Not terrorism, but the way the threat of terrorism is used, is what will have the biggest impact on the shape of cities and urban life in our day. This paper makes its argument in three steps: first, an account of the act of terrorism on 9/11 and its target; second, describing what the response to the threat of terrorism has been, distinguishing between a rational response and one manipulated for other ends; then explaining why those responses came about, running from immediate political advantage to concerns about existential anxieties; ending, thirdly, with an assessment of the results in terms of social justice and public welfare. The discussion will focus on the United States, and specifically New York City after the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001.

To summarize:
The terrorist attack of 9/11 was against a bastion of United States capitalism.
The response to it has been partly rational, and partly excessive, partly legitimate and partly false.

There are many examples:
· The excessive reaction has resulted from a manipulation of fear and worry, serving short-term and long-term political interests, short-term economic interests (both producer and real estate), and tapped into an existential insecurity inherent in and functional for the societal system of late capitalism.

• The impact on cities has been to increase segregation, limit democracy, extend privatization of the public sector, restrict the use of public spaces, and undermine urbanity.
• All cities have not been treated similarly. Cities in imperial countries have been
• classified and treated entirely differently from cities in colonialized countries;
• winner cities have been treated entirely differently from loser cities within.
• A fair assessment of the result shows it to violate common standards of social justice, both in what is done and what is not done in response to major disasters.

The terrorist attack in New York City on 9/11

The scene of the two hi-jacked airliners flying into the World Trade Center in New York City is well known, as is the destruction it caused. Indeed, the very fact of the widespread viewing of these pictures helps to explain much of the reaction to the measures subsequently taken in the name of preventing a recurrence. This had both positive and negative consequences. The positive as an outpouring of sympathy and support for the victims; the negative was to shut off a whole area of analysis as too controversial, as virtually taboo, as reflecting on the victims, as if looking for rational explanations of the attack amounted to justifying it. Susan Sontag learned this very early; the paucity of serious analysis reflects its continuing impact today. The events were shocking well beyond the actual effects, but those effects were indeed substantial: 2,768 persons killed, buildings 100-stories tall destroyed, 17 acres of devastation, harmful clouds of dust spread over much of lower Manhattan, thousands of people unemployed, hundreds of persons having to relocate, if most temporarily, because of dust and damage.
Yet if it were only a question of the extent of the damage and the actual likelihood of a recurrence, comparisons with other disasters would be legitimate, and might have been expected. In extent of the damage from the disaster, 9/11 in New York City may be compared with the other disaster that struck in the United States in August four years later, in which 1,836 people were killed in the state of Louisiana, over 200,000 lost their homes, and total damage estimates are $81.2 billion dollars.¹
The World Trade Center was an office building built in 1966-72 by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a governmental agency, at the urging of David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and his brother, Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York State and appointing authority for half the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey board. Its purpose was to revive real estate values in lower Manhattan, where Chase had just built its own skyscraper office tower.² It was originally hard to rent, and the original major tenants were agencies of the state government of New York. But it soon attracted other corporate tenants, and the construction of Battery Park City immediately adjacent to it helped produce the hoped-for rise of real estate prices in the area. In 2001 the building was privatized through a 99-year lease to a private developer, Larry Silverstein. Its tenants at the time of the attack were a cross-section of internationally (it was called the World Trade Center, after all) connected firms, including foreign banks, stock brokerages, financial consulting firms, and related businesses; the largest single tenants was Cantor, Fitzgerald,³ which traded globally in pollution credits.
There is no doubt why the World Trade Center (and the Pentagon in Washington, hit the same day, and perhaps the White House or Congress, the likely target of the fourth attacker) were selected as targets. They represented the apex of the structure of economic and political power that al-Qaeda held to be responsible for United States policy. The motivation of the attackers is quite clear from the record: it centers on United States policy in the Middle East.⁴
This is quite different from what President Bush said in public speeches immediately after 9/11, and has continued saying to this day:


One has to concede that Osama bin Laden’s comment on such statements is closer to the truth:
FBI agents were closer to bin Laden’s explanation than the President’s:

Given this history, what has been the governmental response to the attack? We will focus on its impact on cities and urban life. Although the urban/non-urban distinction is not a very important one as such; there is a greater difference between the impact on different cities, e.g. New York City and Waterbury, Connecticut, than between New York City and its surrounding suburbs and exurbs.

The nature of the response

The threat of terrorism is a dominant theme in the political life of the United States today. The threat is presented as pervasive, and its presence is constantly reinforced in public speeches, the media, and signs and symbols everywhere.
What has the response to this presumed omnipresent threat been like on the ground?
There are two types of response: legitimate, and manipulated, and perhaps a third, which is simply the product of stupidity in the pursuit of unclear goals. It is important to distinguish between those responses, focusing on the built environment, that are directly and rationally connected to a threat of terrorism, and those that are not, those that are false. We explore in Section III following how those that are false, and how the threat of terrorism has been manipulated to justify them.
Security in the face of a declared threat of terrorism dominates much of the discussion about city life in the United States today, with frequent reference to the events of September 11, 2001 (9/11). But what has been done in response to that perceived threat ranges from the legitimate and sensible to the false and manipulated. The line between them is not always clear, but the extreme cases are clear enough.
Legitimate responses are those that effectively and efficiently reduce the likelihood of a terrorist act. Included might be basic metal screening at airports, checking visitors to plausible targets of terrorist activities, restricting the carrying of firearms or the purchase of explosives. Included also, of course, should be political policy changes in foreign and domestic relations that would reduce the motivations for terrorist acts.
False responses include everything from broadcasting orange and red alerts in the media, combing the records of all telephone conversations in the United States, racial profiling,⁸both public and private, widely-publicized arrests of “suspects” and failure to publicize exonerations of those arrested.
The impact of the legitimate response is almost trivial, representing more of a continuation of trends already in place before 9/11: e.g. airport security measures, rather than something new. In contrast, the impact of the false responses has been substantial. The false response has used the threat of terrorism as a pretext to bring about changes that have nothing to do with physical safety or protection against terrorism, but implement quite unrelated agendas. Anti-terrorism legislation has been used to prosecute members of the St. James Boys, a group of soccer players in the Bronx who formed a violent gang.⁹ The threat of terrorism has been used to justify building a wall along the United States/Mexico border to restrict illegal immigration, although there is no evidence whatsoever connecting illegal immigration from Mexico to terrorism in the United States:


