Evolving security motifs, Olympic spectacle and urban planning legacy: from militarization to security-by-design

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the form, function and impact of previous Olympic security arrangements and their intersection with planning practice. Drawing from prior and ongoing empirical research investigating the security practices at summer Olympic Games, the paper argues that wider shifts towards ‘total' security models comprising continually reproduced security motifs can be observed that are increasingly standardized, mobile, globalized and planned-in. For most Olympic organizers, preparations now necessarily include attempts to equate spectacle with safety and to ‘design-out’ terrorism by relying on highly militarized tactics and expensive and detailed contingency planning. Such securitizing practices have intensified in form and scale since 9/11, with such intensification set to continue at the XXXIII Olympiad in Paris, where a vast security infrastructure is being embedded into the large-scale and long-term master-plans for the central city. This represents a high point in spatial planning practice through embracing principles of security-by-design where Games-time security infrastructure, whilst providing effective protection, becomes a less visible but permanent, physical legacy that can also contribute to local programmes of regeneration, climate resilience and crime prevention. The paper concludes by reflecting upon what the continual evolution of security infrastructure means for the balancing of planned-in security and spectacle at future Olympiads.

KEYWORDS:

• Security
• counter-terrorism
• Olympics
• security-by-design
• resilience

Introduction

This paper examines the form, function and impact of Olympic security arrangements from the 1970s onwards and their intersection with planning practice. While requirements for event security are central to contemporary International Olympic Committee (IOC) policies that seek to defend the Olympics from terrorism through the hardening of urban infrastructure and the mobilization of civil defence, many of its characteristics are not new; they are adaptive versions of techniques and strategies that date back to the start of human civilization, with security being viewed as core to urbanism. Taking a longue durée perspective and reflecting the tendency for planning ideas to ‘re-echo, recycle and reconnect’¹ through history, this paper will illuminate how early ideas of urban fortification, and innovative approaches to plan-out-crime that emerged in the 1970s, have formed the basis of contemporary, and still-evolving, security-by-design² approaches used by Governing authorities to enhance protective security at recent Olympics.

Early approaches to urban security

Cities have always been crucibles of civilization and modernity and sites of visionary planning. They have also always been places where risks, threats and vulnerabilities have been concentrated, and where populations have sought protection through techniques of fortification, surveillance and ordering. The relationship between security and urbanization has long been highlighted, perhaps most notably by Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961) in his discussion of the origins of war and the city. This discussion questioned whether there is an inherent pathology within ‘dreams’ of security which leads inevitably to violence, with city design seen to commonly reflect defensive strategies.

As early urbanization proceeded, so the defensive systems deployed by city authorities became increasingly sophisticated to repel the improving strategies of intruders through techniques of ‘target hardening’. This led to the construction of physical barriers such as gates, walls and ditches as the common features of urban defence³ that embodied a ‘seemingly physical, obdurate, premodern signature’.⁴ Alongside fortified walls, environmental features were also integrated into systems of urban security with trenches, undulating slopes and concealed surfaces that give way under a certain weight (so-called tiger traps), used to restrict access to the targeted area. The natural reaction to what Thomas Hobbes had famously referred to in Leviathan (1651) as a ‘war of all against all’ – where the safety of people was seen as the supreme law – was an ‘elaborate system of fortifications, with walls, ramparts, towers, moats and ditches that continued to characterise the chief historical settlements until the eighteenth century’.⁵

Defensive needs came to increasingly shape city spaces and became a perquisite if cities were to survive and thrive. Here though, the development of defensive features was not necessary a defensive strategy to prevent imminent attack, but rather to pre-emptively prepare for future attacks or warfare. In later work, notably, Clausewitz’s famous treatise On War (1873 [1984]),⁶ defensive fortifications were seen as an integral part of the overall strategy of war, where accordingly, the organization of war was inherently connected to the organization of city spaces.⁷ From the eighteenth century, the value of fortifications was placed ‘not only on the resilience of walls but also on lines of sight, the ability to survey the battlefield, and the possibility of strategic manoeuvre’.⁸ Such security approaches were often the result of plans drawn up by what Mumford described as ‘military engineers’⁹ that had specialized knowledge in the mathematics of fortification techniques that separated them from earlier military architects.¹⁰ In practice, plans could be ‘easily transposed from the design of battlefields to the design of urban systems’.¹¹ Most notably, central places with radiating avenues were seen as an ‘ideal’ design that gave an unparalleled vantage point where ‘the artillery could command every approach’.¹² Such ‘military operations as urban planning’¹³ foreshadowed Baron Haussmann’s boulevard scheme to rebuild Paris that was commissioned by Napoleon in the 1850s. A less well publicized, but essential element embedded within Haussmann’s plan was to enable territorial control of populations by the military because of the newly constructed wide thoroughfares that facilitated troop movement, policing and social and military order.¹⁴

Defensive design

A century after Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, the relationship between security and planning underwent a further paradigm shift. Urbanist Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities – published in 1961 – highlighted how urban design could contribute to diminishing community safety and developed the concept of ‘eyes on the street’ whereby the more people in the streets, the safer they became through the enhancement of informal surveillance. Her observations also elucidated the importance of the urban design in producing, or mitigating, potential criminogenic environments, influencing human behaviour and affecting quality of life.

With further research from the late 1960s onwards also indicating a causal relationship between certain types of environmental morphology and reduced levels of violence, urban design and planning tools were increasingly used to address both the causes of crime, disorder and incivility, and its impacts. Criminologists argued that the strategic manipulation of the built environment could create places that would discourage unwanted behaviours (particularly opportunistic crime) and encourage ‘good citizenship’ with emerging Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) approaches attempting to create environments which could actively deter crime.¹⁵ Such ideas were further progressed when architectural designer Oscar Newman published Defensible Space – Crime Prevention Through Urban Design in 1972, provoking an intense debate in planning practice on the relationship between crime and the built environment. The theory of defensible space encompassed a ‘range of mechanisms – real and symbolic barriers … that combine to bring the environment under the control of its residents’¹⁶ and offered as an alternative to the target-hardening measures that were being rapidly introduced to American housing at this time. That said, Newman did not rule out the use of obtrusive security fences or electronic surveillance technologies, but relying on these measures was seen as a last resort if subtler design solutions were unsuccessful.

Since their incorporation into mainstream urban planning in the late 1960s, defensive design measures were further advanced due to rising crime rates and fear of crime, the escalation of social conflicts related to material inequality, intensifying racial and ethnic tensions and, of particular relevance to this paper, increased attacks by terrorist groups against urban areas that often combined defensible space’s emphasis on territory with physical barriers.¹⁷ Since this time, an increasingly sophisticated array of fortification, and surveillance techniques based on defensive design principles have been deployed by urban and policing authorities in attempts to reduce crime and terrorism. Defensible Space/CPTED ideas can be further traced through various formal urban design guidance as well as more recent approaches to sustainable development, new urbanism and design-led urban renaissance that have often been underpinned by the concept that ‘form follows fear’.¹⁸ As Mike Davis highlighted in his 1980s portrayal of Los Angeles in City of Quartz, ‘one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus into a single comprehensive security effort’.¹⁹ It is this amalgamation of planning and security ideas and practices that increasingly forms the basis of more recent Olympic safety and security regimes. Here the Olympics are viewed as spectacular terrorist targets, which require defending through highly militarized tactics, advanced surveillance, detailed and expensive contingency planning and, increasingly, designed-in security interventions based on reimagined defensive design principles.

