Dealing with Urban Terror: Heritages of Control, Varieties of Intervention, Strategies of Research*

The attacks of September 11th indicate a new kind of threat to urban security and imply the need for new urban knowledge or at least fresh ways to apply older understandings. Although various cities around the world have long faced organized violence, both internal and from the outside, the attacks on New York and the Pentagon shatter precedents in a number of respects. They raise the potential for new research strategies that might lessen danger from terrorists as well as from authoritarian internal responses that undermine civic society and, over the long haul, the means of urban self-protection. We define ‘terror’ as an attack on civilians to communicate a political message (Gearty, 2002). We do not here deal with state-organized terror, focused as we are on security within the US and other countries that remain safe from such aggression (while capable of practicing it). With a focus on the recent US events, we join other efforts (see, e.g., Graham and Marvin, forthcoming) in helping redress the relative lack of study, in general, of cities in the context of war. The New York and Washington events obviously differ from conventional military assaults on cities like the sacking of Rome or General Sherman’s march on Atlanta. The terrorist aim is not against cities as the container of military targets or booty, but as containers of people. The aerial bombardments that began during the first world war were a start in this direction, with the apogee achieved by US bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, along with the destruction of Dresden. Different from such state-directed campaigns, and hence closer in type, is the mayhem experienced in Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, and continuing in the Middle East. But unlike those instances of proximate shelling or guerilla war, the September 11th attacks did not arise from an ongoing localistic conflict over access to land and symbolic sites. They were assaults organized from far away, constituting a local-global nexus in threat and vulnerability. The events resemble state-centered aggression in their distant origin and in the scale of damage; three ‘bombs’ destroy thousands of lives and billions in assets. But this damage did not come from a state adversary at all, but from faith-based subversives who, at least for a time, operated locally. They did not use the more modest means of partial destruction associated with urban guerillas. For all the violent results, the Irish insurrectionaries tended to set off their London explosives when offices were closed or after issuing warnings to evacuate. Perhaps an element of cross-group empathy blunted the strategic use of death. Nor, as sometimes is the pattern, did the September 11th attackers gun down or kidnap victims moving through urban space. Instead, the complexity and magnitude of metropolitan life was used against itself, a move of urban Aikido terror in which the smaller opponent leverages the giant’s strength to bring it down. The distant subaltern gains the means, previously reserved for colonialists and great powers, to engage in remote control (see Law, 1984).