When we look at the impact of these two forms of response to the threat of terrorism in the built environment and its uses in the city, the distinction between rational and false responses becomes clearer. Although there is no absolute division between legitimate and false responses, and there are many borderline cases, there are also many cases that are not borderline. Some measures as airports seem sensible; no one should be allowed to carry a gun or an explosive device on an airplane. Whether the security measures currently enforced meet the test of rationality may, however, be doubted. It may be appropriate to require security clearance at a very limited number of high profile buildings for which there is reason to believe may be high priority targets for terrorism, e.g. the World Trade Center after the garage bombing of 1993, or the Congress. But when the Department of Homeland Security allocated funds to cities to help them protect against the dangers of terrorism, the procedure seemedto depart far from rational decision-making: it cut the funding for New York City but increased it for Omaha, Nebraska, cut it for Washington, D.C. but increased it for Louisville, Kentucky. It considered as potential targets of terrorism deserving priority protection:

Physical manifestations of the varying responses to terrorism make the same point: barriers at approaches to general use office buildings; stockpiling duct tape as a defense against biological terrorism; making concrete barriers with flower planters on top; making bollards inconspicuous, finding social uses for extreme setbacks, etc.¹² And at some point people simply ignore the proclaimed threats: subway ridership in New York City remains the same, whatever level of “threat” may be announced by the authorities. At the same time, other measures are taken solely for the purpose of giving publicity to the threat, hammering home its dangers: the stationing of police or National Guard troops at very visible public locations where in fact their function is not to be prepared to take action but simply to raise consciousness of danger, the random search of bags on mass transit, signs that say “If you see something, say something”, etc., are all calculated to manipulate awareness of the threat of terrorism. It is often hard to tell whether such measures are deliberately false, deliberately for purposes of manipulation, as discussed below, or simply stupid. When the Metropolitan TransportationAuthority stations National Guard troops in camouflage at a railroad station, is it to prevent some unspecified action, or to instill confidence, or to instill anxiety, or simply a misguided (stupid is a harsh term for it) attempt to prevent damage?
When the architect of the “Freedom Tower” claims that he cannot disclose how thick the cement walls of the bottom 20 windowless stories of the tower are for security reasons (see below), it is hard to take him seriously.
The distinction between safety and security may be useful here.

• Security is a psychological state: the perception of the absence of danger.
• Insecurity is anxiety about the presence of danger.
• Safety is protection from danger.
• Danger is the risk of harm, including bodily injury and loss of personal property,¹³ as well as social and economic loss.
• Existential insecurity is the psychological sense of pervasive danger.

And it is the manipulation of the threat of terrorism to draw on existential insecurity, on the deep and fundamental anxiety produced by fear of unemployment, loss of investments, housing insecurity, rising prices, apparently increasing amorality, personal tensions, fear of economic insecurity in old age, lack of health care, all insecurities that life in a competitive and individualistic world create, to displace (in Freudian terms) that aggregate existential anxiety onto an external and concrete target, that produces the false responses to terrorism that we see today. It becomes worry, in the abstract, and is very functional for many purposes. Fear is not quite the right word for it, for fear suggested a specific object of fear; the argument here is that the fear of the threat of terrorism is the displacement of a wider insecurity that is nameless, the fear of terrorism being only understandable with that in mind.
False measures purporting to address the threat of terrorism that aim to increase security without increasing safety in fact simply increase anxiety without reducing danger. They are embraced by specific groups for their own interest, e.g. the security interest or anti-immigration forces or local politicians seeking funds from Washington, but there is something deeper going on in this apparently paradoxical pattern: an underlying benefit from increasing the concern for security that is independent of any concern about safety. We turn to this pattern, as the explanation for the current responses to the threat of terrorism, in the next section.

Explanation for the response

Existential insecurity, then, displaced to worry about terrorism, it is here argued, is directly manipulated for immediate political purposes. It is manipulated to provide very specific support for the election or re-election of political leaders such as President George W. Bush, or Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of New York City on 9/11 and now a candidate for the Republican nomination for President, who regularly makes statements.¹⁴
Some commentators are blunt:


So it is in the interests of the party in power to keep the threat of terrorism alive in people’s consciousness, as a way of claiming it as their contribution that there has in fact been no act of terrorism on their watch – that they can be trusted to handle it. The picture of George W. Bush with a big smile and a large button saying “worry” is apt.
Beyond this, worry about the threat of terrorism is used as the justification for a wide range of public policies, everything from the establishment of the cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security to the invasion of Iraq, to the expansion of the operations of the FBI and the CIA, to the restrictions on immigration, to the pervasive surveillance of public and private spaces, to restrictions on the use of public spaces, to intimidation of dissident voices in the press and the media generally. And, of course, it remains the primary rationale for the continuance of the war in Iraq:


And on a more prosaic level, the threat of terrorism has been used to great financial benefit by the securities industry,¹⁷ which is now one of the fastest-growing sectors of the United States economy.¹⁸


