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Territorial Tactics: The Socio-spatial Significance of Private Policing Strategies in Cape Town
Abstract
This paper analyses the policing strategies of private security companies operating in urban space. An existing literature has considered the variety of ways that territory becomes of fundamental importance in the work of public police forces. However, this paper examines territory in the context of private security companies. Drawing on empirical research in Cape Town, it examines how demarcated territories become key subjects in private policing. Private security companies are responsible for a relatively small section of the city, while in contrast the public police ultimately have to see city space as a whole. Hence, private policing strategy becomes one of displacement, especially of so-called undesirables yielding a patchworked public space associated with private enclaves of consumption. The conclusions signal the historical resonances and comparative implications of these political–legal–security dynamics.
... Territorial behaviour aims to create privacy [21], defend areas [22], achieve specific social goals [23], and secure the areas in a transitional space [24]. The concept of a transitional space for interacting among neighbours has become a custom in the everyday life of an urban village. ...
... The concept of a transitional space for interacting among neighbours has become a custom in the everyday life of an urban village. It is deeply rooted in the community's daily lives, building a spatial culture [24] and affecting interaction patterns [25]. It has also happened in Prawirotaman. ...
... Geographers have long noted the centrality of notions of place, territory, and space to policing (Yarwood 2007). For instance, many of the everyday activities of the police emphasize the need for officers to have a detailed and nuanced understanding of the places and people they are tasked with managing (Fyfe 1991;Yarwood and Paasche 2015), whereas formalized police patrol beats are spaces of law enforcement used to organize, partition, and manage policing efforts (Paasche, Yarwood, and Sidaway 2014), reflecting the use of territory to influence or control social interactions (Sack 1983). Further, many of the tactics that police use to manage affairs within their beats are inherently spatial, such as dispersing people from a particular location, creating checkpoints to limit movement, or relocating individuals through detention or arrest (Herbert 1996b(Herbert , 1997Crank 2015). ...
... As a contextual explanation of police behavior, Fyfe (1992) claimed that police culture alone might receive too much attention from researchers and that other contexts are also important influences on and mediators of policing. For example, the rise of neoliberal governance has shifted some aspects of policing toward a myriad set of private companies (Paasche, Yarwood, and Sidaway 2014) while also emphasizing the responsibility of individuals to police their own spaces through voluntary programs like neighborhood watch (England 2008). Neoliberalism has also been connected to the deployment of zero-tolerance policing policies in particular spaces within cities in support of businesses and commerce (Mountz and Curran 2009) or through police efforts to clear some urban neighborhoods of homeless people in support of gentrification (Smith 2002). ...
Concerns about police militarization have become an important public policy issue since the aggressive police response to the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where police officers used military-style equipment to confront protestors. This event was a stark visual reminder that many U.S. police departments have used federal programs to acquire surplus military equipment, including weapons, armored vehicles, and body armor. We explore the geographies and histories of one the most important programs, called 1033, which supplies police with military equipment under the rationale of prosecuting the War on Drugs. We show that the legal blurring of the police and the military has been ongoing for decades at the national scale but this has resulted in an uneven landscape of police militarization at the county scale. We also investigate one of the most common global arguments for why police become militarized, which is the presence of Special Weapons and Tactics-style paramilitary teams, finding little support for that claim. More geographic inquiry is needed to understand the trajectories, causes, and consequences of police militarization.
... Despite the political transformation of 1994 that aimed to eradicate the racial building blocks of apartheid rule, race continues to play a profound role in everyday practices and this is also reflected in the composition and operation of the private security industry. Similar to other studies on private security in South African urban centres (Kempa and Singh 2008, Samara 2010, Clarno and Murray 2013, Paasche et al. 2014, this article argues that racially constructed categories, stereotypes, and acts of racial profiling are key components of private policing practices. ...
... Several studies (Cashmore 2001, Loftus 2007, Amar 2010, Çankaya 2015 have shown that despite the focus on diversity campaigns within the police, policing practices continue to affirm racial and ethnic distinctions. Although racial profiling has primarily been associated with the state police, growing work on private security is showing that racial profiling is also inherent to this industry (Kempa and Singh 2008, Samara 2010, Clarno and Murray 2013, Paasche et al. 2014, Søgaard 2014. ...
This article analyses how issues of race influence the occupational culture of the armed response sector, a particular part of the private security industry, in Durban, South Africa. In addition to analysing the racial hierarchy of the industry, this article examines the ‘Bravo Mike Syndrome' – Bravo Mike meaning black male in NATO phonetic alphabet code. The ‘Bravo Mike Syndrome' refers to the racialised imaginaries of criminals and the subsequent policing practices performed by armed response officers to protect clients from this racially constructed dangerous ‘Other’. However, as the majority of armed response officers are ‘Bravo Mikes’ themselves, there is a constant element of friction in their performances. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article thus analyses how racialised understandings of crime influence, and are reproduced by, private policing practices, thereby contributing to studies on private security occupational cultures and racial profiling.
... It is an intermediary living area where spontaneous interaction between residents in the kampung occurs (Prayitno, 2013), a part of environment identity and its social interactions (Mehta, 2014) and the pattern of interaction (Abdul Rahim and Hashim, 2018). Moreover, this space underlies people's daily life (Paasche, Yarwood and Sidaway, 2014) where they can carry out activities depending on necessity and highly influences their behaviour (Szauter, 2019). In previous studies, territorial behaviour was often conveyed as privacy (Madanipour, 2003), defense (Ratna and Ikaputra, 2019), certain social purpose (Murphy, 2012), and security (Paasche, Yarwood and Sidaway, 2014). ...
Tourism impacts spatial changes in the urban neighbourhood, including Prawirotaman, which is experiencing a loss of social space. The community continues to strive for its social spaces in its private transitional space, namely the house yard and terrace. Hence, this study aims to explore the territorial behaviour of kampung residents amid the neighbourhood transformation. The study focuses on the formation and distribution of interaction spaces within kampung and the residents’ perception of the transitional space territoriality. This study was conducted qualitatively. The observations were conducted after afternoon prayer (Asr) and evening prayer (Maghrib). The data was collected from snapshots and using Global Positioning Systems (GPS), then imported into ArcGIS, and interviews were presented on emotion maps and narratives. The data were analysed with content and behaviour mapping approaches. This research found that territorial invasion can be defined as a local’s territorial behaviour for sustaining social space amid the kampung’s spatial transformation due to tourism. Hence, territoriality is not only related to the spatial modification to control a space. This research contributes to understanding architecture behaviour and policy making, especially in an urban village with tourism activities.
... While the forms of public that gated communities and contractual collectives are trying to create may be similar, their capacity to do so is systematically different. CIDs, Paasche et al. argue, are always negotiating a more 'porous' public (Paasche et al. 2014(Paasche et al. , p. 1567. ...
... La influencia de estos procesos se traduce dentro de las ciudades de distinta manera, según qué parte de esta se trate; pues una de las características de las ciudades que adoptan el modelo neoliberal señalado es precisamente la segmentación de los barrios según su funcionalidad, según el papel que desempeñen de cara a esa acumulación de capital que orbita sobre las actividades financieras, constructoras y turísticas. La zonificación de las ciudades es un fenómeno documentado en estudios a nivel internacional (Bergero, 2013;Cano Orellana y Márquez Guerrero, 2000;Degen, 2003;Gil y Bucarey, 2019;Montes Ruíz y Durán Segura, 2019;Paasche et al., 2014), que entra en interacción con dinámicas locales y provoca una descohesión de los barrios y un aumento de la desigualdad y las diferencias que previamente existían entre ellos; lo que hace que vivir en determinado barrio tenga efectos sobre la vida de la gente en cuanto al acceso a distintos recursos (Blanco y Subirats, 2011;Torres et al., 2015). ...
En este texto queremos dar luz a la movilización surgida de un grupo vecinal del barrio de Parque Alcosa, en Sevilla, por la patrimonialización de la antigua fábrica de algodón “Virgen de los Reyes” y en contra del proyecto de urbanización que se está desarrollando sobre la misma. Con ello, queremos conocer la relación existente entre las demandas sociales que han motivado las acciones de determinados colectivos por la definición y apropiación de este espacio, y el contexto urbano, producto de políticas neoliberales como es el Distrito Este de Sevilla, en el que aquella tiene lugar. Desde una perspectiva antropológica, queremos comprender la estrategia de patrimonialización como reivindicación del derecho a la ciudad en este caso concreto y atendiendo a su encaje en dinámicas globales.
... La influencia de estos procesos se traduce dentro de las ciudades de distinta manera, según qué parte de esta se trate; pues una de las características de las ciudades que adoptan el modelo neoliberal señalado es precisamente la segmentación de los barrios según su funcionalidad, según el papel que desempeñen de cara a esa acumulación de capital que orbita sobre las actividades financieras, constructoras y turísticas. La zonificación de las ciudades es un fenómeno documentado en estudios a nivel internacional (Bergero, 2013;Cano Orellana y Márquez Guerrero, 2000;Degen, 2003;Gil y Bucarey, 2019;Montes Ruíz y Durán Segura, 2019;Paasche et al., 2014), que entra en interacción con dinámicas locales y provoca una descohesión de los barrios y un aumento de la desigualdad y las diferencias que previamente existían entre ellos; lo que hace que vivir en determinado barrio tenga efectos sobre la vida de la gente en cuanto al acceso a distintos recursos (Blanco y Subirats, 2011;Torres et al., 2015). ...
