Download or read book Securing the City written by Christopher Dickey and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-02-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The NYPD is the best and most ambitious antiterror operation in the world. Its seat-of-the-pants intelligence is the gold standard for all others. Christopher Dickey, who has reported on international terrorism for more than twenty-five years, takes readers into the secret command center of the New York City Police Department's counterterrorism division, then onto the streets with cops ready for the toughest urban combat the twenty-first century can throw at them. But behind the tactical shows of force staged by the police, there lies a much more ambitious and controversial strategy: to go anywhere and use almost any means to keep the city from becoming, once again, Ground Zero. This is the story of the coming war in America's cities and New York's shadow war, waged around the globe to stop it before it begins. Drawing on unparalleled access to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other top officials, Dickey explores the most ambitious intelligence operation ever organized by a metropolitan police department. Headed by David Cohen, who ran the CIA's operations inside the United States in the 1980s and its global spying in the 1990s, the NYPD's counterterrorism division had uptotheminute details of new attacks set in motion to target Manhattan in 2002 and 2003. New York's finest are now seen by other police chiefs in the United States as the gold standard for counterterrorism operations and a model for even the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet as New Yorkers have come to feel safer, they've also grown worried about the NYPD's methods: sending its undercover agents to spy on Americans in other cities, rounding up hundreds of protesters preemptively before the 2004 Republican convention, and using confidential informants who may be more adept at plotting terror than the people they finger. Securing the City is a superb investigative reporter's stunning look inside the real world of cops who are ready to take on the world and at the ambiguous price we pay for the safety they provide.
Download or read book Securing the City written by Kevin Lewis O'Neill and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-09 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologists and historians examine how postwar violence in Guatemala City is reconfiguring urban space, transforming the relationship between city and country, and exacerbating structures of inequality and ethnic discrimination.
Download or read book Securing the Spectacular City written by Timothy A. Gibson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seattle's project of 'downtown revitalization' is often touted as a civic endeavour that serves the community as a whole. Gibson questions that assumption. He examines the trade-off between the gain produced by redevelopment and the loss of public space.
Download or read book Qatar written by David B. Roberts and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rarely has a state changed its character so completely in so short a period of time. Previously content to play a role befitting its small size, Qatar was a traditional, risk-averse Gulf monarchy until the early 1990s. A bloodless coup in 1995 brought to power an emerging elite with a progressive vision for the future. Financed by gas exports and protected by a US security umbrella, Qatar diversified its foreign relations to include Iran and Israel, established the satellite broadcaster Al Jazeera, assumed a leading role in international mediation, and hosted a number of top-level sporting tournaments, culminating in the successful FIFA World Cup 2022 bid. Qatar's disparate, often misunderstood, policies coalesce to propagate a distinct brand. Whether to counter regional economic competitors or to further tie Qatar to the economies of the world's leading countries, this brand is de- signed innovatively to counter a range of security concerns; in short, Qatar is diversifying its dependencies. Qatar's prominent role in the Arab Spring follows a similar pattern, yet the gamble it is taking in supporting Islamists and ousting dictators is potentially dangerous: not only is it at risk from 'blowback' in dealing with such actors, but a lack of transparency means that clichés and assumptions threaten to derail "brand Qatar."
Download or read book Resilience and Urban Governance written by Katarína Svitková and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the concept of ‘urban resilience’ by exploring its impact and limitations in three cities. Resilience has become a buzzword in science, industry, and policy, and this volume offers a fresh perspective on urban resilience as a regulatory and constitutive principle of governance in cities. Cities constitute an extremely relevant playground for resilience, as they are exposed to various disruptions, from natural disasters and pandemics to political conflicts and terrorism. This book traces the evolution of urban resilience, from international development organizations to local governments and communities. It explores how this concept was adopted and mobilized by different actors for different purposes, and analyses the resulting resilience momentum in Barcelona, San Francisco, and Santiago. The book outlines the extent to which resilience has become a universal policy tool and a desired end-state, despite its clearly problematic definition. It also contributes to the discussion about contemporary governance, safety and security in times when their very nature and feasibility are being questioned. This book will be of much interest to students of resilience studies, urban studies, development studies, human geography and international relations.