Olympic security

As a condition of staging the Games, the IOC has increasingly placed responsibility on host cities to provide a safe environment for the ‘Olympic Family’ (competitors, officials and dignitaries), while ensuring that such security planning does not get in the way of the sporting spectacle. As one commentator observed at the turn of the twenty-first century, ‘the IOC has made clear that the Olympics are an international sporting event, not an international security event, and while Olympic security must be comprehensive it must also be unobtrusive’.²⁰ In the wake of the epoch-defining terrorist events of 9/11, 2001, the security deployed for major urban-based events, notably the Olympics, has progressively embodied a range of ‘new’ counter-terrorism practices to secure such ‘soft targets’ resulting in such events proceeding against the backdrop of ‘lockdown’ security.²¹ Here, planning for the worst through pre-emptive actions have been increasingly mobilized, illustrating the powerful symbolic connection between hosting large sporting events with their ‘threat rich’ environment, and the fear of terrorist violence.²²

The Olympics hold significant symbolic value for a diverse range of terrorist actors and, with the highly visible policing and military hardware on display, raise political questions over the proportionality of security responses, not least in the way ‘threat’ can be resolved through the imposition of increasingly exceptional and standardized security models.²³ Since 9/11, there has been a progressive global standardization of Olympic security strategies comprising continually reproduced security leitmotifs.²⁴ Such orthodoxies have impacted upon the physical, organizational and technological aspects of security at Olympic sites, as well as the urban spaces and communities in which the sporting venues are located. Such securitization is increasingly viewed as part of an urban ‘battlespace’²⁵ and ‘as terrain in which military tactics and weaponry are necessary to control crowds and prevent and respond to terrorist attacks’.²⁶ The perceived requirement for Olympic event security also serves another purpose; as an ideal urban laboratory for the testing of an array of new technologies, techniques of social control, or security procedures, that are seen as necessary as part of the wider War of Terror, as well as facilitating the permanent embedding of security infrastructure into the everyday urban landscape. As has been well documented, increased fears of international terrorism has led to the cost of recent Olympic security operations increasing dramatically, with a large proportion of this enhanced cost being attributed to extra security personal as well as an array of temporary protective security measures.²⁷

There is of course nothing new about the deployment of counter-terrorism approaches at major sporting events. The foundations of such practices were laid in the 1970s and 1980s, that in time, would support the architecture of contemporary major event security programmes. Notably, the Black September attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, saw a massive ramping-up of counter-terrorist practices and investment in security infrastructure from Montreal 1976, onwards. For most Olympic organizers – as highlighted in complex security plans now produced – preparations for the Games necessarily include attempts to equate spectacle with safety and to ‘design-out’ terrorism, often by relying on highly militarized tactics and expensive and detailed contingency planning. The ever-present risk of terrorism has often seen core notions of Olympic spectacle replaced by dystopian images of ‘cities under siege’, ‘spaces of exception’²⁸ and ‘total security’ models as organizers attempt to deliver an Olympics, in maximum safety and with minimum disruption to the schedule.

Drawing on extensive archival research, ethnographic fieldwork at more recent Olympic Games, intensive consultation with planners and security professional regarding the design of protective security for Olympic event venues and the array of public places in the host city and, the development of UK and European planning and design guidance for urban security, this paper identifies how Olympic security practices have intensified in form and scale over the last fifty years and have progressively incorporated the voices of urban planners. As will be highlighted, in more recent years these security elements have come together in a widely adopted security management ‘model’ for Olympic Games, which comprises elements of governance and organization which seek to forge relationship between the numerous public safety agencies, including urban planning, state security services, and the local Organizing Committee. This follows the example set over 30 years ago by the successful use of a dedicated Olympic police force at the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway. As militarized security regimes have become progressively normalized at the Olympics, the role of urban planning in these security operations has been enhanced with designed-in security features constructed to mitigate the impact of any would-be terrorist attack. Such protective features simultaneously provide an enduring physical legacy of safety, security and crime prevention for the host city in terms of a range of increasingly convivial public spaces that are protected with increasingly stealthy and environmentally friendly security infrastructure.

In unpacking the evolution of planned-in security interventions at the Olympics, this paper proceeds in four parts. First, starting with the aftermath of the 1972 Summer Olympics, a detailed analysis of how planned-in security has evolved is presented both before and after the epoch-defining events of 9/11, 2001. The security infrastructure developed for the 2012 Games in London is then detailed with a focus upon how it was informed by historic planning theories and more contemporaneous ideas of legacy. Third, the planned-in security for the 2024 Paris Summer Games is unpacked where a vast security infrastructure is being permanently embedded into the large-scale and long-term masterplans for the central city. Fourth, the paper reflects upon what the continual evolution of security infrastructure means for the balancing of planned-in security and spectacle at future Olympiads.

Securing the Olympic spectacle

Over the previous fifty years, the scrutinizing committees and delegates of the IOC have carefully examined bids to ensure that host cities provide the necessary safety and security required for the smooth running of the Games. This is particularly the case for plans for countering international terrorism, which since the early 1970s, have become a crucial factor in Games preparation. The imperative to address the phenomenon of international terrorism began with the ‘Munich Massacre’ in 1972 when members of the Israeli Olympic team were killed after being taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorist organization, Black September. Whilst the Munich games were the biggest and most expensive ever at the time, security was very low key. The 1972 Olympics were billed as ‘the Games of peace and joy’ to erase memories of the Nazi past, with the security guards in the Olympic complex armed with nothing more than walkie talkies, and with a 2-metre-high mesh fence supposedly offering protection to the Olympic village housing the athletes.²⁹ The subsequent terrorist event, widely considered to have launched a new era of international terrorism, saw the security bill for future Games soar. The events in Munich stimulated a period of reactivity, continuing to this day, whereby organizers have prioritized high-levels security to avoid hosting a repeat tragedy and damaging city and country reputations.

