New project examines the impact of counterterrorism measures on residents’ everyday experience in European cities

A new European research project starting in January 2021 aims to provide an unprecedented international comparison of how counterterrorism and urban security change the everyday experiences of residents across cities in Europe. The project has been launched by an international team of researchers, led by the University of Birmingham and in collaboration with the University of Plymouth (UK), Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (Germany), CY Cergy Paris Université , and Institut Paris Region (France), and has received over £1.1 million from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (part of UK Research and Innovation), France's Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the German Research Foundation (DFG). In recent years, terrorism has become a predominantly urban phenomenon in Europe. As recent events in Nice and Vienna have shown, there has been a substantial shift in how terrorists operate, moving away from high-profile attacks against key strategic or symbolic sites and attacking instead everyday spaces, like shopping promenades, pavements, hotels, restaurants, or cafes. Terrorism hits the everyday spaces of cities. With that, cities in Europe are continuously developing their defensive infrastructures and policing approaches to respond to such attacks and anticipate threats. However, what is still very little known, and that the project sets out to explore, is how terror threats and counterterror measures alter the actual felt experience of cities for their residents.