To fight terrorist networks, we need to understand them and learn from them. Obviously that doesn’t mean training to become terrorists ourselves. But we can learn from the way many terrorist organizations operate – via highly networked, decentralized connections. This kind of setup has a lot in common with the networked way in which many of us will live and work in the decades ahead.
Since the wake-up call of 9/11, terrorism has come to characterize many of the military conflicts in the 21st century. Today’s terrorist networks demonstrate a highly resilient way of organizing diverse and often distantly located people toward a common goal. This system of organization helps explain why, as journalist Steven Brill argues, we are not much safer now than we were before 9/11, even after spending US$1 trillion on homeland security. As studies of guerrilla warfare have shown, centralized, hierarchical, top-down systems, like our current Department of Defense, have a hard time defeating a decentralized, nonhierarchical, networked ones, like the Islamic State group.
Centralized, hierarchical systems may appear stronger, with more power and efficiency on their side. But networked, nonhierarchical ones have much greater capacity to take a hit and to keep functioning, as the sizable literature on ecosystem resilience has repeatedly shown. Networked systems even have an “antifragile” quality, as scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb has argued, with an ability to bounce back even stronger after a shock. All of which suggests we need to fight terrorist networks in networked ways of our own.
I am an architect and urban designer by training and so I leave it to policymakers and defense strategists to contemplate what this means militarily. I want to focus on what I know: the target side of the equation. How can we reduce the targets of terrorism, getting rid of concentrations of people of a particular type to reduce the likelihood of a devastating strike? How can we rethink our cities and our buildings so that instead of trying to fortify our architectural bull’s-eyes, we eliminate them with a denser weave of diverse activities across a metropolitan area?
