International Conference on Urban Atmospheres

The terrorist attacks on European cities over the last decade have reconfigured ordinary urban life. This concerns both ordinary practices and experiences, and the production and management of urban spaces. On the one hand, we are witnessing a proliferation of security logics, whose translations - be they discursive, symbolic, legal, material, technological, etc. - are having the consequence of not only modifying urban spaces, but also of affecting residents in their day-to-day behaviour, right down to their bodies. Protean, diffuse and distributed at multiple levels, the threat of terrorism and counter-terrorism measures have a visible impact on the everyday life of cities, but they also have effects that go well beyond the realms of the visible and the expressible, insofar as they concern the senses, affects and emotions. Because they affect bodies and the intensities that bind them together, terrorism and counterterrorism are participating in the creation of a new urban climate.

How do these actions shape urban ambiances and atmospheres? How the intertwining of social interactions, security and protection practices, and security narratives, discourses and policies shape dispositions of attention, states of the body and modes of presence that are specific to the uncertainty associated with the terrorist threat, as well as to the supposed guarantees of the 'safe city'? By bringing together geographers, urban planners, sociologists and anthropologists working in different fields and on different scales, this scientific meeting also sets itself the challenge of critically examining the contributions of approaches in terms of ambiances/atmospheres and affects to urban studies of terrorism.

Jun.-Prof. Simon Runkel and Katharina Ciax co-organize this international conference in Cergy (FR) and give insights in their empirical research in the context of the DFG research project "Atmospheres of (Counter-)Terrorism".

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