Sharply contrasting Munich’s ‘low-key’ approach to security, little expense was spared on securing the 1976 Olympiad in Montreal. The fallout from Munich and the global condemnation levelled at the IOC and German authorities also led to protection from terrorism becoming the key security concern for Montreal’s organizing committee. This manifested in the first of many ‘total security’ approaches alongside the inauguration of several core principles informing the protection of subsequent Olympics: a strong emphasis on preventative strategies, a conspicuous security force presence, enhanced integrative practices (a failure at Munich) and intensive surveillance measures. Within these general principles, specific measures utilized in Montreal included isolated secure transport corridors between sites, accommodation and transportation hubs, enhanced accreditation requirements for site workers and the first widespread and systematic deployment of closed-circuit television (CCTV) to feature at an Olympics.³⁰ The urban planner’s role at this time was not to construct security infrastructure but to advise on its siting. In time, Montreal’s safety-first approach became a blueprint for future Olympic security operations. Notably, core elements were embraced and consolidated at the next Olympic event at the geographically proximate Lake Placid Winter Games in 1980. Augmenting the Olympic site’s geographical isolation were several strategies aimed at strengthening and surveying its perimeters including 12 ft touch sensitive fencing, voice analysers, ‘bio-sensor’ dogs, ground radar, night vision and CCTV.³¹ Together, these measures drew from strategies deployed to secure military sites and airports. Such was the level of securitization that the post-Games legacy of the Olympic village saw its conversion into a correctional facility. Also of note was the unprecedented scale of private security deployment, a feature that has since become central to almost all subsequent Olympic security operations.

Although seen by some as isolated and distinct from other Olympic operations, the components of Moscow’s 1980 Olympic security strategy further illustrate how these now standardized principles cut across geographical and ideological barriers. For example, the deployment of US-made security apparatus including metal detectors and x-ray scanners used at previous Games, including at Lake Placid, showcases continuity between Moscow and its predecessors. Additionally, the extensive use of innovative zero-tolerance policing approaches and exclusion orders have also featured at subsequent games, notably Sydney 2000, Beijing 2008 and Sochi, 2014 (albeit with variations of scale). Although the contemporary form and function of social control in Brezhnev’s Russia may have allowed these strategies to be applied with an intensity unacceptable elsewhere (it has been argued that 120,000 people were displaced by Moscow’s security strategy³²), many of the underlying approaches have been incorporated into subsequent Olympic security programmes.

After Moscow, the next set of Summer Olympiads were to invest a great deal more time and resources ensuring blanket security for all sporting venues. According to the Wall Street Journal, the average cost of security at the Summer Olympics Games rose from around $80 million to $1.5 billion over twenty years between Los Angeles 1984 and Athens 2004. When viewed based on cost per athlete, this equated to rise from $11,627 per capita to $142,857 per capita. Security for the 1984 Los Angeles Games was organized by the private sector, but successfully launched a relationship between the numerous public and private safety agencies and the Organizing Committee that has been adopted in subsequent Games. In LA, the arguments to spend large amounts of finance on security were largely premised on heightened tensions emanating from the Cold War. Notably, less than three months before the Opening Ceremony, the Soviet Union announced that it was boycotting the Games, blaming not only the overt commercialization of the Olympic spectacle, but crucially a lack of adequate security measures. This, they argued, amounted to a violation of the Olympic Charter.

Similarly, Seoul 1988 witnessed the South Koreans engage in a large-scale security operation, with their major concern being North Korea’s use of Japanese proxies to bomb Korean aviation in the run-up to the Olympics and the spectre of further attacks on the Games. These manoeuvres involved over 100,000 security personal drawn from the police, military and private security forces – the largest in Games history at the time. The organizers also drafted thousands of volunteers in to help with security. The Korean question became further involved in Games’ security when riot police were sent in to break up demonstrations by student protestors seeking unification of the two countries. For many, the security operation in 1988 is what captured the headlines of the news media, rather than sporting spectacle.

The trend of policing-out crime and terrorism continued in Barcelona 1992, seeing the deployment of over 25,000 security personal due to fears expressed over reprisal terror attacks linked to the recently finished 1991 Gulf War, coupled with recent action from the Basque separatist movement, ETA, Catalan separatists, Terra Lliure, and left wing extremists, Grupo de Resistencia Antifascista Primo Octobre. Although the security operation used fewer security personnel than in Seoul, security was highly militaristic at certain sites. The security forces, for instance, constructed large-scale bunkers around the perimeter of the main Olympic Village, with tanks situated at strategic locations. This complemented secure fencing and numerous CCTV cameras within the village, as well as a highly visible police presence at the sporting locations. Once again, the urban planner’s role was consigned to advising on where security measures could best be deployed.

Prior to the Atlanta Games in 1996, terrorism was not considered the major risk facing the Games despite serious terrorist attacks on American soil at the World Trade Centre in 1993, and at Oklahoma City in 1995. Indeed, terrorism ranked behind heat-related illness and the possibility of soccer violence on the official lists of ‘potential worries’.³³ That said, law enforcement agencies assigned more than 20,000 military and law enforcement personnel to monitor security measures, supplemented by 5,000 unarmed volunteer security personnel in an operation that, for some, was seen as the most hi-tech and measured in Olympic history. On the eve on the Games, it was argued that:

When it comes to the security of these games, nothing has been left to chance. An army of law enforcement officers will outnumber the athletes themselves. The security for the 1996 games is said to be the tightest ever in history. Security planners for the Olympic Games have tried to cover every angle possible.³⁴

Despite these intensive preparations, the small-scale pipe-bomb blast that occurred at an unsecured public space designed for the Olympics, killing one person and injuring over 100, re-ignited fears of further attacks.

Fears of the alternative spectacle of violence led to even tighter measures to protect the official Olympic spectacle at Sydney 2000. The cost and sophistication of security rose steeply from that incurred in Atlanta and involved nearly all Australia’s Special Forces plus 30,000 security personnel (drawn from the police, private security and volunteers) who were also called to duty. Even though the National Australian Government considered, in public at least, that the risk of attack was unlikely, the media began highlighting connections between Osama Bin Laden, the most wanted on the CIA’s terrorist hit list, and Australia.

Although no major terrorist incident took place during the Sydney Games, the spectre of terrorist violence took on unparalleled concern for Athens 2004, particularly in view of the security situation in both Greece and internationally, where there was much anxiety over hosting the first post-9/11 summer Olympics (the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City was the first post-9/11 Games). The cost of security increased dramatically despite Greece being the smallest nation to host the Games since 1952 with the authorities spending well over five times more than in Sydney and deploying over 70,000 specially trained police and soldiers as well as another 35,000 military personal to patrol the streets. Military hardware used for security was the most expansive and visible used for the Olympics and included a network of 13,000 surveillance cameras, mobile surveillance vans, chemical detectors, several Patriot anti-aircraft missile sites, NATO troops specializing in responding to weapons of mass destruction, AWAC early warning surveillance planes, police helicopters, fighter jets, minesweepers, and monitoring airships.³⁵