Blackwater is one of the most astonishing of the companies to benefit from this munificence. It has nearly $1 billion in war contracts; it headquarters at Moyock are 7,000 acres, it employs 2,300 personnel. And it has converted terrorism into a subcategory of disasters, into any of which it is willing to venture. “After Hurricane Katrina, its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it billed the federal government $950 per man per day”, sometimes $240,000 in a day. At its peak it deployed 600 contractors from Texas to Mississippi. “Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued domestic contracting … marketing its products and services to the Department of Homeland Security.”²⁰


Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) is both a major contractor for military defense and for homeland security.
Revenues for the fiscal year that ended January 31, 2006, were $7.8 billion, accounting for an increase of 8% over the previous year’s revenues of $7.2 billion. SAIC’s operating income was $497 million for fiscal year 2006, compared to $488 million for fiscal year 2005. This represents the 37th year of continued revenue and earnings growth…. SAIC is the principal defense contractor for a capability that provides military forces with access to critical intelligence while it has maximum value, and visualization applications that highlight locations and vulnerabilities of adversaries across multiple theaters of operation. The company also has led the way in homeland security and public safety.
And not only in the United States: the quest for profits in security against terrorism has emerged in full throttle in China also:


The commodification of security is a not inappropriate name for such developments.
So both specific enterprises and the economic and political system as a whole, as well as particular political leaders, have many reasons to welcome a widespread fear of terrorism, and the media serve them and themselves by promulgating it.²³
Fox News is an only slightly extreme example. It has issued not only a Weapons of Mass Destruction Handbook, but also a Terrorism Survival Handbook. Its literature speaks for itself:

Academics have not helped; while there are many critical voices, the established mainstream of academic research has focused on descriptive, non-analytic research, ignoring any attempt at normative evaluation of deeper analysis of causes. Thus we find projects such as one in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California’s Center for Risk and Economic Analysis for Terrorism Events, called without apparent irony, CREATES, which estimates, with an elaborate methodology, the economic impact of a terrorist attack on the downtown district of that city, coming up with a figure of $5,901 billion in lost economic output.²⁵ It makes “no attempt to estimate accurately the number of deaths and injuries and their costs [presumably in dollars].”²⁶
But, I believe, the worry, the anxiety generated by the manipulation of the threat of terrorism, goes deeper than these political and economic and sensationalist causes. I believe it builds on and displaces what I am calling existential insecurity,²⁷ which is of the essence of what makes a capitalist society function to begin with; it is systemic to capitalism. It plays the same role today that the Cold War and the threat of communism played a generation ago. At the level of the dominant economic interests, of capital, of the entrepreneur and businessman, insecurity is what drives competition: the fear that other firms will erode business, the need to ever move ahead and move faster just to stand still, the drive to accumulate and build reserves to ever expand and protect against failures. By the same token, existential insecurity is what motivates a worker to work at unpleasant and unrewarding tasks.²⁸ Not doing so creates the risk of unemployment, poverty, ultimately homelessness or starvation. Understanding this explains why the powers that be consistently oppose a substantial safety net, and cut it back relentlessly even when forced to make concessions for tactical purposes. After all, given a real safety net, no Protestant ethic is likely to pro-duce street sweepers or assembly line workers or dish washers. The temptation simply to enjoy life might, given a real safety net, permit a maximum of time to be devoted to pure enjoyment, to self-fulfilling and creative activities, to what Herbert Marcuse called the erotic in life, and the system of rewards and punishments on which capitalism rests would be undermined.
Existential insecurity thus includes:

• economic insecurity
• motivational insecurity
• urban insecurity – security on the street ²⁹
• fear of the other – racism, Orientalism
• yearning for a non-capitalist past – family values
• the naturalization of risk – the inevitably unknown unknowns
• precautionary logic – the risk society

The insecurity is not only a displaced economic insecurity, but encompasses a range of different but related worries. As a component of such existential insecurity, the more specifically urban insecurity linked to the fear of crime is directly relevant to the response to terrorism, for “homeland security” imperceptibly merges the concern of the two into a single quest for a security that is not there, that is threatened both at home and from abroad. For urban residents, safety on the streets has long been among the top issues that lead to positive or negative judgments of the quality of a neighborhood. For suburban residents, the urban itself is shot through with concern about the dangers of the city. All cities share for them aspects of the city of terrible night. And it is linked to the underpinnings of racism, to the fear of the other, a racism that is not simply contempt or disparagement of the other, but fear, the other as menace, as the threat of the different.³⁰ And that is linked in turn to concern about difference, about change, about the world that is not simply the world as we knew it before–abortion, homosexuality, godlessness, profligacy, lewdness, are all seen somehow as challenges to a security that is imagined to have been before. It is an existential insecurity encompassing unformed worries–not known challenges, not enemies that are known, not problems that must be analyzed and met, but worries about the unknown, that unknown country, the future, from which no traveler returns, the “unknown unknowns”.³¹ It is what occurs when all that is solid melts into air. It is the grist that the mills of the fear of terrorism feed on.
Others have made the same point, calling it “ontological insecurity” rather than “existential insecurity”:
However, there is a major difference between ontological insecurity, or ontological anxiety, at least in the way some writers use these concepts, and existential insecurity, as intended here. Ontological insecurity comes from the fear of death, or, in Giddens’ and Ulrich Beck’s usage, the fear of extinction. All men and women are mortal; death is inescapable, part of being alive.³³ The risk of extinction of the species comes from the advancement of knowledge, in Beck and Giddens, and is thus, as a risk, inescapable. Existential insecurity, as here used, is escapable, but in a way that is not obvious, and it indeed threatens existence, existence as a human being. It is profoundly unsettling, like death, but it is not, unlike death, a necessary characteristic of human existence. The suppression of this latter fact is what creates the need for distraction, displacement, if the existing relations that create the insecurity are to be preserved–the competition, the exploitation, the domination, the unfreedoms.
Frank Furedi raises another interesting perspective on existential insecurity. He quotes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as saying:


