The boulevard of Nice, a Christmas market in Berlin or the headquarters of a Dutch newspaper – the past decade has seen a rising number of attacks with a vehicle as a weapon. Following these attacks, city officials started to look differently at their public space. How do we keep our public spaces safe and secure? How do we combine design for people with design for people with bad intentions?

Often, security measures were implemented as an afterthought: Invasive bollards and ram-proof blocks were added to city squares and station areas. When you were lucky, maybe it would be an invasive bollard disguised as a planter or bench. We plead for a better integrated and less invasive approach to Security by Design!

Over the last years, at least as landscape architects based in the Netherlands, we have seen security move up earlier in the design process. It is increasingly included in the first project brief, making it possible to integrate the measures in public space with care and even use it as an opportunity for design!

For us, this led to ongoing design research that we further shaped with each project. In this article, we want to share some of the lessons and ethical considerations that arose from that process. Hopefully, this will inspire designers to see the opportunities for what can feel like a limiting functional requirement. To see that designing for people with good and bad intentions doesn’t have to be a contradiction. And plead for security measures that are well-considered, proportionate, and implemented with respect to the intrinsic openness and public character of public space.

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Secure from what?

Ok – Security by Design. But secure from what? And designing what? We focus on threats that fall within the technical but ugly term of ‘Hostile Vehicle Mitigation’. Hostile means having clear intentions to hurt people, damage buildings, or hinder processes that are going on inside. This could, for example, be a terror attack in a crowded shopping street, a car crashing into a strategic technical facility or a car bomb going off close to a democratic centre.

As landscape architects we try to do our part through spatial, outdoor interventions. Human or digital surveillance can be a part of a larger strategy, but we keep it out of the equation right now. Also important: we do not mean defensive architecture! This is not about excluding certain social groups from public space. This is designed to protect innocent bystanders and strategic assets from people with bad intentions.

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Lessons learned

1. Every meter counts

In the event of an attack, distance is critical. Any distance. Every meter that an explosive is further away from a façade significantly reduces the damage. Every kilometre per hour that a car is significantly slowed down changes the force of impact. Every meter that someone has to travel on foot instead of by car gives officials significantly more time to arrive on site and intervene.

And there are numerous possibilities to slow people down or increase the distance between the threat and the asset! From strategic interventions on an urban scale to physical objects, dynamic barriers and natural vegetation. A great selection is shown in the Handbook of Tyranny by Theo Deutinger. With lots of detailed illustrations, he explores this dark topic in a light and humorous manner. Need to know the angles of a massive ditch that will stop even the biggest trucks? Maybe giant rocks to prevent a direct trajectory towards your asset? How about collapsable concrete? Or have you considered adding piranhas “for an extra deadly effect”? The Handbook of Tyranny is your friend.

2. Proportionate to the threat

So there are many options on how to manage people with bad intentions: slowing them down, curving their trajectory, stopping them, blocking their view, or making them more visible to the view of security guards. However, when working in a public space, not all options fit everywhere. When do you choose which intervention?

Risk is the probability of something happening, times the potential damage if it happens. The closer you get to the thing you want to protect, the more spatially invasive the interventions can reasonably become. At the same time, the goal of the intervention changes: in the urban context, you might focus on visibility and limiting straight roads leading up to your asset, while near the building itself, you will see gates, bollards and ram-proof doors to stop potential intruders. Those hard measures are acceptable because they are close to the asset. Placing them in a larger context would be an unproportionate limitation of public space.

Therefore, an integral approach to security in public space has a layered line of defence, with each layer scaling up proportionate to the threat. Interventions in the context could even save you some measures in deeper layers!

The difficulty is that different groups should be able to permeate different layers. Approved cars, for example, bringing suspects to a courthouse, have to enter the building swiftly, while unapproved cars should be stopped much earlier. At the same time, emergency services should reach the building as quickly as possible at any time. A layered line of defence makes it easier to design these nuances and exceptions while keeping the level of safety of the whole in check.

3. An opportunity for design

The security measures in your layered line of defence can still feel limiting, but there is room to play! Security by Design isn’t just about concealing. It is about turning the requirements of the security brief into an opportunity for design. A chance to create fun and social spaces, add biodiversity and rainwater management, and yes, still contribute to an open and transparent public realm. A less visible line of defence can be the result of the combination with other goals and careful integration in the context.