The Olympic stadium in Athens, always likely to constitute the most spectacular terrorist target, received the heaviest fortification and was ‘supposed to be one of the most secure places on earth, impenetrable to terrorists plotting a possible attack’.³⁶ Furthermore, hosting the Olympics forced the Greek state to speed up the modernization of its state surveillance and security systems. For the duration of the Games, Athens became a ‘panoptic fortress’ to give assurances to the rest of the world that the city was safe and secure to host the world’s greatest sporting spectacle.³⁷ However, the retrofitting of such security systems was envisioned as a longer-term project that would be maintained after the Olympics and which critics have argued has become a menace to privacy and civil liberties.³⁸

The IOC’s award of the XXIX Olympiad to Beijing in July 2001 also stimulated large-scale development of the city with ideas of safety and security embedded throughout. Coupled with China’s hosting of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai and the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, the Beijing Games catalysed a monumental security programme across the country both within these epicentres of tourism, and beyond. For example, China’s hosting of sporting mega-events also coincided with the national ‘Safe Cities’ programme aimed at to establish surveillance cameras in 600 cities. Embedded within this programme was an emphasis on technological and surveillance-based approaches and included the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags in tickets to some Olympic events (such as the opening ceremonies) to enable their holders’ movements to be monitored. Despite such headline-catching technologies, the principal emphasis was on developing and inaugurating CCTV networks. This included the ‘Grand Beijing Safeguard Sphere’ (developed between 2001 and the start of the Games) which, according to some claims, cost over $6Bn and invested the city with 300,000 networked and highly capable public CCTV cameras. As elsewhere, these technological approaches were combined with more traditional ‘low-tech’ forms of policing. In particular, the state’s capacity to mobilize security manifested in the deployment of 100,000 personnel whilst policing strategies adopted vernacular interpretation of zero-tolerance strategies adopted at other Olympiads (notably Seoul and Sydney). Moreover, security hardware often found itself centre stage in television coverage with ‘ … the conspicuous placement of ground-to-air missile launchers near the Bird’s Nest stadium formed a striking backdrop for the many televised reports from the Games beamed around the globe’.³⁹

In the Summer Olympics of the post 9/11 era, security was increasingly embraced by host cities as a mechanism that could facilitate broader planning and regeneration ambitions. In other words, whilst the security theatre of the Olympics was played out through a plethora of temporary security barriers, bollards and fences, the use of military technologies and mass policing, more recent Games have sought to permanently embed security features within wider place-making agendas, often as an explicit form of legacy. In the preparation for the 2004 and 2008 Summer Games, the role of the planning profession was still, however, relatively minor and restricted largely to deploying surveillance and smart city strategies. This situation was about to change radically in London as the city prepared for the 2012 Games, with planners becoming principal actors charged with embedding safety and security into regeneration legacy plans for both Games-time counter-terrorism and post-Games crime prevention purposes.

The security games of London 2012

For London 2012, the threat of international terrorism and the ability to respond to such incidents played a critical part in the bidding process and the enacted security plans. The pre-existence of a well-defined and tested security infrastructure that had been established as London’s financial zones had attempted to thwart Provisional IRA bombings during the 1990s, meant that the London’s bid was uniquely placed to offer assurances to the IOC over their security concerns. Unfortunately, terrorism was to dominate media discussion immediately after London was chosen as the host city. On 7 July 2005, the day after the announcement, a series of coordinated bomb attacks took place on the London transport network killing 52 people and injuring over 770 others, prompting even more detailed security plans which ultimately saw the proposed security bill quadruple from £225 million to over £1 billion.⁴⁰

As it evolved, the unprecedented 2012 safety and security programme became laminated onto London’s pre-existing security and counter-terrorism infrastructure that comprised several distinctive features.⁴¹ First, a track record in creating urban enclaves that while not physically gated, were symbolically and technologically demarcated from their surrounding environments to reduce terrorist risk. The most enduring example of such counter-terrorist exceptionality were the security cordons established around financial centres that pioneered both protective designed-in security and state-of-the-art automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology.⁴² As the Metropolitan Police highlighted in 2007, the City of London’s ‘ring of steel’ was an exemplary example of the territorialized security they would be trying to enact for the 2012 Games.⁴³

Second, as part of the spread of this surveillance capability, ANPR cameras were deployed in the Olympic boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets supplementing an already existing capacity to monitor and track local populations built up through a long history of piloting advanced surveillance strategies (Facial Recognition CCTV) in the area through the 1990s.⁴⁴ The third major area of pre-existing counter-terrorist expertise that had been developed in London was the embedding of principles of security and resilience into the strategic management of everyday urban spaces. In 2002, in the wake of 9/11, the Metropolitan authorities established a London Resilience Forum (LRF) which subsequently developed strategic emergency plans for a range of risks including terrorism. Fourth, this need for managerial resilience corresponded with a further strand of UK Government counter-terrorism work around the physical protection of crowded places in which urban planning ideas of CPTED and defensible space were central. From 2005 onwards planning and design modifications were made to many public spaces and sporting venues in London as part of both Olympic preparations and the UK’s ‘War on Terror’ such that security became a material consideration in the planning process.⁴⁵

In a global city famed for its counter-terrorism assets, Olympic operations represented an apex of security planning, leading to London to be dubbed the ‘security games’, or, more negatively, ‘lockdown London’.⁴⁶ The broader Olympic safety and security programme focused upon reducing the vulnerability of important national infrastructures and crowded places to ‘protect the London 2012 Games Venues, events, transport infrastructure, athletes, spectators, officials and other staff and ensure their safe enjoyment of the Games’.⁴⁷ More practically, as noted by the Metropolitan Police five years before the Games, this was a challenging task that:

… will require the largest security operation ever conducted in the United Kingdom. The success of the Games will be ultimately dependant on the provision of a safe and secure environment free from a major incident resulting in loss of life. The challenge is demanding; the global security situation continues to be characterised by instability with international terrorism and organised crime being a key component.⁴⁸

The spatial imprints of such regimes of ‘total security’ combined the advanced tactics and techniques of policing, protective counter-terrorism design and technological surveillance that were marked as a series of familiar operational characteristics for the Olympics. The security approach for the 2012 Games was at least an 8-year process, that followed a standard Olympic security model, although with local differences evident in terms of London’s history of dealing with terrorism as well as the emphasis on legacy.