Furedi takes Rumsfeld’s comment seriously, and traces back the usage of “unknown unknowns” to aerospace industrial discussions in the 1970s, and finds it picked up in environmental discussions in the 1990s. Unknown unknowns fit in easily with Beck and Giddens’ discussions of risk. In the context of the threat of terrorism, its usage is directly instrumental: if we need to worry about unknown unknowns, we clearly cannot ask for evidence that they exist. Measures aimed at protection from unknown unknowns are self-justifying, and beyond debate. The concern is an existential one, not subject to cost-benefit analysis or measurement or even rational risk assessment. How useful to justify any measure of Homeland Security, and how strongly contributory to existential insecurity!
I tread cautiously on the somewhat spongy terrain of cultural studies with these speculations. But I think any analysis of what the threat of terrorism is doing to our cities that does not take these considerations into account is missing a great deal.
If the source of existential insecurity were recognized as inherent in the present system and correctly diagnosed, it could lead to major unrest, as indeed it did after the First World War and during the Great Depression in various countries. Its displacement to something as apparently manageable as the “War on Terrorism” at home and abroad is functional for the maintenance of the status quo.

Evaluation of the response at the city level

“City” is a misleading term, what I have called elsewhere a “perverse metaphor”.³⁵ It is not only perverse in suggesting that a city is a single organic entity, which acts as a unit and befits or suffers as a unit; it is also perverse to the extent that it suggests that there is a single ideal type of settlement, called a city”, that is the same everywhere, in all countries if not at all times. Steve Graham has addressed this point persuasively ³⁶ in arguing that an “urban imaginative geography” has been created in which U.S. or “homeland” cities are being treated both as identical and as different from Arab or “target” cities, and that discussion will not be repeated here. We concentrate rather on the impact on the internal and regional structures of cities within the United States, differentiating in the discussion “winner” and “loser” cities in the process of globalization.
It is necessary to separate out the damage done by acts of terrorism or by disasters more generally, from the consequences of the varying response to such disasters.³⁷ We concentrate here on elements (h)-(j) of the model, what the reaction of both government and the private sector has been to the specific disaster of 9/11 and to thethreat of the kind of terrorism 9/11 is taken to represent. We come back at the end to putting the 9/11 case in the context of disasters generally, looking briefly at the startling contrast between the response to 9/11 and the response to the damage caused by hurricane Katrina.
In general, the response has been to:

• make “security” an intrusive and omnipresent concern,
• harden architecture,
• promote citadelization,
• increase segregation,
• restrict the use of public spaces,
• limit democracy,
• extend privatization of the public sector,
• undermine urbanity, cosmopolitanism,
• promote chauvinism, racism, hostility to the different.³⁸

Make “security” an intrusive and omnipresent concern. The examples are legion. They include Jersey barriers before important buildings, often bare and brutal, sometimes under the influence of more sensitive planners and architects, sugar-coated with a frosting of vegetation; bollards, sunken or permanently above ground; signs warning of danger everywhere; obtrusive presence of police and security personnel; public service announcements over loudspeakers not to leave baggage unattended; notifying the police of the right to search handbags and briefcases and backpacks; prominence in the media to any action having to do with terrorism; giving prominence to all arrests and subordinating acquittals.
Harden architecture. The most egregious example of course is the so-called “freedom tower”³⁹ adjacent to the footprint of the World Trade Center (“Ground Zero”), whose plans had to be changed at the requirement of the police to remove all windows from the first 20 stories and enclose that base with hardened concrete, giving it the impression of a bunker (although likely to be concealed by mirrored surfaces on the outside.⁴⁰ Plans for the expansion of the Javits Convention Center on the west side of Manhattan had to be changed to the tune of $100,000,000 to satisfy retroactively applied police concerns.
Promote citadelization. Above the scale of the individual building (although some individual buildings are of a size as to constitute citadels in themselves), the megaproject has become the preferred form of investment in high profit and high status office construction–citadelization in the sense of including within a single private development all the necessities of life for their users, from office space for work to restaurants, health clubs, shopping facilities from boutiques to supermarkets, recreation facilities, internal access to transportation, and increasingly residences, all carefully designed to separate life within the citadel from contact with the life of the city around it. The form of the mega-project is of course not new (e.g. Rockefeller Center, or for that matter Versailles); what is dramatically more emphasized is the security such projects provide, with restrictions on access, private security, surveillance cameras, etc. Residentially, gated communities repeat the pattern on a different scale.
Increase segregation. The net result of these changes has been to increase the segregation of the city. The rich live in citadels, or at least in buildings with private security; everyone else lives in residential areas largely dependent on public services for protection, for transportation, for recreation, for health care. The distortion of public budget priorities brought about by the priority given to expenditures for security against the threat of terrorism, expenditures concentrated in “high value” areas, mean public services in low-priority areas are neglected, streets in worse repair, schools overcrowded, libraries closed, police protection reduced. The differences among suburbs serving different classes is similarly increased by the cutbacks in public expenditure for the lower-class suburbs more dependent on public services and facilities for their survival. Francisco Klauser speaks of the “creation of urban archipelagos of security and commerce” created in the name of security for the World Soccer Cup championship in Berlin.⁴¹
One should be able to trace the segregation-impact of responses to the threat of terrorism by looking at the geography of defensive measures, and particularly of public surveillance (private surveillance and private security measures there have always been: shop-lifting and petty thievery are not limited to any one class, as Leona Helmsley’s case testifies). The geographic distribution of street surveillance devices would be an interesting empirical representation of the spatial divisions of residences and activities by class. Certainly the spatial distribution of road barriers, bollards, stationary street-level police observation posts, as witnessed by the fortification of lower Manhattan or the “ring of steel” around the City of London (its financial district) support a pattern of segregation.
Restrict the use of public spaces. The most egregious example of this was the conduct of the police during the recent Republican convention in New York City, in which demonstrators using the public streets were barricaded in, severely restricted in their movements, kept away from the convention they were protesting about, and arrested on charges thrown out subsequently by the courts,⁴² with the city paying compensation to many unlawfully arrested.⁴³ Central Park, a place where before 9/11 mammoth concerts had taken place, as well as mass meetings and protects, was declared off limits for protests. Rudolph Giuliani, the law-and-order mayor of New York City, tried to limit all sorts of political activities on the streets and in public places, only to have his restrictions frequently declared unconstitutional by the courts as restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly.⁴⁴
Limit democracy. These restrictions on the use of public spaces themselves constitute a severe limitation on the ability to practice democracy. But the omnipresent surveillance, the hostility to difference: If you see something, say something–see what? Anything out of the ordinary? Immigrants, those of darker complexion, those of different religious practices, are particularly affected, but the involvement of ordinary citizens in activities critical of existing government and institutions is inevitably severely dampened.
The extraordinary multiplication of surveillance cameras in New York City has been documented, and their chilling effect on freedoms is well argued in a recent report of the New York Civil Liberties Union.⁴⁵ Similar information is available on Chicago.⁴⁶
Extend privatization of the public sector. The privatization of social and public activities and places is of course a phenomenon long antedating the new threat of terrorism, and a key component of the dominant neo–liberal philosophy and practice.⁴⁷ But the prominence of the threat of terrorism has accentuated the advantages that private enclosed malls, private athletic clubs, private meeting halls and conference centers, privately provided security, private buses and taxis, have over their public counterparts.
Undermine urbanity. Putting all of this together, the impact on urbanity is inescapable–never mind the national-level reinforcement of a conservative, militarily oriented, secretive government and the support given to shows of patriotism by the mass media and political leaders. The diversity, the openness, the tolerance, the think diversity, the free interchange of opinions, the chance encounters with difference, the freedoms that city life in theory connotes, are all impaired. Much more thanthe manipulation of the threat of terrorism of course leads to this result, and the existential anxieties off of which the worry about terrorism feeds would find their expression in other anti-urban, anti-liberal forms even without the threat of terrorism. Yet the way that threat is used contributes its bit to the decline of the urban quality of life in cities that is visible today. As P. Gilroy has it:


National chauvinism, racism, hostility to the different. Racism and xenophobia are very close to the surface in the response to the threat of terrorism. The countless stories of people alerting the police to some ordinary action of a person of Arab appearance, on some normal Muslim activity (praying in an airport is a recent example), the hostility taxi drivers of dark complexion experienced in New York City after 9/11,⁴⁹ the anti-immigrant sentiment in Congress, is virtually a resurgence of Edward Said’s Orientalism in the depth and breadth of its ideological and emotional attitudes. Angharad Closs points out how clearly Tony Blair used the London bombings to support an emphasis on British nationalism; she quotes his probably innocent but revealing formulation:

As much as “we” do–“we”, the real British.
One final and somewhat more speculative point: the difference in the response to actual terrorism as opposed to the response to other real disasters. The hypothesis is this: The class and anti-imperial character attached to terrorism distinguishes it from most other disasters of as great or greater impact. Both the response to terrorism and the measures to prevent it are distinguished from their parallels in other disasters by this class character. In the United States, class is intimately bound up with race and ethnicity. Class and race thus distinguish the response to 9/11 in New York City from the response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
The theory is simple: terrorists, wishing to influence public actions, will seek to strike at the seats of power: government offices, the holders of economic power, those perceived as the rulers and the powerful. The powerful know this; they have, in the United States, seen it in action in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They will give a top priority to avoiding such attacks and remedying their damage if they do occur.
On the other hand, disasters precipitated by natural forces are much more likely to affect the poor, who are more likely to be restricted in their choice of locations to environmentally undesirable and often hazardous sites: flood plains, earthquake-prone areas, and to have available to them much fewer means of protection than the rich: e.g. earthquake-proof construction, berms against erosion. Thus measures to avoid such disasters or to remedy their damage if they do occur receive a much lower priority than is the case with the impact of terrorism or its threat.
As evidence, the disparate response to the consequences of 9/11 and to the consequences of Katrina seem quite convincing.
Look at the class and racial composition of the victims of Katrina:

John Logan summarizes the careful analysis: “The data for the total region show that in several respects the neighborhoods of social groups with least resources were the ones most affected by Katrina.”
Now look at the major firms in occupancy at the World Trade Center on 9/11:


And put that comparison next to the treatment of the victims of the two disasters:
In the most direct comparison between the response to 9/11 and the response to Katrina, the amounts paid to compensate victims and their families offers a possibility for quantitative comparison. The facts are that the families of those killed in New York received a total of $7,049,000,000, with an average award of over $2,000,000 and a top award of over $6,000,000. The average award for those injured was nearly $400,000. This is all only from the Victims Compensation Fund established by Congress after 9/11.⁵¹ Adding compensation from all sources, the total received was at least $38,100,000,000.⁵² From all government sources together, federal, state, and city, victims received $15,800,000,000.
By comparison, and no such fund was established for the victims of Katrina, and the maximum required payment to the families of the victims was the coverage of funeral expenses.
The class of those affected may have something to do with it. Is it possible to compare the reaction to the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer, a former officer of the SS and NSDAP member who was then president of the German Employers’ Association (and thus one of the most powerful industrialists in West Germany) who was abducted and ultimately killed in a violent kidnapping by the Red Army Fraction, the so-called “Baader-Meinhof Gang”⁵³ as a representative of the ruling class, with the reaction to less highly targeted victims of attacks where the victims were hit at random? I do not know the history of European responses to terrorism well enough to know whether the point has any validity.
After the bombing in the London subway in July, 2005, Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, said:

