Big ugly lumps? (Counter)terrorism and the everyday atmospheres of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation

Adopting an atmospheric lens on the everyday and open-ended crisis of contemporary terror threats in cities in Western Europe, this article unpicks the contemporary logics, desires, and effects of the State in matters of urban counterterrorism by exploring the felt qualities and dispositions of the public around Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) measures in Birmingham (UK). It argues that the atmospheres around counterterrorism that security officials and business representatives aim to produce, which seeks to reassure the public rather than cause alarm, has led to ambivalent acceptance of HVM by city centre users. The paper shifts away from discursive and socio-technical discussions of urban counterterrorism, and foregrounds instead practices and experiences of undramatic, ordinary, and ambivalent encounters with terror threat and counterterrorism responses that further nuance existing claims about the global militarisation of the urban. From this, our data shows a variety of public everyday experiences of HVM, revealing not only dislike of their aesthetics, but also hosts of dispositions and attitudes around mobility and sharing space, created by the interplay between the physical presence of the HVM measures and the human practices navigating them.