London’s overall multipronged security approach centred on the main Olympic Park and stadium, with further consideration given to robust security at all Olympic facilities. From a planning perspective, this involved the embedding of security design features into key venues at the concept stage, such as access control and integrated CCTV, the designing-in of ‘stand-off areas’ for hostile vehicle mitigation, and the use of more resilient building materials. CPTED-inspired design approaches were utilized as they had been for several recent London developments including Heathrow Terminal Five, the Millennium Dome, Wembley and Lords Cricket Ground. There were also initial conversations between planners and security experts regarding using the latest innovations in counter-terrorism. This included advanced screening access points – the so-called ‘tunnel of truth’ – which could check large numbers of people simultaneously for explosives, weapons and biohazards – and that could utilize face recognition CCTV that could be compared against an image-store of known or suspected terrorists, and, echoing defensive designs from the mediaeval period, the use of unobtrusive collapsible pavement that gave way under the weight of a vehicle, trapping it in a pit some distance from potential targets.⁴⁹

This interaction of urban planning and security was explicitly linked to a broader stream of work where the UK Government called for counter-terrorism measures to be embedded within the design, planning and construction of public places.⁵⁰ For planners involved in protective security, a series of technical and procedural guides were unveiled at this juncture that showcased how counter-terrorism might be appropriately and proportionately designed into the built fabric of cities, and which were utilized by those in charge of designing Olympic venues. Notably, The Planning System and Counter Terrorism aimed to promote counterterrorism design principles that sort to ‘create safer places and buildings so that people are better protected from terrorist attack’ as well as ‘sustainable, affordable, attractive, and also deliver social goals, for instance, by designing out crime’.⁵¹

Venue-specific security was strategically aligned with security in the wider Olympic Park – a process that began with territorial enclosure five years before Games time. In July 2007, and with little advanced warning, the Olympic Park was ‘sealed’ and nearby public footpaths and waterways closed for public access. An 11-mile blue wooden perimeter fence was established for ‘health and safety’ reasons, and likened to the Belfast peace lines.⁵² This fence was replaced by a £40 m electrified security fence in late 2009 and subsequently evolved into the Command Perimeter Security System with advanced CCTV surveillance at its heart as the Games drew near. Access to the Olympic Park site was limited and closely monitored with biometric checks routinely carried out on construction workers echoing techniques used to secure what are perhaps the most intensely monitored and securitized public spaces: airports. Approaching Games time, a militarized security force visibly policed and technologically monitored the security cordon encircling the site; whilst inside the cordon, landscaped security and crime reduction features, infrastructure strengthening and, electronic devices that scan for explosives, were deployed to ‘push’ possible threats away from the main Olympic site. Likewise, concealment points – areas where explosives might be hidden – were scrutinized and where possible removed (for example bird boxes or litter bins) or sealed (for example, drains).

During the design phase of the Olympic Park areas such counter-terrorism features were simultaneously invested with crime prevention capabilities for the post-games period when the park was to be opened to the public. These security features were designed to be unobtrusive, providing a safety legacy and deterring activities such as joyriding, ram raiding, drug dealing, prostitution, and general anti-social behaviour. This was in line with the wider post-Games objective as outlined in the initial London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Safety and Security Strategy of 2009 which aimed to host an inspirational, ‘safe and inclusive’ Games ‘and leave a sustainable legacy for London’. The fear of a spatially displaced terrorist attack meant security measures blead through the borders of the Olympic Park and saw new forms of protective and technological security permeate across London. Throughout the duration of the Games, the authorities utilized advanced surveillance to track suspects across the city including London’s ever-expanding system of ANPR cameras. Such technological approaches were complimented by high-visibility policing and the deployment of army troops.

Demonstrating the domestic influence on mega-event security planning, an updated Olympic and Paralympic Safety and Security Strategy – A Safe and Secure Games for All – was announced in March 2011, ‘to deliver a safe and secure Games, in keeping with the culture and spirit of the Games … including building security into the venues so they are safe before, during and after the Games’. This security strategy was in line with the latest revised UK National Security Strategy (October 2010) and further harmonized with the third iteration of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST. The CONTEST strategy specifically focused on the 2012 Games, noting that the UK had guaranteed to the IOC to ‘take all financial, planning and operational measures necessary to guarantee the safety and the peaceful celebration of the Games’.⁵³

As the preparations for the Games were finalized, a range of diverse agencies became drawn into play. Here, security planning became managed by the UK Security Services, the Olympic Security Directorate (including specially trained counter terrorism security advisors charged with ensuring the fusion of security and regeneration plans) and multi stakeholder London Resilience Forum who developed detailed pre-emptive security plans to sit alongside pre-existing resilience strategies. Here, a premium was placed on enhanced co-ordination between the various security actors, something that had proved a critical point of failure at other Olympic Games.⁵⁴ As the Games drew near, and interest in London’s state of preparedness intensified, security-related stories flooded the national and international media coverage. Particularly notable was the emphasis on the use of military hardware to control city spaces, airspace or transport corridors. At the Olympic Park, the visual appearance of militarized security was, in large part, restricted to the entrance of the venues where search procedures were carried out by the British Army.

The 2012 Olympics passed off without any terrorist incidents and with minimum disruption, and after the Games, missiles were dismantled, and troops redeployed. Given the focus on security and regeneration legacy in the London plans, the story of securing the London Games did not start on 7/7, nor did it end once the well protected Olympic flame was extinguished at the closing ceremony. Less well documented in the coverage of security planning was the post-Games legacy that was materially inscribed on the East London landscape and improved organizational ways of working between the multiple agencies involved in security planning. As the post-Games period began there was little sign that much of the hi-tech equipment purchased and deployed by police forces had been put away. One such example was the retention of large numbers of mobile ANPR camera units in Newham, one of the five Olympic host boroughs. The security infrastructure embedded within transformative urban regeneration programmes was further promoted as central to long-term community safety. More broadly, it was also hoped that Olympic-related security would assist in developing safer neighbourhoods adjoining the Olympic Park, through measures such as improved lighting, and lead to a reduction in crime and the fear of crime. Post-Games, both the Olympic Village, and the Olympic Park were granted full ‘Secured by Design’ status – the official police security initiative that works with planners to improve the security of buildings and their immediate surroundings to provide safe places – presenting a permanent material security legacy for residents and users.

In recent years legacy has become an Olympic watchword becoming ‘the touchstone’ by which politicians and municipal managers judge the cost and benefits of biding to stage major sporting events. In London, one of the most tangible material manifestations of hosting the Games was the security legacy encompassing the most comprehensive plan seen for urban regeneration and security in modern Olympic history. Whilst at previous Olympics security features have largely been temporary and removed in the post-games period, in London permanent design and planning features were embedded within the material landscape. Likewise, experiences of experimenting with surveillance technologies and the development of significant repositories of knowledge and expertise were retained in London-based networks regarding resilience planning for coping an array of disruptive challenges and securitizing urban areas at home and abroad.

