Does Terror Have an Urban Future?

Abstract

This article was written and submitted before the 11 September terrorist attack on New York City. Minor revisions were made to the text and a post-script added in order to bring it up to date, but the original data, themes and findings have been left intact. Our study examines the occurrence of terror in 40 cities across the globe. We survey incidents, fatalities, injuries and damage due to terror between 1993 and 2000. We also encapsulate these statistics in a terror score for each city. We conclude that terror is more common in cities and we explain why this might be the case. In explaining urban terror, we rely on three factors: social breakdown, resource mobilisation and target-proneness. Essentially, we argue that cities with high cumulative standing on these factors also incur high levels of terror. We are able to explain terror in the remaining cities with high 'terror scores' by showing that terror is often 'exportable'. That is, terror originates in places with high social breakdown and resource mobilisation, but is often transmitted to globally oriented, target-prone cities. These cities are located in what we have labelled an International Message Category. Among others, the leading `candidates' for terror attack have been listed as New York, London, Paris, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Athens and Istanbul.