En este texto queremos dar luz a la movilización surgida de un grupo vecinal del barrio de Parque Alcosa, en Sevilla, por la patrimonialización de la antigua fábrica de algodón “Virgen de los Reyes” y en contra del proyecto de urbanización que se está desarrollando sobre la misma. Con ello, queremos conocer la relación existente entre las demandas sociales que han motivado las acciones de determinados colectivos por la definición y apropiación de este espacio, y el contexto urbano, producto de políticas neoliberales como es el Distrito Este de Sevilla, en el que aquella tiene lugar. Desde una perspectiva antropológica, queremos comprender la estrategia de patrimonialización como reivindicación del derecho a la ciudad en este caso concreto y atendiendo a su encaje en dinámicas globales.
... Cities are anything but homogeneous and uniform; there exists numerous boundaries, which may be as perilous to traverse as international boundaries. These visible or invisible borders are well understood by the inhabitants existing in a dynamic equilibrium with the cultural spaces of the city (Paasche et al., 2014). ...
Boundary studies as a sub-discipline of political geography has undergone several momentous transformations during its evolution. The classical period was predominantly concerned with demarcating the ideal boundary for achieving a stable geopolitical order. This changed during the latter part of the 20th century when scholars began contemplating the role of boundary as a social force. Postmodern understanding of boundaries concerned itself with questions of identity and the narratives of boundary. The focus on territory and territoriality marks another departure from contractual boundary between states to a more cultural notion. In stark contrast to the spatial perception of boundary and territory stands the stream of literature exploring social boundaries investigating the symbolic boundaries that facilitate the social differentiation between various groups of people. The present study comprehensively reviews the three intertwined branches and indicates the need to fuse these traditions and offer suggestions on how to do so. The article also contemplates necessary adaptations to the field going forward.
... Improvement districts, however, have been criticised for actively displacing homeless people and other 'undesirables' from their designated areas, and hence contribute to reinforcing existing structural inequality in Cape Town (Paasche, Yarwood and Sidaway, 2014). In this regard, private security companies require the presence of Law Enforcement officials to evict homeless people illegally occupying buildings and land and the dismantling of their shelters. ...
This handbook, which was developed for SaferSpaces by the Safety and Violence Initiative (at the University of Cape Town), was undertaken with the objective of identifying evidence, lessons and challenges that have relevance for safety and security policy realisation in South
Africa.
... Notwithstanding this important critique of community policing, which includes a large literature on public/ private partnerships and privatized security assemblages at play in delivering policing services around the globe (Colona, 2020;Paasche, Yarwood, & Sidaway, 2014), there is much work that needs to be done in uncovering how local communities "uncritically absorb broken windows policing" ideology (Mitchell, Attoh, & Staeheli, 2016). ...
Despite the fact that any semblance of a “police studies” in geography is relatively recent, with calls for its development and expansion still being made in the literature today, geographers have nevertheless made important contributions to how scholars understand police and policing as a multifaceted manifestation of state power, coercion, and territoriality. Given the formative contributions that have already been made, and with promises of increased scholarly activity to come, there remains much opportunity for geography to become the go‐to social scientific discipline for translating theory into action and advanced methods into practice. This is particularly so given heightened and widespread credence to the concept of defunding policing as we know it in the wake of continued and increasingly ruthless killings by police across the United States. In this article on police and policing in geography, I trace the brief history of a police studies, highlighting recent and contemporary contributions to its progress through critical examinations of community‐, border‐, affective‐, and insidious‐policing practices. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion about how a police/policing studies can move forward as a durable geographical sub‐field vis‐à‐vis greater inclusion of would‐be scholars for whom being policed has been a lived experience that has resulted in personal encounters with hyper‐criminalization, displacement, expulsion, un‐homing, and incarceration.
... However, territories can also be seen to exist (with various degrees of control, contestation and forms of bordering practice) across a range of spatial scales, in many diverse contexts and through various forms of what Sidaway (2007) has referred to as spatial enclaving. This can be seen through such things as the growing phenomenon of gated communities, patrolled commercial and leisure spaces, and other examples of the partial privatization of formerly public space (Bagaeen and Uduku 2010; Paasche et al. 2014). Most people are regularly confronted with signs such as 'Authorized Personnel Only', 'No Trespassing', 'Prohibido el Paso', and so on. ...
... However, territories can also be seen to exist (with various degrees of control, contestation and forms of bordering practice) across a range of spatial scales, in many diverse contexts and through various forms of what Sidaway (2007) has referred to as spatial enclaving. This can be seen through such things as the growing phenomenon of gated communities, patrolled commercial and leisure spaces, and other examples of the partial privatization of formerly public space (Bagaeen and Uduku 2010; Paasche et al. 2014). Most people are regularly confronted with signs such as 'Authorized Personnel Only', 'No Trespassing', 'Prohibido el Paso', and so on. ...
... To be sure, rangers and even police might not necessarily have the right to kill, but they do have the authority to remove people who transgress certain spaces and laws through powers and practices of arrest. The power to remove people from specific spaces is fundamental to territorial practices of policing that seek to secure certain spaces from certain people (Herbert 1996a(Herbert , 1997aPaasche 2013;Paasche, Yarwood, and Sidaway 2014). ...
This article examines how recent increases in commercial poaching of wildlife intensify the dictates that underpin conservation law and its enforcement; namely, the securing of space, punishing of transgressors, and protecting of nonhuman life. Drawing on ethnographic research with antipoaching personnel in Mozambique, I examine how rangers translate these legal and normative manifestations of conservation law enforcement on the ground and in their daily practices to police protected areas and the wildlife within them. This article makes two contributions. First, drawing on insights from the political geography and ecology of conservation with the political geography of policing, I demonstrate how territorial, sovereign, and biopolitical practices and logics coalesce to secure the spaces and the lives of the nonhuman from ostensible human threats. Second, it is rangers who are deployed as petty environmental sovereigns to achieve these objectives through often violent practices. Although many rangers might feel uncomfortable with the use of violence, their agency to commit or resist using violence is authorized, enabled, and constrained by the normative and legal structures of conservation law enforcement within which they operate. The social differentiation among rangers also means that some have more agency to navigate these structures than others. These insights help understand the actually existing operationalization of delegated and performative power over bodies, space, and the use of direct violence. I suggest that critiques of conservation violence, and the use of violence by those acting as petty sovereigns more broadly, should be primarily oriented at the broader structures within which they operate.
Key Words: conservation law enforcement, green militarization, petty sovereign, poaching/antipoaching, policing.
... The crystallisation here of these social issues seems somewhat due to fragmentation of security services created in part by the presence or absence of CID private security (see Figure 5); absence in the case of Atwell Gardens (Bénit-Gbaffou 2008; Clarno and Murray 2013;Paasche, Yarwood, and Sidaway 2014). However, a former director of the Central Johannesburg Partnership, instrumental in bringing CIDs to Johannesburg, suggested to me in an email on October 3, 2018, that those critics "don't know what they're talking about!" ...
This paper explores how entangled layers of use and contingencies of open spaces in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, relate to their structural, material and symbolic aspects. Reflecting on research at Pieter Roos Park, Constitution Hill and Gandhi Square, this paper emphasises the walking route that connects these three spaces, mostly along Rissik Street. It examines the rhythms of people’s navigation of the city, according to perceptions of fear and safety, opportunity and adversity, and offers an initial understanding of the continuous interaction between structure and agency. It reflects on reading about these spaces, and how this connects with walking and writing about the city, all acts with particular, overlapping rhythms. Interpreting these in relation to each other, and in relation to my own rhythms, provokes questions that unsettle linear and straightforward understandings of time and memory as well as the individual and their connection to the public. Whilst linear rhythms are predominant, subject to the working week, surprising and paradoxical practices frequently punctuate these rhythms. Both rhythms and their disruptions are influenced on a variety of levels, often linked to perceptions, which intersect with lingering histories and memory in layered, complex ways.
... Territories can be seen to exist (with various degrees of control, contestation and the bordering practices) across a range of spatial scales and in a wide range of contexts and through various forms of what Sidaway (2007) has referred to as spatial enclaving. This can be seen through such things as the growing phenomenon of gated communities, controlled commercial and leisure spaces and other examples of the partial privatization of formerly public space (Bagaeen and Uduku 2010; Paasche et al. 2014). Following a discussion of ideas of territory and territoriality, this chapter limits the discussion to the overt political sphere focusing on the territorial nature of the state, considering both their territorial practices and the significance of territory in shaping identity. ...
... Crime prevention is at the heart of the Improvement District model, and many Improvement Districts contract private security companies for policing and patrolling services. Improvement districts, however, have been criticised for actively displacing homeless people and other 'undesirables from their designated areas, and hence contribute to reinforcing existing structural inequality in Cape Town (Paasche et al., 2014). ...
