduce Salafi education in local schools – paved the way for the 2015 Prevent Duty. Birmingham has been part of the UK's reorganisation of regional response to terrorism in the past two decades (Coaffee, Wood, and Rogers 2009) was home to 39 convicted terrorists, including the Westminster Bridge attacker Khalid Masood. This has warranted national UK media to label the city as a terrorist "breeding ground", "UK Capital Of Extremism", and "Jihadi capital of Britain"<fnref n="2" />.

Considering these contextual circumstances and the global evolution of terrorist modus operandi, it is unsurprising that in Birmingham permanent and temporary HVM measures have become a common feature of the urban landscape. Following high-profile vehicle ramming attacks in Berlin and Nice in 2016 and in London in 2017, city officials began to add barriers to protect crowded pedestrian spaces. These measures included the use of vehicle gates and large black "barges", which form part of the National Barrier Asset, as well as concrete blocks, surface guards, and bollards, all designed to mitigate the impact of vehicle collisions. In 2019, the security improvement of 19 city centre locations was proposed as part of a £25 million programme of public space regeneration for the 2022 Commonwealth Games. The plan aimed to make central Birmingham a "place that will enhance the city centre visitor experience, support retail business and a cleaner environment" and, specifically, the infrastructural improvements were part of a strategy to integrate security "into the street scene, replacing temporary measures that have been in situ for several years" (Birmingham City Council 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the introduction of HVM in Birmingham, as the UK emerged from lockdown in 2021 and the government supported the reopening of the hospitality sector, surface guard HVM became increasingly common.

However, it is worth noting how the Birmingham context analysed here does not map straightforwardly onto the traits of military urbanism. Despite an urban history spanning early implementations of physical counterterrorism measures such as barriers and bag searches in the aftermath of the 1974 Pub Bombings in the city, and more recent attempts at covert surveillance of suspect communities such as Project Champion (Isakjee and Allen 2013), the Birmingham context analysed here does not entail so much a blurring of "the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence, and the military; distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national and global operations" (Graham 2010: xv). Neither does it entail advanced surveillance, enhanced police powers (McMichael 2012), nor border controls inside the city or militarised narratives and discourses. While we do not seek to minimise the enormous implications that the urban militarism has for urban politics and especially for those caught up in the inequalities of these dynamics, we argue that it is nonetheless also important to unpick the rather more banal logics, un-dramatic agendas, and (un)intended effects of those developing such counterterrorism protective measures, and the everyday practices and experiences of the public that develop around them.

## Calibrating awareness: security officials and the urban imaginary of counterterrorism

For several security officials we interviewed, terrorism was described as inevitable threat and reflective of the current global situation. With terrorist methodologies constantly shifting, officials often noted that terror attacks could happen anywhere, but that crowded and iconic sites constitute more attractive targets, and thus are at higher risk.

<footnote n="2">² See: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-attacker-khalid-masood-birmingham-uk-terrorists-breeding-ground-a7646536.html; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-uk-capital-of-extremism-xdjpc7v2; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4344300/How-DID-Birmingham-jihadi-capital-Britain.html</footnote>
Needs to protect the most crowded places are, at a basic structural level, intertwined with and somewhat limited by budget considerations. This shapes the choice of where to locate HVM, with more crowded, central public spaces being considered as a more obvious choice:

"[Y]ou've got a limited resource, you've got a limited amount of money to buy HVM, and you've got to think 'if I've only got thirty pieces of HVM, where am I best placed to put them? Where do I think I'm going to protect the most amount of people?' [I]t's about footfall. [...] yes there could be a terrorist attack in [a peripheral High Street], but actually there's more people, there's a greater critical mass of people that could be affected in [the city centre]." (Interview, West Midlands Police Detective Inspector, 7 April 2022)

HVM in these locations is intended not only as a physical protective measure, but as a confidence deterrent to potential terrorists, who would, upon seeing a protected site, lose confidence that their attack would be successful. However, such deterrents may not stop "determined" individuals who may move elsewhere to a less protected site (Silke 2011). Public opinion is a further factor limiting the extent of HVM that the police can install. Counterterrorism police, often through the work of Counterterrorism Security Advisors (CTSA), advise local councils, businesses, and event planners on site-specific risks and protective security measures, including the need for HVM in certain locations. As the relationship is advisory, the suggestions of CTSA may not always be accepted, particularly when the public may feel negatively about certain measures. Speaking about the use of large concrete blocks as HVM around Birmingham city centre, the West Midlands Police (WMP) Detective Inspector explained that they could put HVM everywhere, but

"that requires a total cultural change in what might be aesthetically pleasing to the public or to local authorities or to buildings. [...] So, I suppose you could raise the kerb height by a couple of centimetres which I know is not going to stop a truck but would stop quite a few other things. You could look at planting trees. And again, I know they take time to come to fruition, but a large oak tree is going to pretty much stop most things. I think [widespread HVM] would be unappealing [...] because of the aesthetics." (Interview 7 April 2022)

Given concerns over the need for a "total cultural change" in taste and aesthetics to accept the wide-spread implementation of HVM, counterterrorism officials were attuned to the need to balance the use of protective security measures against the risk of alarming the public. In particular, HVM was presented as something which not only protected, but also *reassured* the public, making the city centre *feel* safe, secure, and welcoming. However, the excessive application of HVM, particularly temporary infrastructure which broke with the aesthetics of the surrounding area, was seen to risk excessively altering the felt experience of crowded urban places, alarming the public and reminding them of the terror threat. A representative for Community Safety and Resilience at Birmingham City Council, explained this logic in specifically atmospheric terms:

"Ultimately, for people to feel safe, we don't also need to frighten them with added measures. So, if they're coming to the city to shop, they'll know that it's crowded, they just need to feel safe and secure in that crowded space. [...] I think making people feel safe and secure, first and foremost we need to create for citizens an atmosphere which feels normal. So, any hostile vehicle mitigation things that we put in place, we need to try and retrofit and design with the surroundings so that it feels as normal as possible. Sometimes that's hard to do when you've got events and [...] mobile things that you have to put in place. It probably feels easier when you've got developments going up, so it fits in with everything else that's happening. But [...] we need to make sure that any mitigations we put in place feel as natural and normal to citizens as possible so that they feel safe and secure in that way." (Interview 8 February 2022)

While designing HVM to blend into the surrounding area is portrayed as desirable in producing a "normal" atmosphere and in avoiding what Ciax and Runkel (2024) called "atmospheric fortification", this production of normality also relies on inattention of the public. To avoid attuning the public too
closely to the threat of terrorism in public space, security officials explained that they often spoke of
"security" generally, rather than of "counterterrorism" when explaining new HVM measures:

"Where we engage around design, without alarming the public, we probably won't go in and say 'we do this because of counterterrorism' unless people ask us why we're doing it. So, we won't proactively say: 'These initiatives are being put in place because of terrorism.'" (Interview 8 February 2022).

This tactic was reiterated by a WMP CTSA, noting these semantic manoeuvres have emotive agency
in avoiding producing alarm among the public:

"[W]e would tend to talk about 'safety' and 'security' rather than 'terrorism'. You are talking about the same topic, but it's almost the semantics of it. So, you are often talking in slightly more general terms to start with, people that are worried about this will still know the net result is the same: 'they're probably talking about terrorism, and all of the things they're talking about will keep us safe'. But I suppose I would initially keep it slightly more general and then go into detail as required, rather than talk about 'terrorism', 'terrorism', 'terrorism'." (Interview 1 July 2022)

While HVM was understood specifically as a counterterrorism tool, the way it was presented to the public minimised its perceptibility and therefore the palpability of the terror threat in everyday life. We seem to have moved some way from post 9/11 War on Terror approaches which have sought to "mobilize public anxieties about terrorism and an ever-present sense of insecurity" (Massaro and Mullaney 2011, 593) towards a situation where such insecurity is more backgrounded. However, even when terrorism was suspected to be at the forefront of people's minds, the public was perceived as broadly inattentive to the use of HVM:

"Because people tend to [...] look at things in isolation and they don't join the dots sometimes and go, 'Oh, yeah, we saw that attack in Germany at the Christmas Market.' When they go to the Christmas Market in Germany they don't then look at those barriers and go, 'Oh, that's because of that.' I think a lot of people don't even notice it half the time." (Interview 7 April 2022)

Nevertheless, when the public was thought to be aware of HVM as a counterterrorism tool, this was viewed positively by security officials. Interviewees from both the local council and WMP reiterated that when the public knew that the bollards, barges, and planters were in place to protect against a terrorist attack, they would feel reassured knowing that the threat was being mitigated.

From an official perspective, therefore, within structural constraints such as budget, HVM has three differential atmospheric implications: first, it is (or at least is desired to be) devised to be minimally intrusive and produce a look and feel of public space that is considered "normal". Second, this is part of a proactive attempt of officials to foster feelings of safety and security, but avoiding attuning people to an atmosphere of specifically *terrorist* threat around them, and it also conversely fosters feelings of safety, security, reassurance for anyone who is attuned to it. Third, the fostering of such atmospheres is also reliant on a certain level of assumed public inattentiveness to the appearance and presence of HVM.

**"Big ugly lumps"? Perceiving Hostile Vehicle Mitigation in public realm improvement**

While security council officials remained reassured that HVM produces an atmosphere of safety and security for the public, those involved in public realm improvement were not as convinced. At the time of research, the roughly 1km-long pedestrianised area stretching from the Bullring shopping centre to Centenary Square hosted an eclectic mix of temporary and permanent HVM barriers (see Map 1). Static bollards at the entry points to the privately-owned public spaces of Paradise Circus and the Bullring; concrete blocks by the town hall on Victoria Square near Colmore Row; large wood-clad planters on the side roads leading to New Street and New Street Station; and HVM barges, often
connected to swing gates and raising barriers, restricting access to New Street. Some of these materials were replaced or beautified in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games: planters were painted, concrete blocks were replaced by ATG Surface Guard, and some barges were replaced with surface mounted bollards, although concerns about aesthetics remained for members of the city centre's twelve Business Improvement Districts (BIDs).

[Map 1: Examples of HVM in the Colmore BID]

Temporary measures were seen as the most problematic by the BID representative we interviewed. Local businesses were concerned about the visual impact of these measures on the area and its ability to attract a steady stream of customers. The concrete blocks along Colmore Row and Victoria Square were deemed the most controversial. Installed in late 2017 following a wave of terrorist attacks in England, the blocks were intended as a temporary measure until the city could decide upon permanent fixtures. A Special Projects Manager for Colmore BID, explained that

> "When you're dealing with [...] public expenditure, you've got to go for best value. And the best value is a hideous lump of concrete [...] and that's expensive, because it's not just normal concrete, obviously; it's tempered and treated concrete. But it looks ugly. [...] I know businesses that don't want them there [...] They say, 'When are they going? Why can't they be moved?' And then, 'Why can't they be painted, if they can't be moved?' And then the other conversation was, 'Well, can't we stick some flowers on them as well then, so we can cover it?' So, it's almost the acceptance of them being there, but then, can we just make them look a bit better, so it doesn't look so much of an eyesore?" (Interview 11 January 2022)

Another Projects Manager with Colmore BID lamented the temporary HVM as "a terrible bugbear" that has ruined the aesthetic of the city centre: "This is the city's living room, this is our parlour we're supposed to keep nice and posh for visitors, and it's just hideous" (Interview 11 January 2022). BID staff noted businesses occasionally opposed the presence of temporary concrete HVM as it made the area unattractive and could deter customers.

