What’s really curious about the documents is the way in which that they describe the various responsibilities of different parties who have an interest in minimizing the risk of vehicular terrorism. The Australian and New Zealand Counter Terrorism Commission (ANZCTC) produced a series of reports outlining strategies. TA: Around the time of the Bourke Street attack in January 2017, a high level group of representatives from State, Territory, Commonwealth and New Zealand governments, along with representatives from the security services, and various police departments, met to produce a series of documents to deal with car attacks and other potential mass casualty incidents. SM: So the bollards don’t keep people safe from car attacks, rather they are more concerned with confidence, whether that be in the government or their ability to shop at Zara, so work do they perform? This instills the idea that there is a responsible government and they exist, and they’re responsive to our anxieties and look how they’re addressing them. If you look at the location of the bollards, Fed Square, in front of the State Library and also at the corner of Southern Cross Station, they are located so tourists and especially tourists from regional Victoria get off the train when they come into the city and think “oh there’s bollards, we’re safe”. If the problem is children being run over and killed by crazy people in Commodores, the bollard doesn’t solve that problem, if that’s the design you’re looking for. Maybe they would slow down a Commodore and maybe they would slide, but you just have a different distribution of injury. The car gets launched into the air and then the bollard shatters into fist sized chunks that get launched into the air. TA: There is a great series of photos, that the Commonwealth government’s security design contract published, of a blue 1990s Hyundai Excel hitting a similar but slightly different style of bollard. PC: One of the most perverse findings we came across was that this thing which was about reassuring the public that public space was safe to go shopping, objectively increased harm: it can become projectiles. People have a problem with bollards, but you paint them pretty colors and then it just shows what a great city Melbourne is, and you can put it on Instagram. What was troubling for us was that, in a sense, bollart was precisely what removed the objectionability of the objects themselves. On the one hand you have bollards which demonstrate a securitization process, but don’t worry it’s okay everything in Melbourne is vibrant and interesting still because of street art. And then people’s attention drifted to “bollart.” Since the 1990s with cultural studies there’s definitely a reification of low level petty street forms of resistance insofar as if the government installs something and then you paint on it that resistance or contention demonstrates the presence of politics in the city. There are political and normative questions about public address and the publicness of spaces, putative publicness, how public are they are, etc. We asked “why are there these brutalist concrete cubes all throughout the city? What is the problem? Why is that problem a problem? What do they assuage? What and who do they address? Who or what did the bollards address, and how do they address their public and who or what are their publics?” Peter Chambers: Once we started looking at the bollards and doing some very early pieces around it for workshops.
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