... The focus on place-making, beautification, and enhanced policing has also led to heavy-handed clampdowns on people deemed "undesirable." Informal street traders, beggars, the homeless, and others struggling to eke out livelihoods in South Africa's urban areas are commonly pushed out of CID areas, or forced to engage in cat-and-mouse games where their access to these spaces is constantly negotiated and contested (Paasche, Yarwood, Sidaway, 2014). ...
This book offers a cross-national perspective on contemporary urban renewal in relation to social rental housing. Social housing estates – as developed either by governments (public housing) or not-for-profit agencies – became a prominent feature of the 20th century urban landscape in Northern European cities, but also in North America and Australia. Many estates were built as part of earlier urban renewal, ‘slum clearance’ programs especially in the post-World War 2 heyday of the Keynesian welfare state. During the last three decades, however, Western governments have launched high-profile ‘new urban renewal’ programs whose aim has been to change the image and status of social housing estates away from being zones of concentrated poverty, crime and other social problems. This latest phase of urban renewal – often called ‘regeneration’ – has involved widespread demolition of social housing estates and their replacement with mixed-tenure housing developments in which poverty deconcentration, reduced territorial stigmatization, and social mixing of poor tenants and wealthy homeowners are explicit policy goals. Academic critical urbanists, as well as housing activists, have however queried this dominant policy narrative regarding contemporary urban renewal, preferring instead to regard it as a key part of neoliberal urban restructuring and state-led gentrification which generate new socio-spatial inequalities and insecurities through displacement and exclusion processes. This book examines this debate through original, in-depth case study research on the processes and impacts of urban renewal on social housing in European, U.S. and Australian cities. The book also looks beyond the Western urban heartlands of social housing to consider how renewal is occurring, and with what effects, in countries with historically limited social housing sectors such as Japan, Chile, Turkey and South Africa.
... The focus on place-making, beautification, and enhanced policing has also led to heavy-handed clampdowns on people deemed "undesirable." Informal street traders, beggars, the homeless, and others struggling to eke out livelihoods in South Africa's urban areas are commonly pushed out of CID areas, or forced to engage in cat-and-mouse games where their access to these spaces is constantly negotiated and contested (Paasche, Yarwood, Sidaway, 2014). ...
Book synopsis: This book offers a cross-national perspective on contemporary urban renewal in relation to social rental housing. Social housing estates – as developed either by governments (public housing) or not-for-profit agencies – became a prominent feature of the 20th century urban landscape in Northern European cities, but also in North America and Australia. Many estates were built as part of earlier urban renewal, ‘slum clearance’ programs especially in the post-World War 2 heyday of the Keynesian welfare state. During the last three decades, however, Western governments have launched high-profile ‘new urban renewal’ programs whose aim has been to change the image and status of social housing estates away from being zones of concentrated poverty, crime and other social problems. This latest phase of urban renewal – often called ‘regeneration’ – has involved widespread demolition of social housing estates and their replacement with mixed-tenure housing developments in which poverty deconcentration, reduced territorial stigmatization, and social mixing of poor tenants and wealthy homeowners are explicit policy goals. Academic critical urbanists, as well as housing activists, have however queried this dominant policy narrative regarding contemporary urban renewal, preferring instead to regard it as a key part of neoliberal urban restructuring and state-led gentrification which generate new socio-spatial inequalities and insecurities through displacement and exclusion processes. This book examines this debate through original, in-depth case study research on the processes and impacts of urban renewal on social housing in European, U.S. and Australian cities. The book also looks beyond the Western urban heartlands of social housing to consider how renewal is occurring, and with what effects, in countries with historically limited social housing sectors such as Japan, Chile, Turkey and South Africa.
... Entry to an enclosed neighbourhood in Tshwane. Yarwood, and Sidaway 2014). Enclosed neighbourhoods also threaten normative principles of town planning, such as inclusive and integrated neighbourhoods, the promotion of pedestrian access and walkability, accessible open spaces, etc. (Smit, Landman, and Venter 2015). ...
Gated communities have grown significantly in many parts of the world, including South Africa. This paper focuses on gated communities in the City of Tshwane. The discussion is based on a study carried out between 2013 and 2014 on enclosed neighbourhoods – a type of gated community – and the processes involved to apply for permission to close off existing neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods are used as a lens to highlight the challenges facing the planning practice and the consequent tensions that emerged due to conflicting rationalities and deep differences between the various stakeholders. Planners are caught in the middle. The paper indicates that planners are aware of the tensions but have limited means to address them due to strong political pressure, emotional upheaval from community members and a restricted legal base. This has several implications for both planning theory and practice.
... For Till, this has been as a participant observer as a frontline medic with revolutionary secular Kurdish-??led forces in Syria's civil war and then as member of an NGO team of medically trained veterans providing combat casualty currently working in Mosul (http://mermt.com/) following doctoral research on geographies of private security in neoliberalizing Cape Town (Paasche et al. 2014). For James, the reflections relate to fieldwork
since
2009
with
Till
in
Cambodia,
Iraqi
Kurdistan
and
Mozambique
plus
our
earlier
joint experiences in the English naval port-??city of Plymouth, to where we return in our closing words here. ...
These interventions in urban geopolitics recognise that it is timely to develop a research agenda that reinforces, broadens and regenerates this field, bridging the disciplines of political geography, urban studies, planning and architecture in renewed ways.
... In these cases, public space, i.e. the "location where the social interactions and political activities of all members of 'the public' occur" (Mitchell, 1995, p. 116) is controlled. Protests might be restricted or forbidden at some places, as when officials refuse to grant a permit for protests (Mitchell & Staeheli, 2005), through the activity of public police forces or private security companies (Paasche, Yarwood & Sidaway, 2014) or through controlling geography (Mitchell, 2003). This control of public space can occur through establishing surveillance and social control, privatizing space that was previously public (Kohn, 2004;Miller, 2007;Low & Smith, 2006) as in gated communities (Low, 2001;Bartu, Candan & Kolluoğlu, 2008), or altering the specific design of places to create wide and accessible streets or squares that allow heavily-armed police or military forces to take control-as planned by Haussmann in Paris or as can be seen in the recently transformed West-Amman (Schwedler, 2012). ...
What are the limits of resistance in public spaces? Academic representations of acts of resistance often exclusively look at the acts themselves, focusing on performers or participants, but neglecting passers-by. How do these passers-by connect (or not) to these acts and their aesthetics? What about after the action is over and the participants have left? What about effects at sites distant from where the practices of resistance took place? This article uses the works of Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Rancière to discuss the restrictions and the potential resistance in public spaces. We investigate the limitations of everyday practices of resistance in public spaces and suggest that future research can better understand the limits of practices of resistance by taking into account three distinct aspects: distinction, duration, and extension. We use Rancière’s understanding of aesthetics and the sensible to link accounts of resistance that focus on political subjectivities and those that focus on actual practices of resistance.
... Nowadays, the urban landscape of Cape Town is still marked by high levels of segregation (Parry & van Eeden, 2015). In the higher income categories, the residential environment is characterized by gated communities (Lemanski, Landman, & Durington, 2008), neighborhood watches (Schuermans & Spocter, 2016) and private security companies (Paasche, Yarwood, & Sidaway, 2014). Outside the immediate living environment, white, middle-class people tend to limit their freedom of movement to shopping malls (Houssay-Holzschuch & Teppo, 2009), secured office complexes (Murray, 2011) and city improvement districts (Didier, Morange, & Peyroux, 2013). ...
Drawing on photo-elicitation interviews with 60 middle-class, white residents of two privileged suburbs of Cape Town, this paper focuses on the particularities and the potential effects of mobile encounters with strangers. Starting from discourses about different means of transportation, it is demonstrated, first, that middle-class, white South Africans prefer cars over public transit not only for safety reasons or matters of practicality but also to circumvent interactions with those whom they consider to be strangers. Yet, based on the ambiguous and ambivalent sensations of fear, shame, guilt, sympathy, apathy and anxiety provoked by glances and glimpses of strangers on drives through the city, it is clarified that particular forms of visual encounter which develop on-the-go can stimulate privileged residents of a very unequal city to develop new engagements with strangers. By analyzing how unfocused interactions through the windshield add up to focused interactions at home and at work, it is shown, more specifically, how different types of encounters at different places complement each other to encourage middle-class, white residents to see the humanity of those whom they had considered to be strange or dangerous before.
... However, territories can also be seen to exist (with various degrees of control, contestation and forms of bordering practice) across a range of spatial scales, in many diverse contexts and through various forms of what Sidaway (2007) has referred to as spatial enclaving. This can be seen through such things as the growing phenomenon of gated communities, patrolled commercial and leisure spaces, and other examples of the partial privatization of formerly public space (Bagaeen and Uduku 2010; Paasche et al. 2014). Most people are regularly confronted with signs such as 'Authorized Personnel Only', 'No Trespassing', 'Prohibido el Paso', and so on. ...
Politics and political relationships underpin The world we live in. From The division of The earth’s surface into separate states to The placement of ‘keep out’ signs, territorial strategies to control geographic space can be used to assert, maintain or resist power and as a force for oppression or liberation. Forms of exclusion can be consolidated and reinforced through territorial practices, yet they can also be resisted through similar means. Territoriality can be seen as The spatial expression of power, with borders dividing those inside from those outside.