To address the visual disruption caused by temporary HVM, BIDs sought to use their own funds to beautify the existing infrastructure. The most common modification involved adding planters, whether on top of the barges or to conceal unsightly concrete blocks, referred to as "big ugly lumps" by the Colmore BID team. The flowerpots were seen as making HVM more attractive and acceptable, although they often needed maintenance and regular replanting to stay looking vibrant. This tactic, when used, reduced complaints from members of the BID. The Projects Manager saw this as a successful endeavour, saying, "I think half of people who own bars where there's one outside think it is a planter. I think they just think it happens to be there. They don't know that it's a one-ton block of concrete" (Interview 11 January 2022).

Although they were seemingly minor, superficial interventions, these modifications were thought to have a significant impact on the atmosphere of the city centre. When compared to other commercial areas in Birmingham, HVM was especially pervasive in the Colmore Bid, and this was seen as a potential deterrent to the public. BID managers viewed HVM as a visible reminder of the threat of terrorism, which could alarm potential customers and keep people away. Conversely, decorating or in some cases concealing HVM to make it blend in with the surroundings, was thought to "calm people down," particularly those who might otherwise avoid the city centre. One of the Special Projects Manager described the difficulties his BID encountered with the public, arguing that HVM

> "alerts people and they think, 'Oh, you know, it's a bit rough here. Either it's going to be a ram-raids which is going to be a robbery, or it's for terrorism.' You know, [...] you wouldn't want to be here if either of them went off. And I think it does sit in the mind of people. If we could make it look better, I think that that would be more welcoming, because it's very frustrating as a BID." (Interview 11 January 2022)
In contrast with the imaginaries of security officials, who often portrayed the public as somehow
unaware of the role of HVM, the BID team in contrast frequently experienced a public that was
cognisant of HVM and understood their purpose. However, rather than reassurance or alarm,
feedback from businesses and customers highlighted that HVM made the area look and feel "ugly"
and displeasing. For shoppers who were undeterred by the concrete reminders of the threat of
terrorism, beautifying and concealing HVM was thought to improve their overall experience:

"[P]eople know what they [HVM] are there for. And apart from looking like big ugly lumps of concrete, which is their only moan, they're not moaning that, 'Oh blimey, we are in the middle of a terrorist threat area. I wish I wasn't here.' It's, 'God they look ugly. Can't we paint them? Can't we put flowers on them? Can't we do something to improve them?' That type of thing." (Interview 11 January 2022)

This perceived impact of HVM aesthetics was reiterated by the representative of a security barrier
company, who explained that the company offers branding options for temporary HVM to create a
more welcoming atmosphere for events and city spaces. This participant described how some
models of HVM risked making an area look hostile or enclosed, although acknowledging that this
made it apparent to people that they were being protected:

"I think people want to know they're there, but I don't think it needs to be in your face so much. A lot of these pedestrianisation schemes now, street furniture is really important [...] because people don't want to feel like they're walking into a fortress. [...] But in some respects, it makes you think about it. For me, maybe again because I'm in the industry, if they were covered with nice planters, then you wouldn't [feel] the same, would you? It would still do the same job, but it would look more inviting to sit and have dinner [...] or whatever it might be. So, definitely, I think planters and almost covering these things up is appropriate in some locations." (Interview 16 June 2022)

The debate here, then, is not whether HVM is necessary to produce physical security, but how to
prevent the materiality of HVM from impinging on the convivial and commercial sensory experience
of the city and by extension the business and retail experience therein. Like the police and city
council, BIDs, local businesses, and HVM providers were interested in ameliorating the aesthetic
effects of security infrastructure. Control of the aesthetic impact of HVM was part of a broader goal
by the BID managers to produce, maintain and protect "atmoculture[s] of civilized consumption"
(Brighenti and Karrholm 2018) against poorly designed reminders of the terror threat.

Similarly to the accounts by the city authorities, however, for the commercial and public realm
improvement sector, the role of the public in these atmospheres was implicitly passive. The
expectation was that public perceptions and behaviours would be moulded by infrastructural and
aesthetic interventions by police, BIDs, and others with authority over public space, as long as the
public were not presented with anything too jarring.

Public ambivalence: everyday experiences of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation

If the police maintained that the public either did not notice HVM or felt reassured by it, local
businesses and BIDs were most concerned that people would notice HVM too much and be put off
by its "ugly" appearance. Both positions conceive of the public (and its experiences) as a rather
passive and uncomplicated receiver of security. Our data show a more ambivalent picture.

Complicating the imaginary of public indifference given by the city and security authorities, the 443
survey respondents from the West Midlands clearly recognise the value of visible counterterrorism
measures. 34.71% of respondents consider the presence of these measures as the most important
information they rely on to determine if a public space feels safe. Our data could also serve as
reassurance for some of the public realm improvement stakeholders such as the Colmore BID, as
more than half (59.04%) of West Midlands respondents said that physical safety measures make no
difference on their decision in whether to stay in a specific public space. In fact, 33.94% said that such measures make them want to stay.

This picture might reflect what is by now a recognised response to the situation of the open-ended, everyday crisis of terrorism. As the editors to this themed issue note, distantiation and disaffection can be ways of navigating the uncertainty of such a 'perma-crisis'. However, our survey also found that physical security measures have considerable impact on the experience of public space in general: 48.56% of respondents stated that the presence of counterterrorism measures changes how a public space feels for them.

We want to delve further into this experiential impact. What do such measures do in terms of the actual practicing of day-to-day life in these spaces? How do these responses to the everyday crisis of terrorism come to be interwoven with ordinary life and the activities the public engage in on a day-to-day basis? How do people react to the proliferation of HVM materialities on the ground, as they move through the city? What collective feelings of conviviality or incivility might emerge in this (Simpson 2021b)? What agency do the materialities of HVM barriers have in modulating felt intensities and attunements amongst those who encounter them? What sort of atmospheres emerge at these sites of contact between residents and HVM infrastructures?

