Suspicious cities: An analysis of the securitisation of urban everyday life in London and Brussels

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article engages with the material-discursive ways in which urban everyday life in London and Brussels has transformed under the impression of (counter)terrorism and demonstrates how human and non-human bodies are entangled in this process. Following Barad’s understanding of posthumanist performativity, I conceptualise urban everyday life as an entanglement of intra-acting sites, objects, and people. My historiographic analysis of everyday life in London and Brussels shows how both metropoles have incrementally adopted a culture of pre-emptive security because more and more human and non-human bodies are increasingly assigned with material-discursive suspiciousness, while simultaneously more and more human and non-human bodies are charged with looking out for suspiciousness. As the notion of entanglement reveals how everyone and everything that intra-acts in urban everyday life is also to some extent accountable for its securitisation, my findings imply ultimately an ethical responsibility to counter the securitisation of everyday life in European metropoles which I argue constitutes a process of urban segregation.