... Grant and Mittelsteadt, 2004;Pow, 2009), governance conditions influencing enclosure have received little scholarly attention. Although detailed work has described citizen action to enclose space in South Africa (Landman, 2004;Paasche et al., 2014), wider governance processes producing gated communities--especially self-organized ones-remain under-documented. Addressing governance practices and processes in Malaysia offers insights into the ways that a range of actors co-produce spatial enclosure to facilitate social separation. ...
Enclosed residential areas are proliferating in Malaysian cities, in common with many other parts of the world. The production of gated communities and guarded neighborhoods in Malaysia reveals the active role of the state in creating conditions that support enclosure and securitization of space. This article examines the role of governance in producing residential enclaves that reinforce segregation and fragment urban landscapes. Based on a study of gated communities in Malaysia, we argue that governments, corporations and citizen groups collaborate within a complex governance system that (re)produces enclosure. Neoliberal market principles fuse with ethnic politics, cultural predilections and economic imperatives to generate a socially and spatially fragmented urban landscape where security concerns dominate and where citizens culturally, physically and symbolically segregate themselves from others.
... In line with Comaroff and Comaroff's (2012;see also Simone 2004;Simone & Abouhani 2005;Berg 2010) argument about African metropolises forecasting global urban futures, I see such confrontations, uprisings and 'unrest' as manifesting global cities' increasingly polycentric, nodal or hybrid form of governance impacting spatial ordering and security arrangements (Goldstein 2010;Paasche et al. 2013). Arguably, these developments entail growing urban domains of unsettledness, where police officers or private security guards, for instance, do not necessarily exercise state authority but actively produce confrontations and themselves engage in the popular uprisings. ...
This article analyses the large-scale popular urban uprisings that shook Mozambican cities on 1 and 2 September 2010, following the government's announcement of successive rises in the price of public transport fares and basic commodities. Using ethnographic material from the city of Chimoio and the capital Maputo, the following work highlights the organisational character of the ‘strikes’ (greves), as the popular uprisings were called, and explores them as a new form of organising political discontent. Comparing them to other historical and contemporary popular uprisings, this article argues that the strikes violently and rhizomically generated ephemeral and egalitarian forms of political authority and order that simultaneously confronted, replicated and undercut the aspects of Mozambican statehood. Deploying Durkheim's notion of effervescence, the work further argues that the creative fervour, multisemic aspects and festive character of the popular uprisings need to be recognised; thus, this analysis challenges the reductive labelling of these events as ‘riots’ or ‘food riots’.
... At its worst, territorial policing can be used to exclude some groups of people from particular spaces. In urban areas there are many examples of community and territory being used to cleanse space, often to support neo-liberal 8 programmes of investment (Herbert, 2005;Mitchell, 1998;Paasche et al., 2014;Samara, 2010). ...
The rhetoric of community is widely deployed in rural policing but can be problematic for three main reasons. The idea of community can exclude as well as include; be used as a way of shifting responsibility for policing away from the state and sometimes produces insular, bounded views of places. In response to these concerns, this paper uses a relational approach to re-conceptualise rural policing as a networked activity that enrols various actors to produce different forms of policing in different places. To illustrate the potential of this approach it considers how various agencies are drawn into searches for missing people in the countryside. It pays particular attention to non-human agencies, specifically search-dogs handled by volunteers, in searches for missing people. As well as broadening empirical and conceptual knowledge of rural policing, the paper also contributes to wider debates in rural studies about the place of animals, and especially working dogs, in the countryside.
... Ultimately this struggle was lost, as the pressures and logics of real estate capital and the juggernaut of the 2010 Football World Cup eroded most of the gains and influential representative of municipal workers, the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU), as well as the South African National Civics Organisation (SANCO), which was an extremely influential civil society movement during apartheid and the early years of the democratic period (Lipietz, 2008). succeeded in cleansing central Cape Town of undesirable populations (Paasche et al., 2013). ...
In academic literature, urban regeneration is more often than not treated as a code-word for gentrification or dismissed as a term developers use to sugar-coat the commercialisation of space and the destruction of public housing. Reinvestment in urban spaces and public housing is seen as part of a global strategy of capital and both a cause and symptom of the spread of neoliberal politics and practices around the world (Smith 2002). Using the case of inner-city Johannesburg and the provision of low-income and social housing in the area, this presentation argues that more nuanced and contextually sensitive approaches are required. In Johannesburg, the provision of low-income housing has been led by the private sector, who have also taken the lead in the regeneration of the city. However, this has not resulted in a solely revanchist or exclusionary city being created, but has had the contradictory effects of fostering increased social cohesion and meaningful regeneration, whilst simultaneously increasing the cost of land and housing in the area. Utilising Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of field, capital and habitus, this presentation explores the multiple factors which have shaped the reinvestment and regeneration process in Johannesburg and shows how a diversity of outcomes and imperatives are possible and in fact present, even in a context shaped by neoliberal approaches to city-building and housing provision. Cities are part of broader social contexts or milieus and are therefore shaped by competing fields and forms of capital. This presentation highlights the multiple impulses and concerns which have shaped housing provision and reinvestment in Johannesburg’s inner-city and discusses what the effects of these have been on communities living in the area and invites scholars, whilst still remaining critical, to adopt new, more nuanced and context sensitive approaches to questions about urban renewal, particularly in the Global South.
... However, territories can also be seen to exist (with various degrees of control, contestation and forms of bordering practice) across a range of spatial scales, in many diverse contexts and through various forms of what Sidaway (2007) has referred to as spatial enclaving. This can be seen through such things as the growing phenomenon of gated communities, patrolled commercial and leisure spaces, and other examples of the partial privatization of formerly public space (Bagaeen and Uduku 2010; Paasche et al. 2014). Most people are regularly confronted with signs such as 'Authorized Personnel Only', 'No Trespassing', 'Prohibido el Paso', and so on. ...
... However, territories can also be seen to exist (with various degrees of control, contestation and forms of bordering practice) across a range of spatial scales, in many diverse contexts and through various forms of what Sidaway (2007) has referred to as spatial enclaving. This can be seen through such things as the growing phenomenon of gated communities, patrolled commercial and leisure spaces, and other examples of the partial privatization of formerly public space (Bagaeen and Uduku 2010; Paasche et al. 2014). Most people are regularly confronted with signs such as 'Authorized Personnel Only', 'No Trespassing', 'Prohibido el Paso', and so on. ...
In the last half-century, the ‘centre–periphery’ model has become insufficient to describe the increasingly fragmented and multicentric Latin American metropolises. Frontiers between central and peripheral areas are shifting, in part, due to the emergence of new corporate centralities, usually located outside historical city centres and heavily equipped with private ‘security’ agents and devices. By examining the evolving governing practices taking place in and around the dynamic frontier of a business centrality in São Paulo, Brazil, this article discusses the connections between the transformation in centre–periphery relations and the reworking of prior forms of socio-spatial control since the ‘security’ turn of the 1990s. More specifically, it explores the effects of the production of securitised corporate centralities on the racialised differential governance of urban space. For this purpose, the article draws from empirical work involving fieldwork, interviews with public and private ‘security’ agents, the observation of meetings of the local Public Security Community Council (CONSEG), and the analysis of police statistics. In sum, the argument presented here is that the evolution of segregation mechanisms and governing practices in Latin-American metropolises reproduces centre–periphery relations under new spatial configurations, and increases the capacity of private agents to subject urban space to their own rules and regulations.
This paper argues that reconsidering the disciplinary significance of the geographies of crime is timely. It has three aims. First, it identifies recent developments in the geographical study of crime, arguing that they both challenge and extend its intellectual traditions. Second, using the example of cybercrime, it identifies new forms of crime that deserve scrutiny by geographers. Third, it draws on ideas of Southern criminology to identify how research agendas can be diversified to advance how geographers study crime. In doing so it proposes that geographers’ renewed interest in crime over recent decades is appropriately labelled ‘new geographies of crime’.
Urban governance theories frequently overlook policing, despite current controversies surrounding police. To help fill this gap, I investigate how urban governance institutions may influence police work. My intervention centers around the crucial point that “the police” are a diverse multiplicity of agencies, whereas previous studies on the relationship between urban governance institutions and police institutions focus on one or two agencies, usually municipal police. I direct attention to the diversity of police in central Atlanta: 11 fully sworn agencies, two private security forces employed by community improvement districts, and the common regulatory practices that are fundamentally police though not commonly discussed as such in urban studies. I use frameworks from Law & Society research on jurisdiction to analyze data from roughly one year of fieldwork on three commonly studied urban governance institutions: neighborhood planning units, community improvement districts, and university-led “anchor institution” development partnerships. I show how these agencies coordinate the public and police(s), convene diverse police elites, or foster the expectation of police caretaking. Governance institutions provide legitimate forums for police communications. This activity helps the complicated and contradictory multiplicity of police seem coherent and obscures policing’s violent contradictions, ultimately helping define the bounds of a community.