The sensed qualities of a space determine how mobilities can proceed (Kazig et al. 2017). The aesthetic and atmospheric contours of public space are important to how people move through cities, and this mobility modulates urban atmospheres in turn. In the following pages, we go beyond HVM as something visually (un)pleasing and beyond security infrastructure as a codified representation of a global urban militarism. Instead, we explore HVM materiality as “always open to being undermined, subverted or appropriated within other ways of being together in contingency” (Adey and Grove 2015, 82), and, as such, modulating the qualitative experience of the city.

During sensory observations at different HVM locations, it became evident that most people minimised their interactions with barriers, acknowledging both the barriers and other people moving through or towards them only enough to avoid collision. This is nothing new in urban environments where differently mobile bodies often share spaces and so engage in informal practices of negotiation (Merriman 2016; Simpson 2017) and civil inattention (Haddington et al. 2012), including in everyday encounters with physical security measures (Adams and Ward 2020). However, barriers also increase the cognitive load of moving through the city and force more interaction with strangers than people would normally have. Around HVMs we noted that “the movement of people [is] constant, steady, not leisurely” (Hurst Street/Hill Street, 28 July 2022). Interactions are kept to a minimum, just enough that order and normalcy can be created out of what would otherwise be chaos. Research on civil inattention and changing public security landscapes observes that mobility in public spaces depends on collaborative effort to order and adapt social interactions by means of apparent non-interaction with others (Pütz 2012; Sharon and Koops 2021).

The proliferation of HVM in central Birmingham has also altered dispositions of attention and negotiation between strangers for residents and visitors on an everyday level. As barriers restrict mobility, they engender new civil considerations as large numbers of people attempt to pass through smaller spaces between various barriers. Observations reveal a range of other unintended atmospheric effects as people navigate a new set of negotiations, hindering mobility and even causing civil inattention to break down and subtle forms of incivility to emerge. For example, the positioning and spacing of HVM created “pinch points” along busy pedestrian and cycle routes, often presenting minor inconveniences that required a slight change of direction or body posture to navigate:

> [A] small walkway between the HVM and the shop wall was blocked by three women having a conversation [...]. They blocked the entire path, preventing anyone walking [...] on Corporation Street from making a sharp right turn to New Street. I noticed at least 2
individuals [...] break their speed as they turned the corner and quickly change their route to go through the [pedestrian] portal instead of the path the women were obstructing. They didn't seem annoyed or perturbed (New Street, 27 July 2022)

Most HVM restricted pedestrians passing through to single file, requiring people to negotiate their movements with others in their group and the projected routes of oncoming people. Bollards allowed for the freest flow of people, with often a dozen possible gaps through which crowds could pass. The barges and concrete blocks created the greatest restrictions on movement, sometimes allowing only three or four passages on the busiest pedestrian routes. To navigate the HVM, couples often broke step, with one person falling slightly behind the other, or turned their bodies slightly to the side to pass through the same space at the same time. When individuals or groups arrived at the same passage at the same time, one had to step to the side and wait for the other to pass. To reduce such encounters, people appeared to decide their trajectories up to 30 metres before arriving at the pinch point, and most of the fast, determined walkers were able to pass through their chosen route without pausing. In some cases, when they anticipated a last-minute conflict, the fastest walkers would quickly change direction or side-step to avoid having to wait for oncoming traffic.

Such movements indicated that people maintained civil inattention while navigating HVM, noticing the barriers and those trying to pass through briefly enough to avoid collisions but without needing to engage further with them. People largely avoided making physical contact with HVM. Children were an exception. For example, we witnessed one “plac[ing] his hand flat on the side of the barrier, tracing its contours as he walked through” (New Street. 27 July 2022). In other cases, HVM infrastructures allowed other paces and uses. Incense vendors displayed their products on the barges on New Streets. Some leaned against the barriers to vape and socialise. For others, the barges embellished by plants and flowers presented a photo opportunity. A puffer jacket lied abandoned on the part of the barrier that wasn't planted.

While people appeared to pay as little attention as possible to HVM, treating it as another type of street furniture that needed to be navigated, on other occasions these barriers modulated certain social interactions and, with that, the potential for uncongenial atmospheres to emerge (Bissell 2010; Simpson 2017). This was particularly the case during one observation by the Hippodrome theatre where:

> The HVM at this intersection differed from [...]elsewhere in the city. Large concrete blocks [...] have been plonked along the edge of the square. They are separated by a long, low black metal barrier arm that can be [opened]. They don't fit with the aesthetic of the square or the surrounding buildings, although they do seem in line with the construction-site atmosphere created by the facade repairs [...] at Albany House. [The barriers] also create more pinch-points [...]. One block was placed over the entrance to a well-used cycle lane, restricting access for cycles who could only pass one-by-one while also hiding the lane for pedestrians [...], who often found themselves walking directly at oncoming cycles. This led to a few forced conflicts, as pedestrians would enter the bike lane and force bikes to come to a full stop and wait. One man was visibly annoyed that a person on a scooter seemingly cut him off and entered the HVM gap before him, not realising that he was [...] in their well-marked space. [A]lthough nothing boiled over into any sort of verbal conflict, [...] annoyance was indicated with impatient body language or glances.

Conflicts at narrow pinch points, particularly around barges and concrete blocks, led to visible annoyance for some pedestrians. Although these were largely minor inconveniences, the restricted access created by HVM led to momentarily tense atmospheres as people became evidently annoyed at having to wait or change their direction. This annoyance manifested as people had to navigate not just the infrastructure itself, but also other people they were forced to share space with, disrupting the mutual non-recognition that characterises most mobile encounters in public space (see Figure 2).
[Figure 2: Concrete blocks disrupting a heavily used bike lane]

These emergent atmospheres of annoyance and inconvenience were the most palpable felt effect of the installation of HVM in the moment, despite police and BID concerns about the atmospheric effects of HVM lying primarily in the aesthetic realm. In fact, the aesthetic impacts of HVM also added to this tension of impeded mobility. For one resident, such pinch points were indicative of a design flaw and lack of imagination on behalf of the planners. When asked how he felt about HVM in the city centre, he responded:

> "I understood why they went up, but it's sad to see. Especially those big ones [the barges] [...] Really that impedes walking around as well. It's just so ugly. I'm sure they could have done something else. Maybe even if they'd put some things here and some things here that would leave plenty of space for people to walk through, but no car could get through" (Interview 25 July 2022)

For this resident, aesthetics and mobility were interconnected, and the ugliness of the barriers and barges was attributed to their placement in public spaces.

