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April 19, 2007
On Terrorism and Securitization
Picketing Henry Ford
Brooklynites are troubled by the lack of scrutiny of the Atlantic Yards project from a terrorism and security standpoint. Picketing Henry Ford author Stuart Schrader just posted a macro-analysis of the causes and implications of this serious situation:
The lawsuit filed recently by opponents of the Atlantic Yards (AY) project seeks to “to annul the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) and the approval of Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project”; defendants are the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB), and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Given their less-than-stellar record on transparency, accountability, and ethics, it may be surprising that these agencies did not jump at the chance to give the AY project a thorough “terrorism” review, assessing its vulnerabilities, because there is nothing more purely unanswerable to public, citizen oversight than claims of national security. But the ESDC, PACB, and MTA (no word yet on the NYPD) punted on the terrorism review.
In this post, I discuss the relationship of political Islamist terrorism to neoliberalism through the lens of this large development project, which is using highly leveraged finances and the high-tech architecture of Frank Gehry. I also discuss “securitization,” a term I am using differently from its traditional meaning, to describe the sublimation of urban security features into a totalizing ideology of security and how this process may negatively affect both the architectural character of the project and the actual people, particularly local minorities, who support the project.
Posted by lumi at April 19, 2007 9:38 AM