URBAN RESILIENCE: RETHINKING URBAN DESIGN FOR DEFENSIBILITY AGAINST TERRORIST ATTACKS

Abstract

The rise of global terrorism in recent decades has emerged as the most pressing concern for urban security globally. As highly dense sites of spectacle, movement and gathering, cities have increasingly been targets of destructive attacks by extremists. Current securitisation methods to safeguard the city and its inhabitants have been focused around prevention through a use of extensive surveillance techniques and fortification of zones. Architectural responses thus far have also been focused on the hardening of individual buildings, but has had little say when attacks take place in open urban arenas. The Boston Marathon and Bangkok Bombings have simultaneously exposed the frailties of limiting securitization to the scale of architecture when contemporary attacks tend to be carried out on an urban scale on the one hand, and on the other, the inadequacies of present urban securitization protocols.

This dissertation is not interested to address the source of radical terrorism, nor the factors that reinforce it. Instead, it is concerned with the role of urban design in mitigating the effects of an attack within the city and facilitating aid responses following the attack. It will do so by introducing a defensive framework to fill the gaps in our understanding of urban defensible space. It will also apply this framework onto a local site to illustrate how the framework can be used to uncover both the vulnerabilities and strengths of a given site. In so doing, an inquiry into if, and how, urban design can increase defensibility against terrorist attacks will be created, in the hope of spurring further investigations into the use of urban design to combat the increasing terrorist threat.