Our ethnography shows the presence of ambivalent and even, at times, tense feelings emerging in spaces surrounding HVM measures amongst the public. Importantly, however, data also show that the presence of HVM entails some impasses and unpredictabilities. For example, interruptions (of movement, of direction), avoidances (of contact), and limitations (of attention). Echoing Bissell (2022), we argue that the permacrisis is made not only of urban presences and representations that tell us something about security (or not) of public space, but also of ambivalences in the ways these securitised spaces are experienced. These ambivalences pierce through representations of (in)security and disturb attempts by official urban actors to grapple with complex security threats and their responses.

## Conclusion

The contemporary increase of low-tech terrorist attacks against urban soft targets in Western Europe raises important, under-explored questions about how counterterrorism responses impact on the ordinary lived experiences of urban public space, given the everyday, open-ended crisis that terror threat presents. In this paper, we have explored the felt qualities and dispositions around HVM in central Birmingham, and the emergence and shaping of those qualities/dispositions amidst policy and economic actors, everyday practices, and the corporeality of the HVM. We illustrated the interplay of official agencies and urban security registers in decisions related to the introduction and use of HVM. Further, we offered insights into the staging, designing, and engineering of atmospheric circumstances and contingencies around HVM. Finally, we explored the implications and impacts of such infrastructures on the everyday experiences and practices of urban publics. From this, the paper's contribution is twofold.

Firstly, in focusing on the everyday nature of the open-ended crisis that terror threat presents via the lens of atmospheres, the paper has nuanced claims about the global militarisation of urban spaces. Existing urban scholarship has long warned about the risk of the "deepening of the urbanisation of the military" (Graham 2001, 415) and about how disproportionate security responses to terrorism may alter or even break up the openness to ordinary encounters that is essential to urban life (Coaffee 2017, Vradis 2016). Here we have unpicked the contemporary logics, desires, and intended effects of the State (amongst other agencies) in matters of urban counterterrorism, specifically when it comes to urban circumstances away from heavily militarised contexts or warzones. This builds on the urban militarism and urban geopolitics literature in the wake of the War on Terror. Specifically, we have shown that these counterterrorism approaches have evolved from a globalised, all-seeing, state-driven militarisation focused on technology, target hardening, and
extensions of police and military power that existing literature has examined (Graham 2010; also see McMichael 2012), towards a situation where such (in)security is more backgrounded. We found that the atmosphere of counterterrorism that security officials and businesses in Birmingham aim to produce seeks to reassure the public by fostering a sense of normality and avoiding attuning the public too closely to the specific threat of terrorism. It has also led to the reluctant acceptance by public space users of the sometimes-inconvenient presence of HVM on city streets, and to the normalisation of an everyday atmosphere of threat. Our data, however, also shows a variety of public everyday experiences of HVM. These are not blatant or spectacular acts of rejection of an engulfing military urbanism, but rather subtle, often spontaneous and even unexpected embodiments of claiming a right to the city (see Penny and Richter 2019). These practices reveal not only dislike of the aesthetics of HVM barriers, but also host of emotive dispositions and bodily attitudes around mobility and sharing public space, fostered by the interplay between the materiality of the HVM barriers and the human practices navigating that materiality. These happenings deserve further consideration.

Secondly, in doing so, the paper has contributed to the expansion of the onto-epistemological frame through which security and counter terrorism is considered. We have moved away from the discursive and socio-technical framings that have dominated discussions of counterterrorism and security more generally. In drawing on scholarship on atmospheres, we have contributed to and developed Adey et al.’s (2013, 301) endeavour to go beyond the “construction and maintenance of physical protection and observation” in urban counterterrorism, investigating instead the everyday atmospheric operation of security within the everyday crisis of terror threat. We considered these “micro-level” dynamics – the “indirect and hidden dimensions” (Ritchie 2010, 289) of urban life – as crucial backgrounds for shaping wider felt qualities security. This was shown here to mix collective feelings of indifference and ambivalence, often tinged with minor tensions and annoyance. In illustrating the interplay between different agencies and registers of urban security in decisions about, reactions to, and uses of HVM infrastructure, we have offered insights into the staging, designing, and engineering of atmospheric circumstances around counterterrorism and the felt experience of securitised cities in Europe.

## References

Adams, D., & Ward, L. 2020. "Disability, Terror and Safety in the City: Charting Individuals' Spatio-temporal Encounters with Counter-terrorism Measures in Birmingham, UK" *Planning Practice & Research* 35(2), 185–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2020.1735159

Adey, Peter. 2014. "Security Atmospheres or the Crystallisation of Worlds." *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 32(5): 834-851. doi:10.1068/d21312.

Adey, Peter, Laure Brayer, Damien Masson, Patrick Murphy, Paul Simpson, and Nicolas Tixier. 2013. "‘Pour Votre Tranquillité’: Ambiance, Atmosphere, and Surveillance." *Geoforum* 49: 299-309. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.04.028.

Allen, John. 2006. "Ambient Power: Berlin's Potsdamer Platz and the Seductive Logic of Public Spaces." *Urban Studies* 43(2): 441-455. doi:10.1080/00420980500416982.

Anderson, Ben. 2009. "Affective Atmospheres." *Emotion, Space and Society* 2(2): 77-81. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005.