Download or read book Securing Borders Securing Power written by Mike Slaven and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 Southwest Book Awards, Border Regional Library Association In 2010 Arizona enacted Senate Bill 1070, the notorious “show-me-your-papers” law. At the time, it was widely portrayed as a draconian outlier; today, it is clear that events in Arizona foreshadowed the rise of Donald Trump and underscored the worldwide trend toward the securitization of migration—treating immigrants as a security threat. Offering a comprehensive account of the SB 1070 era in Arizona and its fallout, this book provides new perspective on why policy makers adopt hard-line views on immigration and how this trend can be turned back. Tracing how the issue of unauthorized migration consumed Arizona state politics from 2003 to 2010, Mike Slaven analyzes how previously extreme arguments can gain momentum among politicians across the political spectrum. He presents an insider account based on illuminating interviews with political actors as well as historical research, weaving a compelling narrative of power struggles and political battles. Slaven details how politicians strategize about border politics in the context of competitive partisan conflicts and how securitization spreads across parties and factions. He examines right-wing figures who pushed an increasingly extreme agenda; the lukewarm center-right, which faced escalating far-right pressure; and the nervous center-left, which feared losing the center to border-security appeals—and he explains why the escalation of securitization broke down, yielding new political configurations. A comprehensive chronicle of a key episode in recent American history, this book also draws out lessons that Arizona’s experience holds for immigration politics across the world.
Download or read book The Insecure City written by Kristin V. Monroe and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen years after the end of a protracted civil and regional war, Beirut broke out in violence once again, forcing residents to contend with many forms of insecurity, amid an often violent political and economic landscape. Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, The Insecure City captures the day-to-day experiences of citizens of Beirut moving through a war-torn landscape. While living in Beirut, Kristin Monroe conducted interviews with a diverse group of residents of the city. She found that when people spoke about getting around in Beirut, they were also expressing larger concerns about social, political, and economic life. It was not only violence that threatened Beirut’s ordinary residents, but also class dynamics that made life even more precarious. For instance, the installation of checkpoints and the rerouting of traffic—set up for the security of the elite—forced the less fortunate to alter their lives in ways that made them more at risk. Similarly, the ability to pass through security blockades often had to do with an individual’s visible markers of class, such as clothing, hairstyle, and type of car. Monroe examines how understandings and practices of spatial mobility in the city reflect social differences, and how such experiences led residents to be bitterly critical of their government. In The Insecure City, Monroe takes urban anthropology in a new and meaningful direction, discussing traffic in the Middle East to show that when people move through Beirut they are experiencing the intersection of citizen and state, of the more and less privileged, and, in general, the city’s politically polarized geography.
Download or read book Visions of the City written by David Pinder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of the City is a dramatic history of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. The author critically examines influential utopian approaches to urbanism in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities. He also investigates avant-garde perspectives from the time that challenged these conceptions of cities, especially from within surrealism. At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their alternative visions based on nomadic life and play, David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban spaces and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's New Babylon, finding within his proposals a still powerful provocation to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself. A superb critical exploration of the underside of utopian thought over the last hundred years and its continuing relevance in the here and now for thinking about possible urban worlds. The treatment of the Situationists and their milieu is a revelation. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate School
Download or read book 109 East Palace written by Jennet Conant and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent the atomic bomb and win World War II. In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.
Download or read book The Country in the City written by Richard A. Walker and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman Award Finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008). The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place. The Bay Area’s civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard work. Its most cherished environments--Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast--have engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations. This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of environmentalism to this day. Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian, ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life. Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history, urban planning, and geography.
Download or read book National Security Mom written by Gina M. Bennett and published by Nancy Cleary. This book was released on 2008-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a mother of five and 20-year veteran of counterterrorism in the U.S. Intelligence Community, this book demystifies the underworld of terrorism and offers a unique comparison of how the super-secret intelligence approach to securing the nation is surprisingly similar to how parents secure their homes and families.
Download or read book Securing the Future written by Sheldon Danziger and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2000-06-29 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than ever, the economic health of a country depends upon the skills, knowledge, and capacities of its people. How does a person acquire these human assets and how can we promote their development? Securing the Future assembles an interdisciplinary team of scholars to investigate the full range of factors—pediatric, psychological, social, and economic—that bear on a child's development into a well-adjusted, economically productive member of society. A central purpose of the volume is to identify sound interventions that will boost human assets, particularly among the disadvantaged. The book provides a comprehensive evaluation of current initiatives and offers a wealth of new suggestions for effective public and private investments in child development. While children from affluent, highly educated families have good quality child care and an expensive education provided for them, children from poor families make do with informal child care and a public school system that does not always meet their needs. How might we best redress this growing imbalance? The contributors to this volume recommend policies that treat academic attainment together with psychological development and social adjustment. Mentoring programs, for example, promote better school performance by first fostering a young person's motivation to learn. Investments made early in life, such as preschool education, are shown to have the greatest impact on later learning for the least cost. In their focus upon children, however, the authors do not neglect the important links between generations. Poverty and inequality harm the development of parents and children alike. Interventions that empower parents to fight for better services and better schools are also of great benefit to their children. Securing the Future shows how investments in child development are both a means to an end and an end in themselves. They benefit the child directly and they also help that child contribute to the well-being of society. This book points us toward more effective strategies for promoting the economic success and the social cohesion of future generations. A Volume in the Ford Foundation Series on Asset Building
Download or read book The Anti Black City written by Jaime Amparo Alves and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important new ethnographic study of São Paulo’s favelas revealing the widespread use of race-based police repression in Brazil While Black Lives Matter still resonates in the United States, the movement has also become a potent rallying call worldwide, with harsh police tactics and repressive state policies often breaking racial lines. In The Anti-Black City, Jaime Amparo Alves delves into the dynamics of racial violence in Brazil, where poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, and a biased criminal justice system create urban conditions of racial precarity. The Anti-Black City provocatively offers race as a vital new lens through which to view violence and marginalization in the supposedly “raceless” São Paulo. Ironically, in a context in which racial ambiguity makes it difficult to identify who is black and who is white, racialized access to opportunities and violent police tactics establish hard racial boundaries through subjugation and death. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in prisons and neighborhoods on the periphery of this mega-city, Alves documents the brutality of police tactics and the complexity of responses deployed by black residents, including self-help initiatives, public campaigns against police violence, ruthless gangs, and self-policing of communities. The Anti-Black City reveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how “governing through death” has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, Alves shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence. Ultimately, Alves’s work points to a need for a new approach to an intractable problem: how to govern populations and territories historically seen as “ungovernable.”