In its development of secure regeneration spaces, London’s security community arguably created a ‘blueprint’ for knowledge transfer across the globe for when mega-events come to town. Explicit examples of the use of knowledge and expertise from London being transferred were clear in plans for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where the legacy of safety and security advances were paramount for the Olympics venues and their surrounds. In initiating physical interventions and social programming Rio’s 2016 Candidate file argued that:

The Games will act as a major catalyst for long-term systemic improvements in safety and security systems in the City of Rio, representing a genuine opportunity for transformation.⁵⁵

Although security practices ultimately became prioritized towards long-term crime prevention programmes rather than international terrorism, security was a major concern for Rio’s organizing committee.⁵⁶ This led public authorities to promise enhanced security ahead of the Games (and the 2014 FIFA World Cup) with resources poured into programmes to reduce crime and improve emergency planning organization and, with authorities prepared to mount an overwhelming security presence at the sporting events to ensure safety. To achieve this a familiar plan was developed in the pre-Games period to that in London where … ‘the security overlay will be based on Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles, to be incorporated into the design of all venues’.⁵⁷

For the 2020 Tokyo Games initial security preparations focused less on conventional threats from explosives and criminality, and more on detecting and mitigating innovative attack trajectories. For example, in December 2018, the Japanese government banned drones from flying over venues being used for the Game over fears they could be weaponized. Hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art CCTV cameras were also installed at venues, on transport systems and in public locations to enhance public safety and security. However, ultimately, the Games were rescheduled for 2021 due to the global COVID-19 pandemic with Tokyo posing a different type of security threat – bio-security – with protocols such as practicing social distancing, regular testing and contact tracing and wearing face masks hastily put in place. The Games were largely held behind closed doors with no public spectators permitted due to the declaration of a state of emergency in the Greater Tokyo Area. This led to the installed security cameras being repurposed for disease prevention, with facial recognition software used to support contact tracing initiatives and slow the spread of COVID-19.

Landscape security in Paris

In its bidding documentation for the 2024 Olympics, submitted in February 2017, the Paris organizing committee argued that safety and security was a top priority and that ‘France offers a peaceful environment and world recognised expertise in securing major international events’ – a reference to their experience of delivering a secure and festive UEFA EURO 2016 tournament ‘in a sensitive security environment’.⁵⁸ They had however only budgeted around $200 Million for Olympic security – seen by many to be wholly inadequate for the challenges posed (London in 2012 spent around $1billion for security). A subsequent budgetary review doubled this to $400 Million.

Whilst the 2016 European football championship had occurred without any major terror-related incident, it had proceeded against a backdrop of heightened national security concerns. France had been on high alert since the January 2015 terror attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and a Jewish supermarket in Paris that killed 17 people and wounded 22, including civilians and police officers. Moreover, in November 2015, Paris was attacked again by a series of coordinated assaults in the city’s northern suburbs. At just after 9pm, three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France stadium, during a football match followed by several shootings and a suicide bombing at nearby cafés and restaurants. Gunmen then carried a mass shooting and took hostages during a concert in the Bataclan theatre. The attackers killed 130 people, injuring over 400 more. That same night, President Francois Hollande, declared a state of emergency across metropolitan France and ordered the closure of national borders. Across the Paris metro area, Hollande further asserted that movement and circulation of people would be restricted, mass gatherings banned, and that there would also be widespread stop-and-search procedures in place throughout city. These measures were reinforced by a large presence of armed police and army on the streets and the establishment of protection and security zones.⁵⁹ Additional terror attacks in France during 2016 led to extensions of the state of emergency, including a series of stabbings allegedly motivated by Islamist extremism. The state of emergency was further prolonged due to a major vehicle-as-weapon attack in Nice on 14 July 2016, where a 19-tonne truck was deliberately driven into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais. Eighty-six people were killed and over 450 injured. Just under a year later in Paris on 19 June 2017, a car packed with guns and explosives was rammed into a convoy of Police vehicles on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, France, killing the attacker.

The Paris2024 bid has proceeded against this backdrop where the national terror threat level was categorized as ‘high’ and with a focus upon providing state-of-the-art security across central Paris and at the 35 venues, including the beach volleyball due to take place at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Subsequent developments in planned-in protective security have included both conventional and innovative security design concepts. Given security concerns, in June 2018, the City of Paris unveiled its newly constructed, but controversial, defences against terror attacks: a ‘ring of steel’ for the Eiffel Tower. Concrete and steel blockers that had encircled the tower from 2016 were replaced by a tall and an apparently impregnatable security belt at a cost of nearly €35 million ($40.1 m). This consisted of 2.5-inch bullet-proof glass walls on two sides of a security square, with the other two blocked off with 10-and-a-half-foot high steel barriers formed from curved prongs in the form of the tower itself. When announced in February 2017 (the same month the Paris2024 bid was submitted) the Paris authorities rejected the term ‘wall’ calling the planned barrier an ‘aesthetic perimeter’ noting that further security and armed soldiers in Paris would not scare tourists: ‘What scares tourists is lack of security, not security.’⁶⁰

However, such obtrusive security measures were seen as only a temporary solution with more upgrades planned ahead of the 2024 Olympics that would see security more fully integrated into the urban realm. Subsequently, while the work to securing the Dame de fer was still being carried out, Paris City Hall launched an international design contest to completely reorganize and rethink the wider Eiffel Tower site. The competition for the large-scale redesign of the area: the ‘Grand site Tour Eiffel: decouvrir, approcher, visiter’ (‘The Eiffel Tower Great Site: discovering, approaching, visiting’) was announced in December 2017 and launched in early 2018. It called for resilient, inclusive, and environmentally oriented designs which would solve the problems of overcrowding, impaired accessibility, insecurity, lack of services, and congested gardens. As such, a public realm upgrade was sought to boost safety, improve the tourist experience and reduce queuing around the tower (seen as both a logistical and security concern). The visitor experience as well as the urban and landscape treatment were to be given pride of place in this project, and it was to be developed in line with the ‘Plan Piéton’ [Pedestrian plan] and the ‘Stratégie Tourisme 2022’ [Tourism strategy 2022] and the oncoming ‘Plan Climat Air Energie’ [Climate Air Energy Plan] in Paris. This project was also part of broader attempt to improve air pollution and liveability in Paris – now often referred to as a ‘15-Minute City’ programme – which has encompassed significant public investments across transportation (including many pedestrianization schemes), environmental sustainability and the enhancement of neighbourhood-level governance.

In May 2019 it was announced that the London-based practice Gustafson Porter + Bowman had won the contest to design a £35 million public realm upgrade. The chosen scheme, dubbed OnE, aimed to create ‘the largest garden in Paris’ with the practice likening its concept to ‘a landscape painting where multiple colours, different textures combine to form a single image, a single mind and a sole composition’.⁶¹ The OnE scheme proposed a unifying central green axis centred on the Eiffel Tower where, ‘a series of reimagined landscapes interlock’ and ‘a new and enlivened public space unfolds as a green promenade towards the gardens of the Eiffel Tower’. Here, the forecourt of the Tower was to function as public space ‘discreetly hidden amongst the trees and where ‘the raised lawns of the Champ de Mars protect and elevate the landscape’ whilst ‘improving pedestrian accessibility and city circulation’ (emphasis added).⁶² The City of Paris and the OnE proposals were seen to represent the vanguard of ‘instituting environmental resilience into an urban context’.⁶³ Through its terracing and undulating landscapes, the scheme embodies a high-point in spatial planning practice by embracing principles of security-by-design: providing effective and proportionate protection with security infrastructure becoming a less visible, but permanent, physical legacy that can also contribute to local programmes of regeneration, climate resilience and crime prevention.

