Security Practices in Cities
Marie MORELLE, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, France Jérôme TADIE, IRD, France
This issue of Justice Spatial/Spatial Justice aims at assessing the place and functioning of security - defined as the means of protecting goods and persons - in urban settings. It will focus on the production of security and emphasize informal control mechanisms. It will address the uses and everyday policies, more or less institutionalised, to insure greater security. Of particular interest are the field studies carried out in neighbourhoods that are not affected by globalizing forces or constitute showcases of their respective countries, and different from the well-researched gated communities of urban elites.
Whereas in some metropolises, public policies regarding security focus mainly on the wealthier and best integrated neighbourhoods, we would like to encourage the study of poorer neighbourhoods. These are generally characterized both by daily violence and by specific modes of regulation (less visible state intervention except through repression, virtual absence of private security companies, importance of more or less formal stakeholders).
These neighbourhoods are also the favoured terrains of intervention for international or multinational organizations, illustrating the worldwide spread of specific models of security.
Official discourse and interventions claim to be aimed at social peace, regarded as a factor of development and – in a neoliberal context – of economic growth.
This raises a first set of questions relevant to spatial justice, to do with a redistributive conception of security, whose territorial basis and modes of production should be analysed. In current debates on development, security is mainly considered as a common good,, a resource to which every city dweller is entitled. It is therefore an indicator of spatial justice and a marker of injustice. This question is even more acute in cities where poorer neighbourhoods remain outside all the main security devices. Moreover implementing security for some groups may also induce insecurity for the others. Guaranteeing security may lead to restraining certain rights and freedoms. This might also foster abuses. Security is therefore not mechanically linked to spatial justice.
Depending on neighbourhoods, grassroots practices may emerge, in interaction with interventions from public powers. Do spatial appropriation and production of security take similar forms regardless of political, ethnic or gendered variations? Approaching security in its spatial and urban dimension implies taking into account the representations of the urban by a variety of individuals and groups in the city. Debates on security involve specific conceptions and analyzing them means calling on a procedural understanding of justice.
Spatial justice therefore interacts with security issues on different levels. It is mobilized in discourses in order to formulate claims of security. It also comes across as a demand for equal or fair treatment by some actors (landlords, leaders, associations…), respect
for the “citizen”, less repression against the poor, in sets of actions or discourses that are to be defined. While the notion of justice is not necessarily explicit either in discourses or practices, it may still be mobilized as an exogenous category by researchers, as a way to analyze institutional and political dimensions of security.
Security raise social and political issues, at the roots of a social and urban order, fair or not. The hypothesis can thus be formulated that the exercise of power, whether formal or informal, reinforces urban divisions, gaps between neighbourhoods, even forms of communitarianism, despite the fact security is meant for everybody. It also lies at the basis of categorizations and stigmatization of people and neighbourhoods. Moreover, a territorial approach cannot ignore the question of people or groups that have become invisible because they are devoid of territorial reference (the homeless for instance), who are therefore left out of any security process, fragmented as it might be.
Security is therefore at the heart of a nexus of power exercized not only by the ruling bodies of a city or a country, but also numerous actors such as the inhabitants, different types of groups, security companies, etc. It raises the issue of power relations and the constitution of norms which shape the city and lead to the emergence and consolidation of inequalities, contributing to define legitimate or illegitimate uses and people in its spaces. We would welcome contributions on the spatial and historical processes at work here, in a perspective that emphasizes the diversity of ongoing processes, in order to understand the forms of organisation and regulation on which spatial justice may (or not) be built.
The deadline for submission of full articles (7500 words at most) is October 1st, 2010, for a special issue to be published online in spring 2011.
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