Download or read book Terrorism Risk and the Global City written by Professor Jon Coaffee and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-11-28 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2003, this account of the anti-terrorist measures of London's financial district and the changes in urban security after 9/11 has been revised to take into account developments in counter-terrorist security and management, particularly after the terrorist attack in London on July 7th 2005. It makes a valuable addition to the current debate on terrorism and the new security challenges facing Western nations. Drawing on the post-9/11 academic and policy literature on how terrorism is reshaping the contemporary city, this book explores the changing nature of the terrorist threat against global cities in terms of tactics and targeting, and the challenge of developing city-wide managerial measures and strategies. Also addressed is the way in which London is leading the way in developing best practice in counter-terrorist design and management, and how such practice is being internationalized.
Download or read book Securing The State written by David Omand and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-14 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments recognise that national security in the turbulent conditions of the early twenty-first century must centre on the creation of public confidence that normal life can continue even in the face of threats such as terrorism and proliferation, and of natural hazards such as pandemics and climate change. Based on his own experience in government, David Omand argues that while public security is vital for good government, the effects of bad government will result from failure to maintain the right relationship between justice, liberty, privacy, civic harmony and security measures. His book examines in detail how secret intelligence helps governments to deliver security, but also risks raising public concern over its methods. A set of ethical principles is proposed to guide intelligence and security work within the framework of human rights. Securing the State provides a new way of thinking about the cycle of activities that generates secret intelligence, examines the issues that arise from the way that modern intelligence uses technology to access new sources of information, and discusses how the meaning of intelligence can best be elucidated. The limits of intelligence in enabling greater security are explored, especially in guiding government in a world in which we must learn not to be surprised by surprise. Illustrated throughout by historical examples, David Omand provides new perspectives for practitioners and those teaching security and intelligence studies and for a wider readership offers an accessible introduction to pressing issues of public policy.
Download or read book Securing the Everyday City written by Patrick Murphy and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis investigates the presence of counter-terrorist security within the everyday life of cities. It emerges from, and contributes to, ongoing debates concerning the place of security in contemporary urbanism, and discussions regarding the increased saturation of urban spaces with a diverse range of security interventions. Drawing on this work, this thesis argues that in order to better understand the urban geographies of security, instead of exclusively conceiving security as only imposed on urban spaces, we must ask how processes of securing cities are ʻlivedʼ. In doing so this study responds to the lack of attention to the complex relations between processes of security and lived everyday urban life. This thesis explores the neglected everyday life of security through a case study of an emerging form of counter-terrorist security apparatus within cities in the UK, examining the broadening of the National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom and the continuing development of CONTEST, the United Kingdomʼs counter-terrorist strategy. Taking London as a named example, the study concentrates on the security interventions of two research sites, the Southbank and Bankside area of the South Bank, and the Victoria Line of the London Underground, to examine how security addresses the everyday life of the city and how such practices are experienced as part of lived everyday urban life. In sum, this thesis focuses, first, on the processes through which the everyday city is secured and, second, it draws attention to and describes how those processes of securing are encountered and enacted, as they become part of the everyday life of cities.
Download or read book Endangered City written by Austin Zeiderman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban violence. By following both the governmental agencies charged with this mandate and the subjects governed by it, Endangered City reveals what happens when logics of endangerment shape the terrain of political engagement between citizens and the state. The self-built settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery prove a critical site from which to examine the rising effect of security and risk on contemporary cities and urban life.