At the time of writing, as the Games preparation entered its final phase, concern continued to be expressed about the draconian and dystopian security that would be deployed with a special focus upon ‘experimental’ AI enabled surveillance technologies. Privacy advocates argued this would become a permanent security infrastructure in the post-Games period with the Olympics used as a pretext for implementation across Parisian public spaces.⁶⁴ More positively, in July 2023 an IOC inspection culminating in a ‘World Security Briefing’ argued that Paris was on track to deliver a safe and secure Games, although they were keeping track of social unrest and recent rioting in the city. Despite this optimism, the ambitious opening ceremony on the River Seine – the first ever not in the main Olympic stadium – was raising security challenges, as were concerns over and sporadic isolated lone-wolf terrorist attacks. For example, in early December 2023 French authorities apprehended a man in Paris near the Eiffel Tower who had fatally stabbed a German tourist and wounded two others. Similarly, a stabbing attack injuring three people at the Gare de Lyon train station in February 2024, just six months before the Summer Games, raised security fears still further. Furthermore, Geopolitically, the impact and potential blowback of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine were being considered in final preparations. In September and October 2023, the Rugby Union World Cup held in France with the final in Paris, gave an opportunity to fine-tune Olympic security procedures, whilst New Year’s Eve celebrations in 2023/24 around the River Seine allowed opening ceremony security procedures to be stress-tested and adjusted if required.

Conclusion: the Olympic security assemblage and security-by-design

Security planning ‘for the worst’ has become a mantra of contemporary urbanism as pre-emptive actions are increasingly mobilized to alleviate fears of potential catastrophe. Such pre-emption developed through the exercising of emergencies in table-top or scenario planning exercises that better allow future security challenges to be addressed, become very visible during Olympic hosting. As noted in one summative piece on Olympic security, the

expressive dimension of security at the Games provides a window into wider issues of how authorities ‘show’ that they can deliver on the promise of maximum security under conditions of radical uncertainty [and] how officials emphasize that they have contemplated and planned for all possible security threats, especially catastrophic threats and worst-case scenarios.⁶⁵

Over many decades, security at the Olympics has become more visible, costly and enduring. Moreover, the numerous security vernaculars which inevitably penetrate the IOC’s governance, given the extraordinary security need experienced by host cities, has enabled increasingly standardized forms of security to prevail. What can be gauged from a study of securitization utilized by host Olympic cities are a series of normalized event security features which combine temporary physical features and the officious management of spaces with the aim of projecting an air of safety and security both for visitors as well as potential investors: the Olympic security assemblage.⁶⁶ Since the 1970s, the nexus of decision-making regarding responsibility for security has expanded: from a central focus upon the military and state security services, towards an amalgamation of these same agencies with built environment professionals, particularly planners, who have now become central to not only the siting of temporary security measures but to the permanent embedding of safety and security features into the wider cityscape.

This growth in the role and importance of urban planning’s role in wider security strategies takes several standardized forms across Olympic host cities before, during and after the Games. Firstly, there is intense pre-planning involving the development of control zones around the venue sites, procedures to deal with evacuation, contamination and decontamination, and major incident access. Technical information is scrutinized for all structures and ventures so that any weakness and vulnerabilities can be planned-out in advance. Such scrutiny also takes place to assess the potential vulnerabilities of all public locations within the host city and region and deploy protective security if deemed necessary. Secondly, there is the development and implementation of ‘island security’ involving the ‘locking down’ of strategic (vulnerable) areas of host cities with large expanses of steel fencing and concrete blocks surrounding the sporting venues. The precise siting positions of these obtrusive security features are governed by a large group of actors, including planners. This ‘island security’ combines with a high visibility police presence, backed up by private security, the security services, a vast array of permanent and temporary CCTV cameras and airport-style checkpoints to screen spectators. Often the Olympics is used to field-test such ‘new’ technologies and procedures. Most recently, in the summer of 2021, many advanced surveillance technologies that made use of facial recognition (and increasingly the internet of things and artificial intelligence) were deployed at the delayed Tokyo 2020 Summer Games for disease prevention, risk assessment and venue security, and in contributing to the legacy aim of making Tokyo and increasingly inclusive and ‘smart’ city. Thirdly, to support the intense ‘island security’, peripheral buffer zones are often set up in advance containing a significant visible police presence. This is commonly backed up by the presence of law-enforcement tactics such as police helicopters, drones, a blanket ‘no-fly zone’, fleets of mobile CCTV vehicles and road checks and stop and search procedures. The result of these measures is that often access to ‘public’ spaces is restricted because of ‘security concerns’. Moreover, ‘exceptional’ security operations often serve to reinforce urban splintering where the spaces utilized for sporting festivals have the potential to become dislocated from the wider geographical contexts of the host city.

Fourthly, increasingly there is increased evidence from the Olympics that a lasting benefit of hosting the games is the opportunity for the retrofitting of permanent security infrastructure linked to a longer-term crime reduction strategies and ‘legacy’. This post-event inheritance of designed-in security infrastructures has become a common Olympic legacy in recent years, although is not unprecedented in Olympic security history. Indeed, the legacy of retained private policing following the Tokyo (1964) and Seoul (1988) Games and the continuation of zero-tolerance style exclusion laws after the Sydney (2000) Games are a case in point. Likewise in Athens, the retrofitting of advanced CCTV security systems was envisioned as a long-term project to be maintained after the Olympics and which was condemned by civil libertarians. In London 2012, the large emphasis on a regeneration legacy for the people of East London also extended to the machinery of security. Indeed, in 2009 the tenders for Olympic Park security providers were encouraging companies to supply ‘security legacy’, thus bequeathing substantial mechanisms and technologies of control to the post-event site that remain to police a large urban parkland that has achieved ‘secured-by-design’ designation.

In preparation for the Paris 2024 summer Games, the permanent embedding of security into the urban realm has taken a further advance. In line with wider European guidance on security-by-design⁶⁷ and the New European Bauhaus, that places and emphasis on building beautiful, sustainable and inclusive spaces, there is encouragement to integrate security into planning and design processes that are more inclusive and participatory by including civil society and wider stakeholder groups. The undulating city garden areas adjacent to the Eiffel Tower that have been developed as part of the Paris2024 security plan are an (in)visible exemplar of this approach. The aim in Paris is to safeguard the open nature of central green spaces whilst concurrently making them more secure through implementing stronger physical protective measures that do not give the appearance of a ‘fortress’, and still allow people to access the site freely and safely.

