Political and Experiential Geographies of Militarised Urban Europe

自2015年以来，欧洲的车辆作为武器（VAW）攻击激增，目标是尼斯，柏林，斯德哥尔摩，巴塞罗那和伦敦的日常城市空间。作为回应，欧洲各地的城市竖起了军事风格的混凝土屏障，以保护拥挤的公共空间。然而，这些临时措施通常已永久嵌入日常街景，对日常城市生活产生重大影响。该项目将调查军事化的反应是如何成为安全的暴力侵害妇女攻击在欧洲的合法和默认的解决方案。从概念上讲，这个项目是由地理奖学金认为，军事化的安全可以从根本上（重新）塑造城市人口的城市体验。学者们担心，这些反应破坏了包含城市命脉的公共空间，并放大了这些措施旨在改善的不安全感。然而，欧洲城市当代军事化安全的经验影响受到了有限的学术关注，（重新）产生了一种“非实体”的理解。因此，迫切需要了解这些反应如何影响城市公民的日常体验。该项目强调军事化安全，并重点关注（后）COVID-19城市转型。在物质上，城市正在加速城市化，以使社交距离和企业能够利用户外空间。除了将病毒传播安全化之外，城市还面临着将暴力侵害妇女行为攻击安全化的挑战，这些暴力侵害妇女行为攻击的对象是这些重新设想的、可能不安全的、被隔离的空间。然而，城市化同时也支持了以前通过对建筑环境进行更微妙和综合的改造来保护公共空间的努力（例如，街道设施），限制车辆进出，但不影响其活力。因此，随着城市经历前所未有的转变，以适应（后）COVID-19世界，这提供了一个新的机会，以确定城市如何适应，并能够适应，以安全化病毒传播和暴力侵害妇女的威胁，而不会使城市景观军事化。本项目解决了以下问题：1.如何以及在何种程度上研究和解构暴力侵害妇女问题军事化对策的合法化机制？2.如何理解城市居民对当代军事化安全的日常体验？3.流行病和安全城市化是如何相互作用的，这种混合在多大程度上产生了安全但又能被社会接受的城市空间？该项目采用了曼彻斯特和米兰之间的比较案例研究方法，关注他们的对比家谱（即，攻击历史、大流行病应对）为当代应对、合法性的地缘政治结构和公民日常接受提供了信息。此外，米兰的COVID-19恢复项目StradeStreets [开放街道]构成了一个实证案例，以调查这种非军事化是否在不使城市中心军事化的情况下使暴力侵害妇女和COVID-19证券化。该项目涉及：（一）与主要利益攸关方进行半结构化访谈，以询问暴力侵害妇女和流行病议程的框架;（二）话语分析，以解构暴力侵害妇女威胁的描述、政策解决方案的处方和促进公民接受的"条件";以及（iii）步行采访每个城市的军事化安全周围的居民，以了解如何体现经验的条件，并通过这种该项目通过解决对流行病应对的担忧，并在前所未有的时代建立增强但相称的城市复原力，同时推进对创新理论和方法论方法如何捕捉军事化安全的经验影响的理解，来追求ESRC的优先事项。

Since 2015, vehicle-as-weapon (VAW) attacks have upsurged in Europe, targeting everyday urban spaces within Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Barcelona and London. In response, cities across Europe erected military-style concrete barriers to protect crowded public spaces. However, these temporary measures have typically become permanently embedded within everyday streetscapes, with dramatic implications for everyday urban life. This project will investigate how militarised responses have become the legitimate and default solution to securitising VAW attacks in Europe.Conceptually, this project is informed by geographical scholarship arguing that militarised security can radically (re)shape how cities are experienced by urban populations. Scholars are concerned these responses undermine the public spaces that encapsulate the very lifeblood of cities and amplify feelings of insecurity that such measures were installed to ameliorate. However, the experiential implications of contemporary militarised security in European cities have received limited scholarly attention, (re)producing a 'disembodied' understanding. Therefore, it is urgent to understand how such responses are affecting the everyday experiences of urban citizens. This project's emphasis on militarised security is complemented by an interwoven focus on (post-)COVID-19 urban transformations. Materially, cities are accelerating pedestrianisation to enable social distancing and businesses to utilise outdoor space. Alongside securitising virus transmission, cities are also challenged to securitise VAW attacks against these reimagined, potentially unsecured, pedestrianised spaces. However, pedestrianisation has concurrently underpinned previous efforts to secure public spaces through subtler and integrative alterations to the built environment (e.g., street furniture), restricting vehicular access without detracting from its vibrancy. Thus, as cities undergo unprecedented transformations adjusting to a (post-)COVID-19 world, this provides a novel opportunity to identify how cities are adapting, and can adapt, to securitising virus transmission and VAW threats without militarising the urban landscape. This project addresses the following questions: 1. How and to what extent can the mechanisms of legitimation of militarised responses to VAW be studied and deconstructed? 2. In what ways can the everyday experiences of urban citizens to contemporary militarised security be understood? 3. How do pandemic and security urbanism interact, and to what extent does, and can, such hybridity produce secure yet socially acceptable urban spaces? This project employs a comparative case-study approach between Manchester and Milan, attending to how their contrasting genealogies (i.e., attack history, pandemic response) inform contemporary responses, geopolitical constructions of legitimacy and everyday (un)acceptance amongst citizens. Moreover, Milan's COVID-19 recovery project Strade Aperte [Open Streets], constitutes an empirical case to investigate whether such pedestrianisation securitises VAW and COVID-19 without militarising urban centres. This project involves: (i) semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders to interrogate the framing(s) of VAW and pandemic agendas; (ii) discourse analysis to deconstruct the delineation of VAW threats, prescription of policy solutions and the 'conditions' to facilitate acceptance amongst citizens; and (iii) walking interviews with residents around each city's militarised security to understand how embodied experiences are conditioned by and emerge through such spatial encounters.This project pursues ESRC priorities by addressing concerns over pandemic responses and building enhanced, yet proportionate, urban resilience in unprecedented times, whilst advancing understanding of how innovative theoretical and methodological approaches can capture the experiential implications of militarised security.