Urban anxieties in times of terrorism

Abstract

Urban anxieties are often linked to the perception that certain parts of the cities are off limit, with potential danger lurking on the streets or behind the closed doors. People are however not anxious about environmental dangers, but mostly about the behaviour of other people in public spaces. The paper reflects on how in times of terrorism the question about dangerous individuals more and more focuses on the inside of the human body – the gene and the brain. In this search to map danger, there is a similarity between the social mapping of danger in urban spaces and the biological mapping of it inside the human body. In both cases, danger is perceives as being hidden, opaque, and ungraspable. Behind the desire to clearly map urban danger and to find clear explanation of human dangerousness in the body is the desire to impose new forms of social control. The paper concludes that neuro-architecture and neuro-urbanism also succumb to the desire to find ever new forms of mastery and control of human subjectivity.