180 research outputs found
Hollow Sovereignty and the Hollow Crown? Contested Governance and the Olympic Security Edifice
No full textIn this chapter, Fussey and Coaffee assess the form, impact and lasting ‘legacy’ of security practices associated with hosting the 2012 Olympic Games in London. It examines imbrications of formal security plans, comprising state and private sector actors and agencies, with more indirect and informal securitising processes such as diverse territorially based regulatory regimes and the creation of ‘regenerated’ spaces that are hardened and insulated against the urban milieu in which they are situated. Mega–event security is often characterised as an exceptional exercise in terms of scale, scope and form, and considered variously through macro-theoretical lenses citing the assertion of overarching disciplinary, neoliberal, colonial corporatist and other interest–based aspirations. This chapter argues that whilst such explanations have much to offer, Olympic security practices comprise a multiplicity of ambitions, ordering processes and path dependencies that, as they converge on the Olympic city, do not necessarily cohere and are often in tension with one another. Such processes illuminate the complex and contested governance of Olympic security and also the multiple overt and subtle ways post–Olympics security legacies become embedded in the urban landscape.<br/
Futureproof: how to build resilience in an uncertain world
No full textCatastrophic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Tohoku "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that hit the eastern seaboard of Japan in 2012 are seen as surprises that have a low probability of occurring but have a debilitating impact when they do. In this eye-opening journey through modern and ancient risk management practices, Jon Coaffee explains why we need to find a new way to navigate the deeply uncertain world that we live in. Examining how governments have responded to terrorist threats, climate change, and natural hazards, Coaffee shows how and why these measures have proven inadequate and what should be done to make us more resilient. While conventional approaches have focused on planning and preparing for disruptions and enhanced our ability to "bounce back," our focus should be on anticipating future challenges and enhancing our capacity to adapt to new threats
Constructing resilience through security and surveillance : the politics, practices and tensions of security-driven resilience
No full textThis article illuminates how, since 9/11, security policy has gradually become more central to a range of resilience discourses and practices. As this process draws a wider range of security infrastructures, organizations and approaches into the enactment of resilience, security practices are enabled through more palatable and legitimizing discourses of resilience. This article charts the emergence and proliferation of security-driven resilience logics, deployed at different spatial scales, which exist in tension with each other. We exemplify such tensions in practice through a detailed case study from Birmingham, UK: ‘Project Champion’ an attempt to install over 200 high-resolution surveillance cameras, often invisibly, around neighbourhoods with a predominantly Muslim population. Here, practices of security-driven resilience came into conflict with other policy priorities focused upon community-centred social cohesion, posing a series of questions about social control, surveillance and the ability of national agencies to construct community resilience in local areas amidst state attempts to label the same spaces as ‘dangerous’. It is argued that security-driven logics of resilience generate conflicts in how resilience is operationalized, and produce and reproduce new hierarchical arrangements which, in turn, may work to subvert some of the founding aspirations and principles of resilience logic itsel
Securing and sustaining the Olympic city: reconfiguring London for 2012 and beyond
No full textOften seen as the host nation's largest ever logistical undertaking, accommodating the Olympics and its attendant security infrastructure brings seismic changes to both the physical and social geography of its destination. Since 1976, the defence of the spectacle has become the central feature of its planning, one that has assumed even greater prominence following the bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Games and, most importantly, 9/11. Indeed, the quintupled cost of securing the first post-9/11 summer Games in Athens demonstrates the considerable scale and complexity currently implicated in these operations. Such costs are not only fiscal. The Games stimulate a tidal wave of redevelopment ushering in new gentrified urban settings and an associated investment that may or may not soak through to the incumbent community. Given the unusual step of developing London's Olympic Park in the heart of an existing urban milieu and the stated commitments to 'community development' and 'legacy', these constitute particularly acute issues for the 2012 Games. In addition to sealing the Olympic Park from perceived threats, 2012 security operations have also harnessed the administrative criminological staples of community safety and crime reduction to generate an ordered space in the surrounding areas. Of central importance here are the issues of citizenship, engagement and access in urban spaces redeveloped upon the themes of security and commerce. Through analyzing the social and community impact of the 2012 Games and its security operation on East London, this book concludes by considering the key debates as to whether utopian visions of legacy can be sustained given the demands of providing a global securitized event of the magnitude of the modern Olympics.<br/
Moral panics and urban renaissance
No full textAs cities around the world are re-shaped by urban renewal policies underpinned by a concern with enhancing quality of life, tensions inevitably arise about whose quality of life is enhanced, and at whose expense? In this piece, Rogers and Coaffee critically interrogate the effects of quality of life policies which target UK city centres. Their particular concern here is with the exclusion of young people from the spaces of the city and from the policy processes which seek to re-shape those spaces. They explore these issues through an analysis of the ways in which the agencies promoting Newcastle-upon-Tyne's urban renaissance have positioned young people's various uses of the city centre. Their paper highlights the exclusionary consequences of single-minded attempts to enhance quality of life which fail to give recognition to the diversity of lifestyles or urban populations, thereby displacing and dispersing some populations to the margins. Nonetheless, Rogers and Coaffee also find evidence of alternative approaches, which might go some way to fostering a more diverse urban public realm
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
Editorial : The broadening scope of urban regeneration and renewal
No full textThe author talks about the expansion in scope of urban regeneration and renewal. He says that urban regeneration and renewal used to focus on physical interventions with associated economic and social benefits but became intimately connected to generic political, social and economic policy. He says that the importance of policies concerning urban regeneration and renewal has also grown. He asserts that broadening in scope of urban regeneration and renewal will lead to more sustainable outcomes in the future
The uneven geographies of the Olympic carceral : from exceptionalism to normalisation
No full textIn recent years a vast academic literature has developed around the concept of ‘militarising’ or ‘securitising’ cities and in particular the policy responses to the occurrence of crime, fear of crime and the evaluation of cities as strategic sites for a spectrum of large-scale increasingly destructive perturbations in everyday urban life, such as riots, protest and acts of terrorism. Increasingly policy interventions in response to such threats have embodied characteristics of the ‘carceral archipelago’ where incarceration techniques and strategies are punitively deployed within public places of the city and embedded within the design of urban space. Such attempts at creating increasingly hyper-carceral spaces have often been supported by an array of legislation and regulation targeting the control of particular activities deemed unacceptable or inappropriate. This paper draws conceptually from the urban security literature noted above and emerging studies within the nascent sub-discipline of carceral geography, and examines their convergence on the issue of Olympic security planning. This highlights the various spatial strategies and imprints that emerge from new conceptualisations and practices of securitisation, and how these might be seen to characterise an increasingly punitive state. Here Agamben's studies of exceptionality are deployed to highlight how ‘lockdown’ security often becomes the ‘normal’ option for Olympic cities, seen as being on the frontline in the war on terror, and how a range of uneven geographies emerge and are sustained in such locations before, during and after the event. Empirically the paper uses data from ethnographic research focusing on the experiences of security preparation for, and post-event legacy of, the London 2012 Olympics. The paper also seeks to highlight how lessons from the military-carceral security strategies deployed in London have been transferred to subsequent host cities of Sochi (2014) and Rio de Janeiro (2016)
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