This paper builds on the notions of topology, scene and relationality in this special edition by highlighting asymmetries following from overdependence on private security companies (PSCs) in a settler colonial context. The locus is the JB Marks Municipality in South Africa. This municipality includes the historically white and middleclass town of Potchefstroom and the historically black township of Ikageng. These two scenes differentially address the gap left by an under-resourced state police. In Potchefstroom, PSCs, social media platforms and other infrastructures are intertwined with the sociality of daily life. In Ikageng, a ‘vigilante group’, the Peri Peri, has attempted to fill a similar gap. While reliance on racist and classist state policing has been pointed out as problematic globally, this paper suggests that reliance on non-state policing may not be any less problematic. The paper argues that tacit and provisional acceptance, which can be withdrawn, of the technically extra-legal activities by non-state security providers, might, in the interim, be a pragmatic way to allow effective security provision by non-state actors. However, tacit approval is no substitute for addressing a broader topology of inequality and insecurity through macroeconomic and spatial transformation.
This paper explores how dwellers of the fortified Cape Town market called The Neighbourgoods Market understand, navigate, and experience personal safety. The findings support Hentschel’s (2015) claim that concepts such as “fortified enclaves” cannot fully explain how navigations of personal safety unfold in urban South Africa. Market dwellers’ sense of safety did not solely result from fortification but was constantly assessed on the affective, corporeal, and emotional plane. The particulars of this undertaking illuminate that market access and belonging is granted those that can behave in a way that market dwellers understand as ‘enjoyment’. Therefore, ideas about the ‘right’ way to enjoy the market form a kind of social and behavioral fortification, in addition to the exterior and architectural one. The findings indicate the importance of further study of how seemingly positive characteristics of space – such as enjoyment - operate social hierarchizing and subsequent spatial exclusion in contemporary cities.
Rio de Janeiro’s police officers habitually work on the edge of a border – between rationalised and ordered routines on one hand, and risk, disorder and incipient violence on the other. The article argues that this edge has distinct emotional components and concrete spatial consequences for the production of the city as a bordered space. Conceptually, the article combines spatial thinking about the production of territoriality with an emotional understanding of the police as ‘edgeworkers’ grounded in cultural criminology. Empirically, this piece uses ethnographic material from research with ordinary civil police officers and Special Forces in Rio. Across three empirical sections, the article explores police emotions and their significant spatial effects. First, the article mobilises the metaphor of ‘drying ice’ that police officers use to symbolise their everyday struggle with Rio’s urban conflict, and which leads them to produce spaces of secrecy. Second, the article shows how the police consider their job to be a vocation, a stance which simultaneously produces spaces of exposure. Finally, the Special Forces’ activities are compared to those of soldiers in war zones, assessing how the officers as edgeworkers find ways of escaping their emotional dilemma, thereby producing the city as a space of war.
Amid the incapacity of state security forces, the persistence and spread of our era's security challenge – from urban homicide to global terrorism – have also led to an expansion of private policing to combat them. Private security has become one of the fastest growing sectors. Like these challenges, private policing has also diversified, ranging from local community policing groups to wealthy multinational firms. The entry delves into the underlying catalysts of private security, using examples from each world region.
This article considers how militarism and post-militarism impact upon places and the people who live in them. The article focuses on Plymouth in Devon, south-west UK, examining how geopolitics and militarism have contributed to change in a ‘garrison town’.
While work on the securitization of migration has often held borders to be the site at which state power is most keenly felt, this paper draws on static and walking interviews with Bangladeshi male migrant workers in Singapore to understand their everyday experiences of the securitization within state territory. These narratives demonstrate how the Little India district in Singapore has been scripted as an exceptionally problematic space associated with dangerous migrant bodies, within which Bangladeshi migrants encounter state power in a variety of guises, ranging from police patrols to video surveillance technologies. They also reveal how Bangladeshi migrants continually struggle against these state-led scripts of insecurity, even if their sojourn in Singaporean territory is circumscribed by a condition of permanent temporariness. Through this discussion, the securitization of migration is conceptualized as an unfinished project that is often exerted unevenly and paradoxically within state territory. The security-migration nexus should also not only be understood with recourse to bodies deemed “illegal” and “unwanted”—such as asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants—but should also account for temporary labour migrants who have been legally admitted into state territory, whose labour power is central to the host state’s economy but who are disallowed from ever belonging within the countries they work in.
We call into question the growing presence of private security companies (PSCs) in cities throughout the world. Though PSCs have grown enormously in recent decades, there exist few academic analyses to consider their broad-reaching effects. Researchers still have much to understand about the relationships between PSCs and changing patterns of urban development, governance and public security. PSCs are prevalent in both the Global North and South, yet their presence is perhaps most intense in emerging countries, where social inequality is high and public security is tenuous. As such, in this article we draw on specific examples from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, where demand is soaring for private security and PSCs operate in complicated networks between the state, private capital and organised crime. Our analysis draws attention to the paradoxes of urban private security, beginning with the fact that public insecurity is in fact good for PSC business. By reflecting on existing published resources – and making connections across several disciplines – our goals in this article are threefold: (1) to highlight the need for more research on PSCs in urban settings; (2) to draw attention to the ways private security is changing urban space, and; (3) to suggest that the growth of PSCs, rather than being representative of increased public security, may in some cases coincide with rising levels of urban crime and insecurity.
Private policing has been spreading across South Africa. This paper interrogates
the context of the development of private policing in the country. Drawing on
insights from global security research, governmentality studies, and critical
sociological and criminological theory, particularly postcolonial perspective, it
addresses these questions: How do we make sense of the growth of private
policing in South Africa, and what are the broader security policy implications of
the proliferation of private policing in the post-apartheid state? It proposes that
the development of private policing reflects a paradigm shift from the collective
human security to the individualistic sense of security in contrast to the collective
welfare that characterized pre-colonial indigenous social relations. Private
policing is intended to contribute to addressing the resultant security challenges.
It concludes that crime control mechanisms must transcend aggressive policing
to address structural underpinnings of crime problems, including poverty, to
ensure a collective human security, as part of the broader security policies in
South Africa. This paper makes a contribution to the theoretical debate regarding
the role of imperialist powers, the transnational capital, and the state, in
promoting the development of private policing.
This article demonstrates and advocates the importance of theoretical frameworks which allow for nuance and complexity. Moving away from fixed ways of reading and analysing processes of urban renewal (such as gentrification, revanchism, neoliberal urbanism), it seeks to show how a diversity of imperatives and agendas are present and shape moments of urban change and the practices of actors involved in these. Drawing on research conducted in inner-city Johannesburg which focussed on private-sector-led regeneration, housing provision and security, it demonstrates that the process underway is characterised by a multiplicity of goals and practices. Regeneration is formulated within a neoliberal paradigm, yet through creative strategies and interventions is also achieving developmental goals and expanding the provision of affordable, centrally-located housing. The article details the strategies adopted by organisations specialising in financing social and affordable housing and demonstrates the ways in which these emphasise and are helping to achieve the expansion of housing provision to low-income households. It further discusses the habitus of housing providers in the inner-city and shows how these have been influenced by and respond to the developmental challenges and racial transformation which characterise the area. It thus demonstrates that local contexts, concerns and agendas influence the regeneration process and that putatively global processes such as gentrification, revanchism and neoliberal urbanism, whilst still relevant, need to be used in ways which allow for alternative, vernacular narratives and explanations to emerge too.
This paper considers the roles of policing and security in the geographies of everyday public and semi-public space. We contend that while security is concerned with territory, policing relates to place. We consider the relationship between security and territory before examining the relationship between policing and place. In the final section, we argue that a relational view of space is needed to understand how practices of policing and security shape space and, in turn, the lives of people using it.
The diverse residents of the urban global South experience insecurities in everyday, immediate and subjective ways. Lemanski argues these insecurities relate not only to physical concerns like fear, crime, and violence but also to stressors like insecure tenure and financial situations, and threatened and contested lifestyles and cultures as cities rapidly change. This paper considers how diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ manifest through urban nature and shape collaborations around nature conservation. The focus is on protected coastal dunes in Cape Town and collaborative conservation participants, including municipal nature conservators and community representatives from the adjacent apartheid-era ‘townships’. The diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ perceived and experienced by these participants manifest variously in physical threats to bodies and biodiversity, but also in relation to the insecure tenure and financial situations experienced by residents and conservators alike, alongside differing cultural values of nature. Through attention to diffuse power relations and everyday experiences, divergent perceptions of (in)security are shown to be frictional and sometimes paradoxical in nature. Yet identifying these (in)securities also holds potential for exploring hopeful and productive negotiations around what ‘security’ might mean, and how it might be realised through the collaborations – bringing into dialogue contested spaces of urban nature in cities of the global South and North.
This article historicizes the contemporary urban development and governance strategies in Cape Town, South Africa, by focusing on two periods: the British colonial era (mid to turn of the nineteenth century) and the neoliberal postapartheid era (early twenty-first century). It reveals the keen affinity between a contemporary urban strategy known as Improvement Districts for the affluent and the old colonial practice of "location creation" for the native. Discussing the similarities and differences in the material and discursive practices by which urban privilege is produced and maintained in Cape Town across the two eras, the study brings to light the colonial legacies of the neoliberal municipal strategies for governance of urban inequalities. This insight is significant to the citizens' resistance against exclusionary redevelopment projects that claim "innovation" in urban management.