Anderson, Ben. 2015. "Boredom, Excitement and Other Security Affects." *Dialogues in Human Geography* 5(3): 271-274. doi:10.1177/2043820615607759.
Anderson, Ben, and James Ash. 2015. "Atmospheric Methods." In *Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research*, edited by Phillip Vannini. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.

Angelo, Hillary. 2011. "Hard-wired experience", *City* 15(5): 570-576, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.609023

Birmingham City Council. 2019. "Plans for £25million Revamp of City Centre Public Spaces Announced." *Birmingham City Council*. https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/news/article/488/plans_for_25million_revamp_of.cityCentre_public-spaces_announced.

Birmingham City Council. 2022. "Why Birmingham's super-diversity is a strength, and not a surprise" The Birmingham Blog, 29 November. https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/blog/birmingham-blog/post/1205/why-birmingham%E2%80%99s-super-diversity-is-a-strength-and-not-a-surprise#:~:text=Figures%20from%20the%202021%20census,diverse%20cities%20in%20the%20UK.

Bissell, David. 2010. "Passenger Mobilities: Affective Atmospheres and the Sociality of Public Transport." *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 28(2): 270-289. doi:10.1068/d3909.

Bissell, David. 2022. "Negative urbanism: unknowability, illegibility and ambivalence in the platform city". *City* 27(1-2), 56-75. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2022.2145633

Bollens, Scott. A. 2021. *Bordered cities and divided societies: humanistic essays of conflict, violence, and healing*, 1 Edition. ed. Routledge, New York.

Brenner, Neil., David J. Madden and David Wachsmuth. 2011. "Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory.", *City* 15(2): 225-240.

Brighenti, Andrea Mubi, and Mattias Kärrholm. 2018. "Atmospheres of Retail and the Asceticism of Civilized Consumption." *Geographica Helvetica* 73(3): 203-213. doi:10.5194/gh-73-203-2018.

Butt, Waqas, H. 2017. "Distributing destruction." *City* 21(5): 614-621. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2017.1374775.

Catterall, Bob, Nicholas Coulton, Mike Davis, John Rennie Short, John Friedmann, Mark Gottdiener, Peter Marcuse, Eduardo Mendieta, Lila Leontidou, Stephen Graham, Michael Safier, Gustavo Esteva, and Haleh Afshar. 2001. "Cities Under Siege: September 11th and after." *City* 5(3): 383-438, DOI: 10.1080/13604810120105000

Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure. 2022. *Public Realm Design Guide: Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (Third Edition)*.

Ciax, Katha und Simon Runkel. 2024. "Geopolitics of Urban Squares: Atmospheric Securitization and Counterterrorism in Everyday Urban Spaces in Berlin." *Geopolitics* 29(5): 1807-1830. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2023.2283465 External link. 1-24.

Coaffee, Jon. 2003. *Terrorism, Risk, and the City: The Making of a Contemporary Urban Landscape*. Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Coaffee, Jon. 2004. "Rings of Steel, Rings of Concrete and Rings of Confidence: Designing out Terrorism in Central London pre and post September 11th." *International Journal of Urban and Regional Research* 28: 201-211. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2004.00511.x

Coaffee, Jon. 2017. "A Balanced Response? The Quest for Proportionate Urban Security." *International Journal of Urban and Regional Research*. https://www.ijurr.org/spotlight-on/the-city-at-war-reflections-on-beirut-brussels-and-beyond/a-balanced-response-the-quest-for-proportionate-urban-security/
Coaffee, Jon. 2019. *Futureproof: How to Build Resilience in an Uncertain World*. New Haven, UNITED STATES: Yale University Press.
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bham/detail.action?docID=5844752.

Coaffee, Jon, David Murakami Wood, and Peter Rogers. 2009. *The Everyday Resilience of the City*. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Coaffee, Jon, Paul O'Hare, and Marian Hawkesworth. 2009. The Visibility of (In)security: The Aesthetics of Planning Urban Defences Against Terrorism. *Security Dialogue* 40 (4-5): 489-511.

Coyles, David. 2017. "The Security-Threat-Community." *City* 21 (6): 699–723.
doi:10.1080/13604813.2017.1412598.

Davis, Mike. 2007. *Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb*. London: Verso Books.

De Goede, Marieke, Stephanie Simon, and Marijn Hoijtink. 2014. "Performing preemption." *Security Dialogue* 45: 411–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010614543585

Dimitrakou, Ifigeneia and Julie Ren (this issue) "Critical Geographies of Everyday Crisis" *City*.

Dirksmeier, Peter and Ilse Helbrecht. 2015. "Everyday urban encounters as stratification practices." *City* 19(4): 486-498, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1051734

Drongiti, Angeliki and Damien Masson. 2023. Crises terroristes et ambiances urbaines: quelles marques les attentats laissent-ils aux villes? *Revue Internationale d'Urbanisme*, 13 hal-04329155.

Edensor, Tim. 2012. "Illuminated Atmospheres: Anticipating and Reproducing the Flow of Affective Experience in Blackpool." *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 30(6): 1103-1122.
doi:10.1068/d12211.

Edensor, Tim, and Shanti Sumartojo. 2015. "Designing Atmospheres: Introduction to Special Issue." *Visual Communication* 14 (3): 251-265. doi:10.1177/1470357215582305.

European Commission. 2017. *Action Plan to support the protection of public spaces*.

EU Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation. 2022. *European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2022*. LU : Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2813/467703.

Fregonese, Sara. 2017. "Affective Atmospheres, Urban Geopolitics and Conflict (de)Escalation in Beirut." *Political Geography* 61: 1-10. Doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.04.009.

Fregonese, Sara. 2021. "Shockwaves: Atmospheres beyond the Conflict City/Ordinary City Divide." *Conflict and Society* 7(1): 26-41. Doi:10.3167/arcs.2021.070103.

Fregonese, Sara, and Sunčana Laketa. 2022. "Urban Atmospheres of Terror." *Political Geography* 96: 102569. Doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102569.