A great example of this is the Centenary Square in Birmingham, UK, which is an inner-city public square with an international convention centre. The reoccurring political conferences held there, unfortunately, demand some hostile vehicle mitigation. What the designers of Graeme Massie Architects wisely did is cut up the line of defence into different forms: It shape-shifts from a reinforced planter to benches, steps and a water feature. Each is an added value to the quality of the square, while for the untrained eye, the line as a whole dissolves into a lively public space.

A leading and ‘greener’ example is the International Crime Court in The Hague, designed by SLA and Schmidt Hammer Lassen. The complex has one of the highest security levels due to the presence of international (war) criminals, witnesses and judges. The desired character, though, was that of an open, transparent and democratic place. The local dune landscape turned into the key to Security by Design.

With height differences and rugged terrain, most of the security measures are transformed into natural landscape. It’s only the reinforced edges and places where a path cuts through the dunes, and suddenly a fence or bollard is needed that reveal the role that the landscape plays in the court’s security. Could someone with bad intentions climb over the hills? Possibly. But the height difference immediately exposes them to security cameras. A fast pace through all those rough plantings would be a challenge too.

The closer to the buildings, the harder it gets to approach without permission. The buildings are quite literally dug into the dunes. A massive moat limits the amount of entry points to the complex. Because the moat is designed like a ha-ha, the hard 3-meter-high (9 feet 10) wall is invisible to the outside viewer. Even the building façade itself plays an invisible role in the protection of the people inside: The randomly tiled windows thwart the aim of a sniper. Every part of the design is oozing with integrated counter-terrorism (landscape) design.

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Ethical considerations

Despite the possibilities for design that these projects show very well, working with security measures in public space instantly triggers ethical questions. Is it really necessary? How does it influence peoples’ experience of a place? Are we gaining in security but losing in the publicness of public space? These are some of the ethical considerations that arose during our design processes:

1. Not too soon and not too late

Adding a security level to the brief is not something we should all be doing lightly. Even with a careful and proportionate design, security measures can have a big impact on the character and use of space. As a society, as clients and designers, we should stay critical: How much do you want to prepare for an unlikely event? At the same time, does the unlikely event need to happen first before taking action?

2. A sense of safety is something different

Don’t all these bollards just make people feel more threatened? Doesn’t it remind people of the risk of an attack and make them feel less safe? So far, researchers are divided¹. The current conclusion is that it depends on the level of trust in a society: In a high-trust society, where the public has a general level of trust in the government and its officials, seeing security measures can add to the feeling of safety. In low-trust societies, the opposite seems to be the case. Depending on where you are, being safe and feeling safe are different things – another argument for integrating measures well in public spaces.

3. Eyes on the street?

What about Jane Jacobs? What about safety through the classic ‘eyes on the street’ principle? Though a great principle for social safety, the amount of public ‘eyes’ can actually be an added risk factor when designing anti-terrorism landscapes. An attack aimed in public space often has the goal of spreading fear. Being seen by many eyes, therefore, increases the potential impact and risk.

4. Public space is public

If there is one thing that we try to stay critical of as designers, it is to uphold the public character of public space. Even if your aim is to design for people with bad intentions, other groups like the elderly, less-abled or certain social groups could be unintentionally limited by your interventions as well. Who are you making this space less accessible to? How do we keep the maximum of openly accessible and unhindered public space? Where can we push the line of defence back? Without these questions, the line between Security by Design and defensive architecture becomes thinner and thinner.
Especially when designing democratic spaces, this question is more complex than it seems at first: Yes, democratic space means the right for protesters to be within visible and audible distance from their representatives. But democracy also means the politician feels the freedom to do their job in peace. Security by Design literally defines the border between the two freedoms. Only through a continuous critical attitude can we attempt to find a righteous balance.

All in all, there is never one right answer. Where the line of defence is, what measures are used, how they are integrated, and how different rights and freedoms come together are all highly dependent on the situation and the type of society in which they are located. As a design community, we are still in the middle of the learning curve of Security by Design. The security level itself makes it hard to learn from each other since a lot of the project information cannot be shared openly. With this article, solely based on public information, we try to add our small part to a topic that should really be discussed more broadly. Or maybe after reading this, your freshly trained eye for Security by Design can spot measures more easily.

During this growing demand for security measures in public space, we will continue to plead for a focus on the main users of our designs: people with good intentions. And yes, there will be situations where you have to design to keep people out. However, it can still be an opportunity for open, sustainable, and healthy public spaces. So next time you are asked to design for security, think of Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo, designed by Michael van Gessel: where one asks for a fence, the other sees an opportunity for a flamingo enclosure, water feature and intimate public square.

Written by Marit Noest, landscape architect and Research Lead at Karres en Brands.

Published on November 18, 2024

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