For the United States, one might use the formulation of “imaginative geographies” that Stephen Graham explores ⁵⁵ in the context of the discourses and treatments of “western” vs. “Arabic” cities to speak of a similar imaginative geography separating winner cities from loser cities, with the discourse of the Global City playing the role that Orientalist discourses played vis-a-vis the east in Edward Said’s writing.⁵⁶ The parallel is more complex, for it is really the equation of central business districts focused on finance and global trade of “global cities”, that play the role of the west, while the ghettos and tenement quarters of those same cities are relegated to the same secondary importance and service functions that colonial cities played in Said’s discussion. In this imaginative geography, the distance between lower Manhattan and the ninth ward of New Orleans is astronomical. Could one speak of “global cities” as opposed to “unglobal cities” within the more developed world in somewhat the same relationships as Graham and Said expose, with unglobal cities to be found not only outside but also within global cities? The problem is ironically even verbal in London, where “the City” becomes equated with “the city”.
Some ill-informed people think that all we are doing is protecting those “fat cats” in the City. The reality is that if the City of London is brought down economically, perhaps never to be recovered, then all of us … will be the losers from the damage done to the nation’s economy … It would be difficult to overstate the importance of securing the City against that threat. Of course, the terrorists, too, see the potential results of their activities and that makes the City their most desirable target.⁵⁷
So all parts of the city are not alike, just as all cities are not alike. And reactions taken purportedly in response to the threat of terrorism can’t accentuate the differences among the parts. Francesc Muñoz goes so far as to suggest anti-terrorism actions can constitute:


It may also be illuminating, particularly when thinking of appropriate policy priorities, to see disasters (including those produced by terrorism) as a subcategory of the broader field of risks.
The concept of precautionary principle obscures more than it helps, as does the idea of the Risk Society, which effectively naturalizes the risk of environmental damage, removes human agency from the picture, and promotes unending and inevitable anxiety.
By contrast with other risks, the risk of injury from terrorism is not overwhelming. Other risks (I write this as 30 students were killed on a college campus in Virginia while some 200 million firearms are abroad in private hands in the land,⁵⁹ and the homeless from the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans are not yet re-housed) are probably greater, yet we do not ban unlicensed firearms or stop global warming–not to speak of providing equal educational opportunities for all our residents. But the media-supported constant focus on “terrorism” creates an atmosphere of fear out of proportion to the threat, and used to reinforce the existing structures of power, both in the established political regime and in the broader economic relations of power and exploitation.
People without thinking about it evaluate alternate risks every day as they go about their daily lives. The responses of different individuals to different risks will vary. When the federal government declares an orange risk for the subways of New York City, the reaction of the New York City Police Department to put police very visibly, and with much publicity, on many (but a minority of) cars will increase insecurity and be seen by some as a reason to avoid the subway–but the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers will continue to use it. As indeed did the majority of train riders in Madrid and Underground riders in London–seeing the threat of further terrorism as simply another question of safety, assessing the risk, and riding. The official and media insistence on the threat and the reality of the danger from it are only loosely linked, and both vary substantially from group to group and place to place.
If only governments evaluated risks as sensibly as subway riders do!
1. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina#Storm_history>. For more details on the comparison, see Marcuse, Peter, “Ignoring Injustice in Disaster Planning: an Agenda for Research on 9/11 and Katrina”, forthcoming.

2. Gillespie, Angus K., Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Center, New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1999. For a more political account, see Fitch, Robert, The Assassination of New York, London: Verso Press, 1993.

3. «Bond brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost nearly 700 employees in the World Trade Center attacks on September 2001, has filed a $7 billion lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda, and dozens of Middle East banks and other organizations». <http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx ?guid=%7B61D0DEBE-8792-4950-B90E-F061D483AB0B%7D&siteid=mktw>.

4. See also on 27 December 2001, a second bin Laden video was released. In the video, he stated “Terrorism against America deserves to be praised because it was a response to injustice, aimed at forcing America to stop its support for Israel, which kills our people”, but he stopped short of admitting responsibility for the attacks. “Transcript: Bin Laden video excerpts”, BBC News, 27 December 2001. A 1998 fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu-Yasir Rifa’i, Ahmad Taha, Shaykh Mir Hamzah, and the Amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh, Fazlur Rahman. The fatwa lists three “crimes and sins” committed by the Americans: U.S. military occupation of the Arabian Peninsula; U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people; U.S. support of Israel. The fatwa states that the United States “plunders the resources of the Arabian Peninsula; dictates policy to the rulers of those countries; supports abusive regimes and monar chies in the Middle East, thereby oppressing their people; has military bases and installations upon the Arabian Peninsula, which violates the Muslim holy land, in order to threaten neighboring Muslim countries; intends thereby to create disunion between Muslim states, thus weakening them as a political force; supports Israel, and wishes to divert international attention from (and tacitly maintain) the occupation of Palestine.” “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders: World Islamic Front Statement” (23 February 1998), cited in: <http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11%2C_2001_attacks#_note-52>.

5. Bush, George W., «Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People», 20 September 2001, text at: <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html>.

6. Excerpts from text of Osama Bin Ladin’s audio tape, robert-fisk.com (14 February 2003). Retrieved on 26 April 2007. Quoted in: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11%2C_2001_attacks#Damage>.