Fregonese, Sara, Paul Simpson, Damien Masson, Simon Runkel, Carrie Ann Benjamin, Samuel Berlin, Katharina Ciax, and Angeliki Drongiti. 2024. "Atmospheric Geographies of (Counter)Terrorism." *Progress in Human Geography* 48 (6): 752–778.
doi:10.1177/03091325241268951.

Ghertner, D. Asher, and Hudson McFann, eds. 2020. *Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life*. Duke University Press.

Graham, Stephen, 2001. "In a moment: On glocal mobilities and the terrorised city". *City* 5(3): 411-415

Graham, Stephen. 2004. "Postmortem City." *City* 8(2) 165-196. Doi:10.1080/1360481042000242148.
Graham, Stephen. 2009. "Cities as Battlespace: The New Military Urbanism." *City* 13 (4): 383–402.
doi:10.1080/13604810903298425.

Graham, Stephen. 2010. *Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism*. London; New York: Verso.

Graham, Stephen, 2012. "Olympic 2012 security: Welcome to lockdown London. *City* 16(4): 446-451.
DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2012.696900

Grand-Clément, Sarah, Victoria Jordan, Pauline Paille, Theodora Ogden, and Ruth Harris. 2021.
*Executive Summary of the Study into Measures to Prevent Terrorist Attacks with Vehicles and Mitigate the Impacts Thereof*. European Commission.

Grassiani, Erella, and Tessa Diphoorn. 2019. "Introducing Security Blurs." In *Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision*, edited by Tessa Diphoorn and Erella Grassiani, 1-15. Abingdon: Routledge.

Grove, Kevin and Peter Adey. 2015. "Security and the Politics of Resilience: An Aesthetic Response".
*Politics* 35 (1) pp. 78-84. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.12078

Gusic, Ivan, 2020. *Contesting Peace in the Postwar City: Belfast, Mitrovica and Mostar*. Springer
International

Han, Yoonai (this issue) "Moving in Stuckness: Crisis, Aspiration, and Futurity of Short- term Workers in Seoul" *City*.

Haddington, Pentti, Sami Frogell, Anna Grubert, Heidi Huhta, Pauli Jussila, Juha Kinnunen, Antti Korpela, et al. 2012. "Civil Inattention in Public Places: Normalising Unusual Events through Mobile and Embodied Practices." *Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research* 13(3). Doi:10.17169/fqs-13.3.1794.

Healy, Stephen. 2014. "Atmospheres of Consumption: Shopping as Involuntary Vulnerability." *Emotion, Space and Society* 10: 35-43. Doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2012.10.003.

Huch, Charlotte and Alexa Agoropoulos (this issue) "Being Detached Yet Engaged: (Un)affectedness and climate events during chronic crisis in Athens" *City*

Ilum, Stine. 2022. "Concrete Blocks, Bollards, and Ha-Ha Walls: How Rationales of the Security Industry Shape Our Cities." *City & Society* 34(1): 88-110. Doi:10.1111/ciso.12424.

Isakjee, Arshad, and Chris Allen. 2013. "'A Catastrophic Lack of Inquisitiveness': A Critical Study of the Impact and Narrative of the Project Champion Surveillance Project in Birmingham." *Ethnicities* 13 (6): 751–770. doi:10.1177/1468796813492488

Iveson, Kurt. 2011. "Ten Years After 9/11", *City*, 15(3-4): 389-391, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.610189

Jenson, Martin, J. and Ole B. Jensen. 2023. "The Social Life of a Barrier: A Material Ethnography of Urban Counterterrorism." *Space and Culture* 26(1): 74–88.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331220985445.

Kazig, Rainer, Damien Masson, and Rachel Thomas. 2017. "Atmospheres and Mobility." *Mobile Culture Studies – The Journal* 3: 7.

Kraftl, Peter, and Peter Adey. 2008. "Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-In Buildings." *Annals of the Association of American Geographers* 98(1): 213-231.
DOI:10.1080/00045600701734687.

Krasmann, Susanne, and Christine Hentschel. 2019. "'Situational Awareness': Rethinking Security in *Times of Urban Terrorism*." *Security Dialogue* 50(2): 181-197.
DOI:10.1177/0967010618819598.
Löfgren, Orvar. 2014. "Urban Atmospheres as Brandscapes and Lived Experiences." *Place Branding and Public Diplomacy* 10(4): 255-266. Doi:10.1057/pb.2014.26.

McCormack, Derek, P. 2018. *Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment*. Durham: Duke University Press.

McFarlane, Colin. 2011. "Assemblage and critical urbanism." *City* 15(2): 204-224.

McMichael, Christopher. 2012. "'Hosting the world': The 2010 World Cup and the new military urbanism". *City* 16(5): 519-534. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2012.709363

Masson, Damien et al. 2022. *Atmospheres of (counter)terrorism survey / Enquête sur le terrorisme et le sentiment de sécurité dans l'espace public, 2022*. [hal-03844552](https://halshirpa HALshirpa)

Massaro, Vanessa A. & Emma Gaalaas Mullaney. 2011. "The war on teenage terrorists", *City* 15(5): 591-604. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2011.630856

Massumi, Brian. 2015. *Politics of Affect*. Oxford: Wiley. [https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4029964](https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4029964)

Merriman, Peter. 2016. "Mobility Infrastructures: Modern Visions, Affective Environments and the Problem of Car Parking." *Mobilities* 11: 83-98.

National Protective Security Authority. 2023. "Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM)." *National Protective Security Authority*. Accessed May 23. [https://www.npsa.gov.uk/hostile-vehicle-mitigation-hvm](https://www.npsa.gov.uk/hostile-vehicle-mitigation-hvm).

Paiva, Daniel and Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros. 2021. "The Territoriality of Atmosphere: Rethinking Affective Urbanism through the Collateral Atmospheres of Lisbon's Tourism". *Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers* 46(2): 392–405. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12425.