In this paper, we examine the ways in which the urban brand is policed in an attempt to ensure that the Exchange District business improvement zone in Winnipeg, Manitoba maintains a stable and safe image. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the use of security and beautification services as well as environmental design in the production of perceptions of safety. In addition, we suggest that the brand itself is a source of policing, since it evokes a regulatory ideal or ‘definition of order’ that facilitates coordination of the institutions, auspices and agents engaged in the co-production of the brand and its boundaries.
Using the example of two English villages, this paper examines whether rural crime concern is evidence of an ‘exclusive society’ in the countryside. Specific attention is given to concerns expressed by residents as part of a consultation exercise to establish community-based policing partnerships in rural areas of the West Mercia Constabulary. Based on these findings, the paper goes on to question whether local policing partnerships are capable of shaping idyllic visions of rural space in an exclusionary way. It is argued that while it is important to examine the spatialised rhetoric of rural crime concern, structural processes, rather than localised discourses, make a greater contribution to exclusion in the countryside.
Changes related to postmodern trends outline, briefly, the way policing is being re-considered in South Africa. Testimony to this is the Cape Town City Improvement District Initiative which is represented as a case study of the nature of pluralised policing in contemporary South African communities. The types and amount of policing being undertaken and the relations between various policing entities is discussed as well as the implications of these types of networks in terms of various ideological and practical issues.
This article will illustrate, by means of three empirical research examples conducted in South Africa, that private security operating in public spaces simultaneously retains ‘traditional’ private security mentalities of loss prevention as well as ‘traditional’ state policing mentalities of crime control and coercion. This adoption of either state or corporate mentalities and technologies is fluid, interchangeable and by no means mutually exclusive, befitting the nature of daily security activities as well as the expectations generated from policing that space. In this way, private security is evolving in its application of diverse policing mentalities in its management and interpretation of public ‘space’; in its ability to wield power both symbolically and actually and; in its tendency to adopt a variety of crime control and social ordering techniques.
We begin this paper by reviewing some recent transformations in governance. We then propose three new concepts that we believe assist us in coming to terms with these transformations and the political statuses that have emerged as part of them. These concepts are ‘nodal governance’, ‘denizens’, and ‘communal space’. Following this we will explore the normative implications of nodal governance as it has taken shape to date, with an emphasis on the ‘governance disparity’ that is paralleling the ‘wealth disparity’ across the globe. In response to this disparity, we will end with an outline of a normative vision and practical programme aimed at deepening democracy in poor areas of South Africa, Argentina, and elsewhere. We will argue that the main virtue of nodal governance, namely, the emphasis on local capacity and knowledge can be retrieved, reaffirmed, and reinstitutionalized in ways that enhance the self-direction of poor communities while strengthening their ‘collective capital’.
In 1991 Nicolas Fyfe published a paper in this journal arguing that studies of the police were `conspicuously absent from the landscapes of human geography' (Fyfe, 1991: 249). This article reviews geographical progress in this area and argues that attention should be shifted from the police towards policing. Consideration is given to the increasing numbers of agencies that perform policing, including state, private and voluntary actors, as well as `the police' themselves. Second, critical scrutiny is given to discourses of policing and their potential to exclude particular people from particular spaces. It is argued that the concept of governance provides a suitable framework for theorizing new geographies of policing.
Despite a long academic debate on the patrimonial dimension of the state in Africa and a more recent interest in African political parties, the effect of patronage and party politics on governability in Africa’s cities remains poorly addressed in the academic literature. This includes the case in South Africa when one looks at the security sector, which to a certain extent, looks like a depoliticised field of expertise. Popular claims for security seem to be a side issue in the literature on social movements, while vigilante specialists and policing experts do not place party politics at the core of security issue challenges, especially in poor townships. The provision of security in poor neighbourhoods is an important resource in the struggle for political support however. This is examined through two case studies in Cape Town Coloured townships, considering the role played by political leaders, NGO leaders and key officials in grassroots mobilisations for security. These mobilisations are not only about politicking however; ‘ordinary members’ of local security organisations also get involved for motivations, which have nothing to do with confrontational party politics. These different agendas between ordinary members and local leaders cannot be read as the manifestation of a fundamental opposition between the popular classes and a westernised elite as suggested by Charterjee. It reveals instead prevalent and ambivalent relationships between partisan politics and popular mobilisations for security in a context of high insecurity.
Over the past two decades, municipal governments across the United States have adopted novel social control techniques including off-limits orders, parks exclusion laws, and other applications of trespass law. These new tools are used to exclude the socially marginal from contested public spaces. These new social control techniques fuse criminal and civil legal authority and are touted as `alternatives' to arrest and incarceration. Ironically, these new techniques nonetheless increase the number of behaviors and people defined as criminal and subject to formal social control. This article describes these legal innovations and considers their origins and theoretical implications. We argue that recognition of law's constitutive effects helps to explain the origins and nature of the urban social control innovations described here.
Banishment is an increasingly common tool for urban social control. In Seattle and other cities, new tools give the police stronger authority to create and enforce zones of exclusion. Deployed most commonly in neighborhoods populated by homeless people and members of other disadvantaged populations, banishment orders seek to coerce individuals to relocate. As an attempt to reduce crime and disorder, however, we suggest that banishment fails. We demonstrate this by drawing on interviews with forty-one Seattle residents who live with at least one exclusion order to ascertain how their strong connections to place make compliance with banishment an oppressive burden. Even if banishment increases the authority of the police, and thereby helps them to respond to public concern about 'disorder', it makes everyday life more perilous for the sociallymarginalized. This suggests that banishment's increased popularity deserves robust contestation.
This paper offers a critical reconstruction and reinterpretation of the disposition towards the governance of crime that was ascendant in England and Wales during the middle decades of the twentieth century - namely, liberal elitism, or what I term Platonic guardianship. Drawing upon documentary sources, and extended oral history/biographical interviews with retired Home Office officials, penal reformers and criminologists, I examine the express and implied values and beliefs that constitute this take on political responsibility towards crime and the public passions it arouses, and consider the senses in which it may be plausibly described, ideologically, as liberal. I then explore three moments of contention during which the legitimacy of liberal elitism was called into question over the last several decades - the nothing works assault on rehabilitation in the 1970s, the rise of law and order politics in the 1980s, and the populist and punitive turn taken by penal politics since 1993. In each case, I outline briefly the nature of the charges leveled at the commitments and practices of Platonic guardianship and assess - drawing upon the interview material - the perceived scale and effects of each challenge. I conclude by reflecting on the sociological preconditions and normative limitations of Platonic guardianship as a mode of rule, and on what we may draw from it today in our efforts to make sense of, and transcend, the febrile contemporary politics of crime.
This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation into active Neighbourhood Watch (NW) Schemes in Hereford and Worcester: an area which has experienced a rise in both crime rate and the number of active NW Schemes in the last ten years. The example of NW is used to examine the effectiveness of voluntary action to tackle social problems in rural areas and to consider the changing nature of social relations found there. More specifically, the study of these schemes allows an assessment to be made of the impact and nature of crime in rural areas and measures the effectiveness of NW in countering it. The paper reveals that NW does have an important role to play in reducing fear of crime and improving police relations. It confirms that NW operates with considerable social bias which is a recognised problem associated with voluntary action. The final discussion highlights the need for more systematic studies of the problem of rural crime.
This paper explores some of the more extreme tendencies in the management of public space to consider whether current policy directions, in this case in central Scotland, are driven by a desire to empower or control users of such spaces. The title of the paper is taken from the theoretical lenses provided by Neil Smith and Sharon Zukin in their differential views on trends in the management and control of public spaces. The paper focuses on two local case studies to examine the possibility that a `revanchist' element is emerging in policies towards public spaces in Britain. The paper concludes that programmes designed to deal with urban and public space are a reaction to both real and perceived problems. However, there has been a privileging of a policy discourse which celebrates the displacement of social problems rather than their resolution. It is argued that such a discourse cannot ultimately provide sustainable policies for the regulation of public spaces and threatens the inclusion of some users of public spaces who may not be considered to be legitimate patrons. While this does more to foster fearful than inclusive public spaces, a thorny question remains over whether some degree of exclusion is a necessary price for policies which seek to secure public space and maintain a wider quality of life.
This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in different historical and geographical contexts. It does so first by critically interrogating work on territoriality, suggesting that neither the biological nor the social uses of this term are particularly profitable ways to approach the historically more specific category of ‘territory’. Instead, ideas of ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ are examined, suggesting that these political-economic and political-strategic relations are essential to understanding ‘territory’, yet ultimately insufficient. Territory needs to be understood in terms of its relation to space, itself a calculative category that is dependent on the existence of a range of techniques. Ultimately this requires rethinking unproblematic definitions of territory as a ‘bounded space’ or the state as a ‘bordered power container’, because both presuppose the two things that should be most interrogated, space and boundaries. Rather than boundaries being the distinction between place and space, or land or terrain and territory, boundaries are a second-order problem founded upon a particular sense of calculation and concomitant grasp of space. Territory then can be understood as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and measure and control – the technical and the legal – must be thought alongside the economic and strategic.