7. «9/11 Commission Hearings for June 16, 2004», transcript at: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/articles/A46525-2004Jun16.html>.

8. For the extent of the widespread linkage between Arab identity or looks and suspicion of terrorism, see Foner, Nancy (ed.), Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11, New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 2005. Even security officials believe profiling is useless. “President Bush’s former deputy homeland security adviser was named counterterrorism chief for the New York Police Department, officials announced yesterday. Falkenrath, 37, said ‘In the past four years, attacks in the West have been homegrown, forming spontaneously with only limited links to terror, not foreign operatives trained abroad’, he said. ‘But anything can happen if you let your guard down, so you have to focus on both.’” (Daily News, <http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/430235p-362725c.html>.)

9. Williams Timothy, «In Bronx Murder Case, Use of New Terrorism Statute Fuels Debate», In: The New York Times, 8 July 2006, p. B1.

10. Archibald, Randall C., «Border Patrol Draws Scrutiny as its Role Grows», In: The New York Times, 4 June 2006, p. 1.

11. Details in the database at <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/washington/12assets.html>.

12. See Washington D.C. Metropolitan Planning Agency’s guidelines, and citations In: Vale, Lawrence, “Securing Public Space”, typescript, fall, 2005.

13. Meant here is not the legal definition of personal property, which would include yachts and industrial machinery not nailed to real property but rather items of personal use: household goods, personal jewelry, clothing, dishes.

14. <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/us/politics/26giuliani.html?ex=1179374400&en= eb5a02f066 4bd597&ei=5070>.

15. Herbert, Bob, «America the Fearful», In: The New York Times, 15 May 2006, <http:// select. nytimes .com /2006/ 05/15/opinion/15herbert.html?th&emc=th>.

16. 5 October 2005, quoted by CNN, reported at: <http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS / 10/06 / bush.iraq>.

17. For insider and outsider views see: <http://www.motherjones.com/ news/feature /2002 /09 /ma _106_01.html ?welcome=true / http://www.newsletters.forbes.com/servlet/ControllerServlet? Action = DisplayPage&Locale =en_US&id=ProductDetailsPage&SiteID=es_764&productID=10294900>.

18. And not only in the United States. In the United Kingdom, it is now a three- to four-billion pound industry with half a million “security operatives”, almost four times as many as there are public police officers in the United Kingdom. The Security Industry Authority, and its licensing powers, were established by legislation in 2001. <http://www.the-sia.org.uk/home>.

19. Homeland security generates multibillion dollar business, report available at <http://www. usatoday.com/money/industries/2006-09-10-security-industry_x.htm>.

20. Scahill, Jeremy, «Bush’s Shadow Army», In: The Nation, 2 April 2007, p. 13. A full-length account is in Scahill, Jeremy, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, New York: Nation Books, 2007.

21. Commenting on a bill to spend $4 billion fortifying the New York City subway system, which restricted expenditures for equipment, not payroll. Eisenberg, Carol, «NYC counter-terror chief urges stiffer subway protection», In: New York Newsday, 7 March 2007, available at: <http://www.newyorkfreestyle.com / freestyle/showthread.php?p=11469>.

22. <http://www.securitychinaexpo.com/market.html>.

23. For an excellent full-length discussion, see Kellner, Douglas, Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles, Boulder (CO): Paradigm Publishers,  2005. Also useful Kavoori, Anandam P. and Fraley, Todd (ed.), Media, Terrorism, and Theory: A Reader, Series: Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture, Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006.

24. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,76887,00.html?sPage=fnc.specialsections/homelandsecurity>.

25. «The Economic Impacts of a Terrorist Attack on the Downtown Los Angeles Financial District», by Harry W. Richardson, Peter Gordon, James E. Moore II, University of Southern California, and Qisheng Pan, Texas Southern University.

26. For a more general discussion of the role of social science research in addressing social problems, harking back to C. Wright Mills’ Sociological Imagination, see Marcuse, Peter, «Ignoring Injustice in Disaster Planning», forthcoming.

27. C. Wright Mills begins his classic Sociological Imagination with the following: “Nowadays, men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their problems, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct ... and the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. Underlying the sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies.” (p. 3.) “It is true, as psychoanalysts continually point out, that people do often have ‘the increasing sense of being moved by obscure forces within themselves, which they are unable to define.’ But it is not true, as Ernest Jones asserted, that ‘man’s chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and the dark forces pinned up within him.’ On the contrary: ‘Man’s chief danger’ today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its developing techniques of political domination, its international anarchy – in a word its pervasive transformation of the very ‘nature’ of man and the conditions and aims of his life. It is now the social scientists’ foremost political and intellectual task – for here the two coincide – to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference.” (p. 3.)

28. Frances Piven and Richard Cloward spell this out in detail in Piven, Frances Fox, and Cloward, Richard A., Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, New York: Vintage Books, 1971.

29. See Boudreau, Julie-Anne, «Urban Revolution or Urban Involution? Reflections on Fear and Political Action», in this book.

30. See Boudreau, Julie-Anne, «Urban Revolution or Urban Involution? Reflections on Fear and Political Action», in this book.

31. See Furedi, Frank, «Fear Rules: The Expansion of the Empire of the Unknown», in this book.

32. CUNY Graduate Center, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, available at: <http://web.gc.cuny.edu/pcp/index.html>.