Penny, Joe, and Anna Richter. 2018. "The Ambivalent and Undecided (Dis)Order of Things." *City* 22 (5-6): 609–611. doi:10.1080/13604813.2018.1571771.

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2016. "Withdrawing from Atmosphere: An Ontology of Air Partitioning and Affective Engineering." *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 34(1): 150-167. Doi:10.1177/0263775815600443.

Pütz, Ole. 2012. "From Non-Places to Non-Events: The Airport Security Checkpoint." *Journal of Contemporary Ethnography* 41 (2): 154-188. Doi:10.1177/0891241611426431.

Ritchie, Ian. 2003. "Architecture—design in need of a compass". *City* 7(3): 281-299. [https://doi.org/10.1080/1360481032000157487](https://doi.org/10.1080/1360481032000157487)

Rokem, Jonathan. 2016. "Beyond Incommensurability: Jerusalem and Stockholm from an Ordinary Cities Perspective." *City* 20 (3): 472–482. doi:10.1080/13604813.2016.1166698.

Rokem, Jonathan, Sara Fregonese, Adam Ramadan, Elisa Pascucci, Gillad Rosen, Igal Charney, Till F. Paasche, and James D. Sidaway. 2017. "Interventions in Urban Geopolitics." *Political Geography* 61 (November): 253–262. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.04.004.

Schwabe, Siri. 2021. "Order and Atmospheric Memory: Cleaning Up the Past, Designing the Future." *City & Society* 33(1): 40-58. Doi:10.1111/ciso.12391.

Sharon, Tamar and Bert-Jaap Koops. 2021. "The ethics of inattention: revitalising civil inattention as a privacy-protecting mechanism in public spaces." *Ethics and Information Technology* 23: 331–343. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09575-7

Silke, Andrew. 2011. "Understanding Terrorist Target Selection." In *Terrorism and the Olympics: Major Event Security and Lessons for the Future*, 49-71. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Simpson, Paul. 2014. "Atmospheres of Arrival/Departure and Multi-Angle Video Recording: Reflections from St Pancras and Gare Du Nord." In *Video Methods: Social Science Research in Motion*, edited by Charlotte Bates. London: Routledge.

Simpson, Paul. 2017. "A Sense of the Cycling Environment: Felt Experiences of Infrastructure and Atmospheres." *Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space* 49(2): 426-447. DOI:10.1177/0308518X16669510.

Simpson, Paul. 2021a. *Non-Representational Theory*. London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Simpson, Paul. 2021b. "Re-figuring public space?" In *COVID-19 and Similar Futures: Pandemic Geographies*, edited by Gavin Andrews, Valorie Crooks, Jamie Pearce and Jane Messina. Berlin: Springer Nature.

Smith, Naomi, and Peter Walters. 2018. "Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments." *Urban Studies* 55(13): 2980-2995. DOI:10.1177/0042098017732690.

Spanu, Giacomo. 2023. "Urban Military Geographies: New Directions in the (Re)Production of Space, Militarism, and the Urban." *Geography Compass* 17 (12): e12727. doi:10.1111/gec3.12727.

Sorkin, Michael. 2023. "Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State." *Routledge & CRC Press*. Accessed June 7. https://www.routledge.com/Indefensible-Space-The-Architecture-of-the-National-Insecurity-State/Sorkin/p/book/9780415953689.

Sumartojo, Shanti, and Sarah Pink. 2019. *Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods*. Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Space. London and New York: Routledge.

Tamayo, Fernando and Libardo Ariza. 2022. "Building a secure city." *City* 26(2-3): 243-260, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2022.2056349

Thibaud, Jean-Paul. 2011. "The Sensory Fabric of Urban Ambiances." *The Senses and Society* 6(2). Routledge: 203-215. doi:10.2752/174589311X12961584845846.

Thibaud, Jean-Paul. 2015. "The backstage of urban ambiances: When atmospheres pervade everyday experience." *Emotion, Space and Society* 15: 39-46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.07.001

Thibaud, Jean-Paul, Tixier, Nicolas and David Zerbib. (forthcoming) *Ambiances. A Sensitivity to Ordinary Situations*. London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Trovato, Maria. G. and Balsam E. Ariss. *this issue*. "Ongoing Crises in Beirut: Resistance and Resilience as Everyday Life". *City*

Tulumello, Simone. 2015. "From 'Spaces of Fear' to 'Fearscapes': Mapping for Reframing Theories About the Spatialization of Fear in Urban Space." *Space and Culture* 18(3): 257-272. doi:10.1177/1206331215579716.

Tursić, Mirza. 2019. "The city as an aesthetic space." *City* 23(2): 205-221. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2019.1615762

Vannini, Philip. 2015. Non-representational research methodologies: An introduction. In *Non-representational Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research*, edited by Philip Vannini. London: Routledge.

Vieten, Ulrike M. and Gill Valentine. 2015. "European urban spaces in crisis." *City* 19(4): 480-485, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1051731

Vradis, Antonis. 2016. "Of density, banality and terror." *Open Democracy*, 18 July, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/of-density-banality-and-terror/
Wall, Illan rua. 2019. "Policing Atmospheres: Crowds, Protest and 'Atmotechnics.'" *Theory, Culture & Society* 36(4): 143-162. doi:10.1177/0263276419829200.

Wekerle, Gerda R., and Paul S. B. Jackson. 2005. "Urbanizing the Security Agenda: Anti-terrorism, Urban Sprawl and Social Movements." *City* 9 (1): 33–49. doi:10.1080/13604810500050228.

Wood, David Murakami, and C. William R. Webster. 2009. "Living in Surveillance Societies: The Normalisation of Surveillance in Europe and the Threat of Britain's Bad Example." *Journal of Contemporary European Research* 5(2): 259–273. doi:10.30950/jcer.v5i2.159.

Zeiderman, Austin, and Katherine Dawson. 2022. "Urban Futures: *Idealization, Capitalization, Securitization*." *City* 26 (2–3): 261–280. doi:10.1080/13604813.2022.2035964.