Designing For Security: Post 9/11 Architecture and Planning

"For any public space, security has become a complex, layered concept that covers detailed blast specifications of window glass as well as issues of controlled access, electronic passkey systems, street-level vehicle barriers, and exterior surveillance. Open spaces have become either suspect urban no-man's lands or bleak accommodations to street setback requirements, bristling with barriers and cameras that anticipate visiting trucks packed with C4 explosives, not bubbly tourists packed with cameras and guidebooks."

Vishaan Chakrabarti, former New York City director of planning in Manhattan believes that designers "should spend their time dealing with documented ground-level threats, not abstract hallucinations of Armageddon" He says that "part of the problem is that as far as terrorism is concerned, in America we went from zero to sixty in about two seconds."

Landscape architect Len Hopper says "You can increase security to a point where you actually instill fear, and then you have failed spaces." Hopper believes that the best security design relies on what crime-prevention groups learned in public parks in the 1970s and '80s from the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design movement."