33. “…anxiety is ontological in character. It is ontological because it is the necessary concomitant condition of the fact and structures of existence. Man is faced with one basic threat—the possibility of nonbeing. In an absolute form, he is threatened with the total extinction of being. In an absolute form, he is threatened with the total extinction of being. In a relative form, he is threatened with personal death and with the failure of personal fulfillment—with the loss of being and becoming. Ontological anxiety has to do with the absolute threat of extinction and ontic anxiety with the relative threat to self-preservation and self-enhancement. From this condition there is no escape.” Hendrix, Harville, «The ontological character of anxiety», In: Journal of Religion and Health, vol. 6, no. 1, January 1967.

34. Press briefing, February 2002. Quoted by Furedi, Frank, in «Fear Rules-The Expansion of the Empire of the Unknown», paper at conference on the Architecture of Fear, 17-18 May 2007, Barcelona.

35. See «The city’ as perverse metaphor», In: CITY: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, vol. 9, no. 2, July 2005, p. 247-254.

36. In Graham, S., «Cities and the ‘war on terror», In: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 30, no. 2, 2006, p. 255-276.

37. The argument that follows is spelled out in more detail in Marcuse, Peter, «Ignoring Injustice in Disaster Planning: an Agenda for Research on 9/11 and Katrina», forthcoming.

38. See Closs, Angharad on: London after the subway attacks, «Seven Million Londoners, One London’: National and Urban Ideas of Community in the Aftermath of the 7 July 2005 Bombings in London», in this book.

39. “…the freedom Tower is conceived as a barricaded fortress. Its base, a 20-story-high windowless concrete bunker that houses the lobby as well as many of the structure’s mechanical systems, is clad in laminated-glass panels to give the visual allure, but the message is the same: it speaks less of resilience and tolerance than of paranoia; it’s a building armored against an outside world that we no longer trust.” “A tower that sends a mixed message of anxiety, not ambition” (Ourossoff, Nikolai, The New York Times, 19 February 2007). The tower will have an underground security screening area and an extra set of stairs for rescuers. Special filters in the ventilation system will protect against biological and chemical attacks. In June 2005 the New York Police Department forced David Childs to set back his new building 90 feet from West Street instead of the original planned 25 feet, thus leading to the elimination of the unconventional twisted shape that Liebeskind gave to the tower.

40. A number of critics (notably Derek Murdoch in the National Review) have suggested that it is alienating and dull, and reflects a sense of fear rather than freedom, leading them to dub the project “the Fear Tower”. Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic for the New York Times, calls the tower base decorations a “grotesque attempt to disguise its underlying paranoia … Mr. Childs said the base, made of highdensity concrete (he would not specify the thickness of the walls, for security reasons), ‘does the job that the New York City police want it to do, in every respect.’” “Revised Design for Freedom Tower Unveiled, The New York Times”, 28 June 2006, <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/nyregion/28cnd-freedom. html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=46c1550c94e7161b&ex=1179460800>.

41. Klauser, Francisco. «FIFA Land 2006TM: Alliances between Security Politics and Business Interests for Germany’s City Network», in this same book.

42. The NYPD violated the First Amendment when it created a written policy ordering cops to lock up demonstrators overnight rather than write them a ticket, a Manhattan federal jury ruled yesterday. Some 25 to 30 protesters who were tossed in jail at least overnight during the short-lived 2001 policy may be entitled to damages, which will be decided by a separate jury or settlement.” ZAMBITO, Thomas, «Jury rules against NYPD’s rally lockups», Daily News, staff writer, <http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2006/12/ 19/2006-12-19_jury_rules_against_nypds_rally_lockups.html>.

43. A more detailed description of the events is in Marcuse, Peter, «The ‘Threat of Terrorism’ and the Right to the City», In: Fordham Urban Law Journal, vol. XXXII, p. 767-785.

44. For an excellent reasoned presentation of the argument that surveillance limits the appropriate enjoyment of public spaces, see the work of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, <http://www.appliedautonomy. com/isee/info.html>.

45. “Who’s watching? Video Camera Surveillance in New York City and the Need for Public Oversight. A Special Report by the New York Civil Liberties Union”, Fall 2006. Accessible through <http:// www. nyclu.org /pdfs /surveillance_cams_report_121306.pdf>.

46. See open-loop.org.

47. See Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

48. Quoted in Graham, S., «Cities and the ‘War on Terror», In: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 30, no. 2, 2006, p. 258.

49. See Foner, Nancy (ed.), Wounded City: The Social Impact of 9/11, New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 2005.

50. A listing by floors is at:: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tenants_in_One_World_Trade_Center>.

51. All figures from the Final Report, Kenneth R. Feinberg, Special Master, September 11th Victims Compensation Fund, vol. 1, n.d. Available at: <http://www.usdoj.gov/final_report.pdf>.

52. Dixon, Lloyd and Stern, Rachel Kaganoff, «Compensation for Losses from the 9/11 Attacks», The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica (CA) November 2004.

53. Details and good links at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction#Autumn_1977_.28German_ A utumn.29>.

54. <http://www.london.gov.uk/londoner/05Aug/mayors-message.jsp>, cited in an illuminating paper by Closs Stephens, Angharad, «Seven Million Londoners, One London’: National and Urban Ideas of Community in the Aftermath of the 7 July 2005 Bombings in London», in this book.

55. See supra.

56. See Marcuse, Peter, «Said’s Orientalism: A Vital Contribution Today», In: Antipode, vol. 36, no. 5, November 2004, p. 809-817.

57. Coaffee, Jon, «Recasting the ‘Ring of Steel’: Designing Out Terrorism in the City of London?», in Graham, Stephen (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; and Terrorism, Risk and the City: The Making of a Contemporary Urban Landscape, London: Ashgate, 2003.

58. Muñoz, Francesc, «Lock Living: El paisaje urbano y el urbanismo de la seguridad», in this book.

59. Herbert, Bob, The New York Times, 10 April 2007, p. A27.