162,131 research outputs found
The politics of security-driven resilience
No full textThis chapter illuminates how, since 9/11, security policy has gradually become more central to a range of resilience discourses and practices whilst seeming to focus upon the everyday needs of populations. Since the early 2000s, the so-called ‘resilience turn’ (Coaffee, 2013) has seen ideas, discourses and logics of resilience embedded within an array of social and urban policy and practice at a range of spatial scales, driven by an overarching requirement to secure the future from an array of disruptive challenges, threats and events or, more broadly, a general sense of uncertainty about the future (Coaffee, 2010; Walker and Cooper, 2011). In this chapter we argue that practices of security have become the most potent driver and shaper of contemporary resilience practices. In turn, these have served to generate multiple competing ‘logics of resilience’ identified and explored in this chapter through the concept of ‘security-driven resilience’ that captures the multi-directional process, where resilience policy becomes increasingly driven by security concerns and, at the same time, security policy adopts the more palatable language of resilience. Such processes hold a range of implications including the narrowing of formerly diverse resilience concerns towards very specific forms of security and, at the same time, generating multiple governmental, scaling and coercive implications
Securing the games
No full textSince the 1970s, safety and security, and the management of incivility, have become key issues for Games organisers (Fussey and Coaffee, 2011; Bennett and Haggerty, 2011), spreading beyond event-based venues to the wider urban realm. Concerns for security, resulting from the fear of international terrorist attacks at international mega-events, such as the Olympic Games, and against the associated crowded places and critical infrastructure of the host city, has also meant that security is increasingly designed into the regenerating built environment and embed-ded within the behaviours and practices of those responsible for construction and securing of the Olympic venues and sites (Coaffee and Fussey, 2010). Nowhere in Olympic history is this more obvious than in the preparation for the 2012 Summer Games in London.<br/
Mexico City 1968
No full textThe International Olympic Committee (IOC) make clear in guidance to host cities that it is their responsibility to provide a safe environment for the competitors, officials and dignitaries attending the Olympics and Paralympics, while ensuring that such securitization does not get in the way of the sporting activities or spirit of the Games. As Thompson (1999, p. 106) observed, ‘the IOC has made clear that the Olympics are an international sporting event, not an international security event, and while Olympic security must be comprehensive it must also be unobtrusive’. However, since 2001, given the escalation and changing nature of the terrorist threat ‘securing’ the Olympics is increasingly difficult and costly to achieve (Coaffee and Murakami Wood, 2006). Certainly if the risk of terrorism remains at its present critical level, there is the possibility of seeing core notions of Olympic spectacle replaced by dystopian images of ‘cities under siege’ as organizers and security personnel attempt to deliver a
Laminated security for London 2012: enhancing security infrastructures to defend mega sporting events
No full textSince the 1970s, security planning has become an integral and required part of bidding documents and preparation for hosting sporting mega events, most notably the summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. Drawing on a multidisciplinary conceptual framework derived from prior experiences of security operations at major sporting events and historical counter-terrorism experiences of London, the paper unpacks the socio-spatial implications of security measures intended to secure the 2012 Games. In particular, it highlights the threat posed against ‘crowded places’ from international terrorism as well as possible surveillance, design or managerial measures that are to be deployed to make such sites more resilient to terrorist attack. This, it is argued, both converges with standardised Olympic security models and diverges at important points, related to the pre-existence of capacity in urban counter-terrorism onto which 2012 security will be overlaid or laminated. The paper also highlights the increased use made of security for ‘legacy’ purposes
Balancing local and global security leitmotifs: Counter-terrorism and the spectacle of sporting mega-events
No full text This article considers the transferability of sporting mega-event strategies across time and place. In doing so, it presents a number of arguments highlighting the progressive global standardization of sporting mega-event counter-terrorism strategies comprising continually reproduced security leitmotifs. Such orthodoxies are drawn from a range of experiences at both sporting and non-sporting mega-events. By contrast to these globalized models, the terrorist threats they seek to counter are almost always rooted in diverse local settings. This convergence of sporting mega-event counter-terrorism strategies does not simply represent an uncritical imposition of an external framework of security, however. Instead, this article identifies and interrogates how sporting mega-event security planning is also tempered by a range of localized processes, including vernacular cultures of security and the scale of extant security infrastructures. </jats:p
The regeneration games: purity and security in the Olympic city<sup>1</sup>
No full textAbstractThis paper examines the wider social impacts of hosting the London 2012 Olympic Games and its ‘legacy’ ambitions in East London, emphasizing securitization as an inbuilt feature of the urban regeneration project. Drawing on extensive original empirical research, the paper analyses the modalities of Olympic safety and security practices within the Olympic Park itself and their wider impact, while also connecting this research to theorization and debates in urban sociology and criminology. In this complex setting, a raft of formal and informal, often subtle, regulatory mechanisms have emerged, especially as visions of social ordering focused on ‘cleansing’ and ‘purifying’ have ‘leaked out’ from the hyper‐securitized ‘sterilized’ environment of the Olympic Park and become embedded within the Olympic neighbourhood. In such complex circumstances, applying Douglas' (1966) work on purity and danger to the spatial realm provides a key conceptual framework to understand the form and impact of such processes. The imposition of order can be seen to not only perform ‘cleansing’ functions, but also articulate multiple symbolic, expressive and instrumental roles.</jats:p
Urban spaces of surveillance
No full textBorders are the key sites in the distinction of territories. As places of the sorting and effective differentiation of the (global) mobilities of people and things, borders are married to the practice and evolution of surveillance. This chapter is concerned with such processes of border-making or bordering which act to instate or reinforce existing regimes of regulation and governance over mobilities by way of a manifold array of surveillance techniques and technologies. Perhaps borders are the focus of such intense practices of monitoring, surveillance and sorting because they are “pinch points,�? the �?lters in a hydraulic system of flows of movement that circulate and move between and within national state and supra-national state boundaries. Constituting the contact zones between populations, borders are the site of political exertion, of decisions over who gets in, who leaves and who doesn’t, moments of the sovereign decision over who or what is inside or outside the regime of their care. If critical decisions like this are to be made, then critically they require surveillance measures in order to provide the basis upon which decisions may be taken, although we will complicate this later
[Report to Chief J. E. Curry, by an unknown author #1]
No full textReport to Chief J. E. Curry, by an unknown author. The report contains a list of officers who gave depositions to the United States Attorney
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