Whilst variations on these expressions of protection exist, Olympic-based security and counter-terrorism strategies continue to bare remarkable similarities across time and space. By contrast, terrorist threats at such events are almost always grounded in relation to their local setting, yet the strategies designed to counter them are increasingly imported from global patterns of security governance, creating a profound tension between what is being secured and for whose benefit? Notwithstanding the local specificity of Olympic planning, the exceptionality of Olympic security coupled with the transference of its strategies across Olympiads culminates in standardized approaches that map onto the uneven terrain of diverse host cities. Such transferable paradigms seemingly operate as a form of ‘liquid security’⁶⁸ where a shared lingua franca of defensible motifs coalesce into a security assemblage that becomes disassociated from their geographical contexts and once constructed, generate a particular vision of order.⁶⁹

Not unsurprisingly, the increased push for enhanced security across contemporary Olympics has become an ever more complicated and expensive task. Ideally, it requires politicians and a range of other stakeholders to balance several considerations and adopt a proportionate response to minimize disruption to daily activities. As demonstrated across all recent Olympic cities, such proportionality is seldom found, with security lockdowns the preferred modus operandi, as ‘spaces of exception’⁷⁰ become the default option as city and national reputations are at stake. Importantly, though, the temporary retrofitting of such security ‘stage sets’ to promote a particular destination as a safe and secure location, often now leaves permanent legacy of fixed security infrastructure that invite critical interpretations. Specific work on counter-terrorism and design in the 1990s foregrounded how such an ‘architecture of terror’ could be self-reproducing as planning guidelines, once drawn up, would be difficult to withdraw.⁷¹ More recently, pioneering work on normalization and exceptionality of security demonstrates that, once established, such apparently temporary security undergoes a ‘transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government’.⁷² In turn, these techniques realize ‘the production of new norms’⁷³ that become installed in a more permanent ‘normalised’ sense and become instituted into the management of both specific spaces and the broader geographies of exception.⁷⁴

Increasingly, regimes of Olympic security further reflect and exemplify emerging practice-based trajectories in urban planning linked to the protection of cityscapes from terrorist attack. Viewed through the lens of urban security and counter-terrorism, the repeated features of Olympic security strategies coalesce into an overall model that is oriented around several core themes related to enhanced urban militarism, private security, integrated surveillance, rebordering the city through design intervention, and the control of behaviour, all of which in some ways are the responsibility of urban planners. In more recent Olympic cities, balancing inclusive and sustainable design solutions with effective protection, especially regarding hostile vehicles, is a difficult task that requires increased cooperation between security and urban planning professionals to best utilize security-by-design approaches and ensure human-centred rather than fortress design approaches predominate. Whilst it was the 1976 Olympics in Montreal that set the precedent for police-led security approaches, the most recent Olympic experiences illuminate that innovations in planning and design are being mainstreamed within the Olympic security assemblage and look set to be a central feature of security planning at future Olympics as organizers seek to balance spectacle, security and legacy.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon Coaffee

Jon Coaffee is a full Professor of Urban Geography based in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. His research focuses upon the interplay of physical, technical and socio-political aspects of urban vulnerably and he has worked closely with a range of private and governmental stakeholders to ensure his research has real world impact. This work has been supported by a significant number of research grants linked to building resilience across socio-technical systems.

Notes

1 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 7.

2 Coaffee, Fussey, and Moore, “Laminating Security.”

3 Morris, History of Urban Form.

4 Brown, Walled States, 80.

5 Mumford, The City in History, 57.

6 Clausewitz, On War.

7 Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 20.

8 Denman, “On Fortification,” 232.

9 Mumford, The City in History, 442.

10 DeLanda, War in the Age.

11 Denman, “On Fortification,” 237.

12 Mumford, The City in History, 444.

13 Misselwitz and Weizman, Military Operations as Urban Planning.

14 Graham, Cities Under Siege.

15 Jeffery, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, 178.

16 Newman, Defensible Space, 3.

17 Boal, “Belfast 1980.”

18 Ellin, Architecture of Fear.

19 Davis, City of Quartz, 203.

20 Thompson, “Security,” 106.

21 Coaffee and Murakami Wood, “Security is Coming Home.”

22 However, high-profile events have remained relatively untouched by international terrorism, although elevated ‘security’ fears are often a key priority of organising authorities. Exceptions include the pipe bomb attacks at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the Boston marathon bombing in 2013.

23 Coaffee, Fussey, and Moore, “Laminating Security.”

24 Fussey and Coaffee, “Balancing Local and Global.”

25 Graham, Cities Under Siege.

26 Schimmel, “Deep Play,” 162.

27 Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the Global City.

28 Agamben, States of Exception.

29 Reeve, One Day in September.

30 COJO, Official Report of the XXI Olympiad.

31 Lake Placid Organizing Committee, Final Report.

32 Sanan, “Olympic Security Operations 1972–94.”

33 Wall Street Journal, “Securing the Olympic Games.”

34 Macko, “Security at the Summer Olympic Games.”

35 Coaffee and Murakami Wood, “Security in Coming Home.”

36 Peek, “How I Strolled into the Heart of the Games,” 4.

37 Samatas, Surveillance in Greece, 115.

38 Ibid., 17.

39 Boyle and Heggerty, “Planning for the Worst,” 64.

40 Coaffee and Fussey, “Constructing Resilience.”

41 Coafee, Fussey, and Moore, “Laminating Security.”

42 Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the Global City.

43 Metropolitan Police Service, “Olympic Programme Update.”

44 Fussey, “Observing Potentiality.”

45 Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the Global City.

46 Graham, “Olympics 2012 Security.”

47 HM Government, Countering the Terrorist Threat.

48 Metropolitan Police Service, “Olympic Programme Update.”

49 Ultimately, for cost and technological readiness reasons, neither of these innovations were actualised in the Olympic Park.

50 Coaffee, “Protecting Vulnerable Cities.”

51 Home Office, Crowded Places: The Planning System and Counter-Terrorism.

52 The Guardian, “Cordon Blue.”

53 Her Majesty’s Government, CONTEST, 105.

54 Fussey et al., Sustaining and Securing the Olympic City.

55 Rio de Janeiro, Candidate File.

56 Rio2016, Applicant File.

57 Ibid., 27.

58 Paris2024, Candidature File Phase 3, 91.

59 France Diplomacy, “Partis Attacks.”

60 Daily Star, “Now France Wants a Wall.”

61 Architects Journal, “Gustafson Porter + Bowman Wins Eiffel Tower Contest.”

62 Ibid.

63 Architectural Digest, “Paris Announces Plans for a Major New Park.”

64 Politico, “France Sets EU Precedent”; Amnesty International, “France: Intrusive Olympics Surveillance.”

65 Boyle and Haggerty, “Planning for the Worst,” 241.

66 Coaffee, Fussey, and Moore, “Laminating Security.”

67 Coaffee et al., Security by Design.

68 Borrowing from Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

69 Coaffee, “The Uneven Geographies.”

70 Agamben, States of Exception.

71 Pawley, Terminal Architecture.

72 Agamben, States of Exception, 2.

73 Ibid., 28.

74 Notably Foucault, Security Territory, Population; Fussey, “Command, Control”; Coaffee, “The Uneven Geographies.”