Nearly two decades after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, how different does the nation look? In Cape Town, is hardening inequality under conditions of neoliberal globalization actually reproducing the repressive governance of the apartheid era? By exploring issues of urban security and development, this book brings to light the features of urban apartheid that increasingly mark not only Cape Town but also the global cities of our day—cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Beijing. The text focuses on urban renewal and urban security policies and practices in the city center and townships as this aspiring world-class city actively pursues a neoliberal approach to development. The city’s attempt to escape its past is, however, constrained by crippling inequalities, racial and ethnic tensions, political turmoil, and persistent insecurity. He book shows how governance in Cape Town remains rooted in the perceived need to control dangerous populations and protect a somewhat fragile and unpopular economic system. In urban areas around the world, where the affluent minority and poor majority live in relative proximity to each other, aggressive security practices and strict governance reflect and reproduce the divided city.
To achieve a world-class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: Business or City Improvement Districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in center city Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio-spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post-apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio-spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll-out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and without their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio-spatial inequalities is an open question.
Just a decade ago security had little claim to criminological attention. Today a combination of disciplinary paradigm shifts, policy changes, and world political events have pushed security to the forefront of the criminological agenda. Distinctions between public safety and private protection, policing and security services, national and international security are being eroded. Post-9/11 the pursuit of security has been hotly debated not least because countering terrorism raises the stakes and licenses extraordinary measures. Security has become a central plank of public policy, a topical political issue, and lucrative focus of private venture but it is not without costs, problems, and paradoxes. As security governs our lives, governing security become a priority. This book provides a brief, authoritative introduction to the history of security from Hobbes to the present day and a timely guide to contemporary security politics and dilemmas. It argues that the pursuit of security poses a significant challenge for criminal justice practices and values. It defends security as public good and suggests a framework of principles by which it might better be governed. Engaging with major academic debates in criminology, law, international relations, politics, and sociology, this book stands at the vanguard of interdisciplinary writing on security.
Politics and political relationships underpin The world we live in. From The division of The earth’s surface into separate states to The placement of ‘keep out’ signs, territorial strategies to control geographic space can be used to assert, maintain or resist power and as a force for oppression or liberation. Forms of exclusion can be consolidated and reinforced through territorial practices, yet they can also be resisted through similar means. Territoriality can be seen as The spatial expression of power, with borders dividing those inside from those outside.
Geographies of homelessness mainly address issues of social exclusion, especially in contexts of urban public space. Recent research focuses on spatial regulation and surveillance, and strategies used by homeless people to resist these forms of control and create spaces for themselves in the city. Relatively little attention is paid, however, to the embodied, affective, emotional and relational geographies of homelessness. We address this absence through an exploration of how material spaces and practices shape a sense of belonging for a group of men living in a homeless shelter in Cape Town. Theorizing belonging as constituted through the materialities of both self-identity and social connections, we examine the three spaces that are most affective in our participants’ everyday lives: (i) their bodies, (ii) the shelter where they live, and (iii) the shebeen (tavern) where they drink. The discursive and embodied accounts of two participants in particular serve as a case study that illuminates the complex ways in which belonging is shaped in spaces of homeless life. These men’s experiences reveal some of the ambivalences and ambiguities of homelessness which are only rendered visible through a theoretical lens that respects their status as emotional and relational subjects, rather than as objects within structures of exclusion. Drinking in particular emerges from this research as an important factor in understanding the contradictory behaviours and feelings in these men’s daily lives. Damaging their bodies and social relationships, alcohol nonetheless provides a sense of belonging by facilitating both a sense of self and connections with others.
Academics have increasingly begun to question the significance of bounded understandings of space and place, preferring instead to approach places as open, dynamic, relational entities that are in-formation, and the ways in which different places are connected by flows of people, ideas, and material things. The aim of this paper is to focus on the implications of networked and relational ways of thinking for how we understand the notion of 'territory', the archetypal example of bounded space. We discuss the need to develop a greater dialogue between relational and territorial understandings of space by exploring recent work on national territories. We contend that (1) the discourses and embodied practices of actors and (2) a whole series of objects are actively involved in producing a national territory that is open, contingent, and contested. The paper focuses on empirical material relating to Welsh roads and road signs-in particular the campaign in favour of bilingual road signs in Wales during the late 1960s and 1970s-as a way of highlighting the significance of these two themes. We conclude by arguing that territories are not relics of a static world of nation-states but, rather, the contingent products of an ongoing series of connections between people, discourses, and objects.
In contemporary sociology, there has been significant interest in the idea of mobility, the decline of the nation state, the rise of flexible citizenship, and the porous quality of political boundaries. There is much talk of medicine without borders and sociology without borders. These social developments are obviously linked to the processes of globalization, leading some to argue that we need a 'sociology beyond society' in order to account for these flows and global networks. In this article, I propose an alternative analysis. There are important developments involving the securitization of modern societies that create significant forms of immobility. One striking illustration is the increasing use of walls to quarantine or secure territories and communities against outsiders or to regulate the flow of migrants in Israel, in Europe and along the Mexican-US border. Modern societies are in particular character-ized by a deep contradiction between the economic need for labour mobility and the state's political need to assert sovereignty. Gated societies, ghettoes, quarantine zones, prisons, camps and similar arrangements are in many respects pre-modern institutions of spatial regulation for political ends. Contemporary technical developments in biomedicine offer new oppor-tunities for political control and spatial regulation in terms of forensic policing, bio-tattooing and bioprofiling. Globalization paradoxically produces significant forms of immobility for political regulation of persons alongside the mobility of goods and services.
The spreading of city improvement districts (CIDs) and connected forms of public–private partnership as an international model of urban renewal has been linked to the rise of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ and the neoliberalization of policies and practices, at a time when competition between cities in the global economy has never been greater. The aim of this article is to explore the transfer and adaptation of the CID model in two cities of the South, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Arguing that CIDs are an example of the local embeddedness of neoliberalism, we highlight the role of the private sector in importing and adapting CIDs in South Africa, and point out the rise of techno‐politicians in CID management. Paying particular attention to discourses, we analyse the way images of decaying urban centres were used to legitimate the adoption of such schemes. The subsequent transformation of the model also enables us to explore the specificity of the adoption of this international best practice model in South Africa and its further circulation at the Southern African level. We conclude that while CIDs in South Africa raise familiar North American issues regarding the private management of public spaces, they also question the very nature of the African city model proposed and envisioned locally.
Résumé
La diffusion du modèle du CID et du principe du partenariat public–privéà l'échelle internationale pour servir des stratégies de renouvellement urbain a été lue comme conséquence de la montée en puissance de l'urbanisme entrepreneurial et comme l'avènement de pratiques et politiques néolibérales, ceci alors que la compétition économique mondiale entre les villes est plus vive que jamais. Les auteures s'attachent dans cet article à décrypter le processus de transfert et d'adaptation du modèle du CID dans deux villes du Sud, Johannesbourg et le Cap. L'argument central est que les CIDs offrent un cas d'école de l'ancrage local du néoliberalisme. Le rôle du secteur privé dans l'importation et la promotion du modèle en Afrique du Sud est souligné, et illustre la montée en puissance des techno‐politiciens dans les affaires urbaines. Faisant une place particulière aux discours, les auteures analysent la façon dont les images du déclin des centres ont légitimé l'adoption du modèle. La transformation ultérieure du modèle permet par ailleurs de réfléchir aux spécificités de l'ancrage de ce modèle de «best practice» en Afrique du Sud et sa circulation à l'échelle de l'Afrique australe: alors que les CIDs nous renvoient à des questions relatives à la gestion privée des espaces publics déjà traitées dans les contextes du Nord, ils permettent également de réfléchir à la nature même du modèle de ville africaine proposé ici.
The South African Police is one of the world’s most controversial police forces. In this, the first detailed study of the origins and development of policing in South Africa, John Brewer places current allegations of police misconduct in their historical context. Long after similar forces elsewhere in the world had been modernized, the South African Police were continuing to discharge a colonial role, using the methods and style of the nineteenth century. Dr Brewer links this lack of development and modernization to the South African state’s need for colonialism. It is this, he argues, that is also the source of the close relationship between police and state in South Africa. Now that government policies have changed, the SAP must adapt: Dr Brewer ends by addressing the vexed question of police reform and argues that it will be severely constrained by the SAP’s failure to transcend its colonial origins.
In the past, geographers have argued for a policing network that mainly consists of the police, private security companies and voluntary policing. This paper revises the idea of policing and social control by arguing for an extension of theorisations of the policing network to include social development agencies within certain governance arrangements. Although they are partially effective, private security companies and ‘hard policing’ strategies are limited when controlling targeted groups such as particular sectors of the urban poor. Acknowledging and responding to those limits, Improvement Districts have invested in social development programmes. Guided by statistics and the pressure to produce ‘success stories’, meaning fewer visible street people, social development actors are associated with the ‘softer side of security’. Being governed under the same auspices, private security and social development furthermore complement each other. If the urban poor refuse offers of social development assistance it is likely that those individuals will be referred to private security companies. In this set-up, participation in social development programmes is not entirely voluntary as it puts pressure on the urban poor. Thus the policing and social control strategy becomes more effective. This research is informed by extensive interviews and participant observations in Cape Town. The case study addresses wider questions on the control of sectors of the urban poor and suggests that policing landscapes can be more nuanced than often depicted.
