A sobering look at a new need for design - from Failed Architecture:
Making Anti-Terror Infrastructure Pretty: The Most Depressing New Urban Design Challenge
Urban designers are increasingly being tasked with an emergent ‘design challenge’ for public spaces: how best to deliver anti-terror infrastructure while generating a pleasant urban environment. By allowing themselves to be drawn into this challenge, and by dutifully working to respond with creative and constructive solutions, they are inadvertently helping to normalize a creeping ‘fortification’ of our cities that in turn contributes to a wider process of ‘bordering’ across the world.
The trend comes in the wake of a succession of fatal and horrific vehicle-based terror attacks over the past few years in several cities across the Global North, most notably London, Nice, Strasbourg, and New York. Following such attacks, knee-jerk urban design interventions have often involved the haphazard insertion of protective infrastructure into public spaces in the form of reinforced steel fences, cement blockades, and guarded entryways to pedestrian walkways and bike lanes. For example, following the vehicle attack that killed eight people in lower Manhattan on Halloween of 2017, New York’s Mayor, Bill de Blasio, reserved $103 million in the infrastructure budget “to install permanent barriers, bollards, granite blocks, [and] concrete blocks at well-trafficked central areas.”
Of course, this is nothing new for Israel - even their children's playgrounds have bomb shelters.
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