This paper argues that in central Cape Town different public spaces exist in parallel to each other, continuing the long history of dysfunctional public spaces in South Africa. While some have suggested that the recent spread of privately governed and policed public spaces means that they have become privatised and form part of a segregated landscape of enclaves, the empirical data suggest a different assessment. Although agreeing that privately policed public spaces are distinctly different from ‘regular’, not privately governed spaces. In fact they have become more public than they were before. Here, the middle class that used to hide out in gated communities and shopping malls mingles again. Through this the existence of different parallel existing public spaces is being continued. Since the colonization of Cape Town, public space has always been segregated, especially with the exclusion of non-white parts of the population. Over time, each of the different segregated public spaces has developed their own cultures, norms and values. Within the researched spaces, this ‘tradition’ of dysfunctional public space continues. While the non-white urban poor congregate in ‘regular’ public spaces, a white, latté-consuming class of those who can afford it enjoy peace in the parallel existing public space.
Ending crime has become the leading challenge of South Africa's democratic government. While the growth of criminality in the society began in the early 1980s it peaked – in common with other societies attempting to move from authoritarian rule to democratic governance – during the years of political transition. But, South Africa's system of criminal justice is ill‐prepared to face the challenges of growing crime. Policing remains centralized, unresponsive to local needs and requires the upgrading of detection services, urgent reform is also required in the areas of prosecution, sentencing and incarceration. The National Crime Prevention Strategy, the key response of the new government to growing levels of crime, while an important initiative, remains too centralized and reliant on Pretoria‐led rather than local initiatives. On the ground, critizens are responding in their own way: for the wealthy (and generally white) this means greater use of the burgeoning private security industry, for less fortunate communities it increasingly raises the possibility of taking the law into community hands through vigilante action.
In this article, I argue that the security and development nexus takes on specific forms depending on the context, and that in Cape Town’s coloured townships it is embodied in policies and practices around what has come to be known as the ‘war on gangs’. Furthermore, the war on gangs in Cape Town bears resemblances to counterinsurgency strategies — not least in the sense that both are responses to a similar problem of governance. This comparison allows us explore how citizenship is being reconfigured for residents of the townships in ways that resemble what James Holston (2007) calls ‘differentiated citizenship’. Such differentiated citizenship is opposed to the universal inclusivity promised by post-apartheid South Africa. By exploring the specific merging of security and development in the Capetonian war on gangs as compared to counterinsurgency and the subsequent reconfiguration of citizenship, I am able to address a central question: How — and with what consequences — does power maintain itself when faced with an onslaught from those that it restricts to the margins of institutions and social life?
This paper examines the reproduction of racialized urban spaces in post-apartheid South Africa through a case study of the Central City Improvement District in Cape Town. Urban neoliberalism provides mechanisms of governance that reproduce spaces generated by apartheid under conditions of democracy. My focus is on private policing and the regulation of the central city through the socio-spatial ordering of downtown in ways that secure the interests of property owners and more affluent consumers. Private policing in this context produces a form of social ordering based on emerging conceptions of racialized citizenship linked to market access. It works to exclude or tightly regulate the black urban poor, who are unable to participate freely in this quasi-public neoliberal space, and to remove these 'undesirable' elements back into the townships. In doing so, it contributes to reproducing the spatial segregation and the racial identities of the apartheid period.
Urban renewal in South Africa involves contending with a combination of high crime rates, increasing inequality and growing public frustration. In Cape Town, urban planners are attempting to stimulate economic growth, in part, by turning the city into a ‘world class’ destination for investment and tourists. In taking this approach, the authorities cite crime as the primary obstacle to urban renewal. This study examines the politics of urban renewal in Cape Town's Central Business District, paying particular attention to efforts to control the presence of street children in the central city. I argue that the attention given to street children and the negative impact they are said to have on urban renewal constitutes a moral panic driven by and contributing to a vision of development that leaves relatively untouched the inequalities of apartheid. In defining street children primarily as a threat to social order, local elites, including the media, police and renewal authorities, are reproducing deeply embedded and recurring notions of a ‘black menace’ that emerge during times of real or perceived social upheaval and threats to social ‘order’. My contention is that this panic is indicative of an ongoing struggle over urban public space that expresses a deeper conflict regarding changes in the city, which has to do with unresolved contradictions of race and class. This criminalisation of street children raises serious doubts as to how well new progressive approaches to both crime reduction and development will survive urban renewal efforts that many feel reproduce the city's division into developed and underdeveloped areas.
Despite widespread interest in the relationship between the exercise of power and control of space, few current works in geography make explicit use of the concept of territoriality. This paper does so by considering the means by which the Los Angeles Police Department pursues its law enforcement and order maintenance functions through regulating space. I draw upon fieldwork observations of a single LAPD patrol division to demonstrate that officers regularly seek to govern the citizenry through controlling the spatial parameters of permissible action. The imperative toward effective territorial control is given further impetus within the subcultural world that officers construct; indeed, officers evaluate each other's competence in large part on their ability to manage activity within the spaces for which they are responsible.
Draws upon recent accounts of the state, notably that developed by Mann, in order to investigate the formation of "Locations' (segregated and separately administered residential areas for African people) in South Africa. The central argument is that the Location was a territorial strategy employed by the state (amongst others) to enhance its powers and capacities with respect to South Africa's black population. This argument relies upon a theory of the state which preserves state autonomy, but which allows that outcomes, such as the Location, are the result of a variety of processes, including economic conflict. State territorial strategies abound both in the South African context and in the more general colonial context, and thus I put forward a wide-ranging research agenda around the themes of the colonial or racial state, territoriality, and power-themes which have hitherto received little attention. -from Author
Territoriality is a means of affecting (enhancing or impeding) interaction and extends the particulars of action by contact. Territoriality is defined here as the attempt to affect, influence, or control actions, interactions, or access by asserting and attempting to enforce control over a specific geographic area. A theory of territoriality is developed that contains ten potential consequences and fourteen primary combinations of consequences to territorial strategies. It is hypothesized that any instance of territoriality will draw from among these. Specific consequences and combinations are predicted to occur in particular social-historical contexts.
The relationship between changing geographies and the notion of citizenship is outlined. As well as focussing on the transformation of the nation-state, it is argued, it is necessary to concentrate on other kinds of geographical transformation. These include changing regimes of mobility, the privatisation of public space and the salience of belonging at the local level. The paper insists on the importance of geography (both material and imaginative) to the process of making up the citizen and this is illustrated through considerations of the ‘denizen’ and the ‘shadow citizen’ in relation to their various geographies. In each case issues of place and mobility lie at the heart of the process by which citizens and their other come to be defined and lived. Recognizing the geographical constitution of the citizen means thinking about the citizen not as a self-sufficient individual body but as a ‘prosthetic citizen’ who is a product of the assemblage of the body and the world.
In this article, we hypothesize that the punitive and disciplinary dimensions of the private security industry reflect and propagate a peculiar and practically alarming story about human security: that it is possible to pursue a form of individualized political peace nearly apart from broader projects for social and economic peace. We reflect upon the impacts for different `racial' groups of the continued currency of this story for human security. We probe these developing hypotheses through the empirical case of South Africa. Toward framing this form of analysis, we elaborate upon controversies concerning the combination of Foucauldian analyses with political economic and realist critical race approaches, to yield critical sociologies of political economy.
The paper questions the pluralization of policing devices and security agents across the Johannesburg metropolitan area, which has been accelerated and actually encouraged by public policies in the post-apartheid period. Are the various security initiatives and networks coordinated in a metropolitan security “system” – the regulation of which would need to be analysed – or does their development lead to urban fragmentation? Based on an analysis of an extensive documentation of security services, as well as a series of interviews with involved (street level) actors, different dimensions of potential urban fragmentation linked to security are examined: spatial fragmentation, with the development of road closures and their contestation; financial fragmentation, emblematised by business improvement districts encouraged by the municipality; and political fragmentation, as reflected by the analysis of the broader security policy framework. The paper argues that although the integrated vision of Johannesburg’s policing creates the basis for redistribution of resources and forms of policing regulation at a metropolitan level (in contrast with the apartheid period), the choice of neo-liberal urban policies, of which security strategies form a part, tends to encourage policing fragmentation, or in other words, the differential and unequal provision of security services according to place, income and race.
This article addresses the relationship between public and private policing in a residential setting. It adopts a case study approach to explore the fabric of such relationships in a UK community. It draws on empirical research in a residential community with concurrent policing inputs from the public and private sector. Empirical research with the public and private police and subscribers and non-subscribers to a commercial security scheme is used to comment upon the status of interconnection between the two policing bodies. The potential for public and private police to work in partnership and for alliances to be formed to reinforce policing of communities is explored. The paper also addresses the public perception of possible collaborative partnerships between public and private police. In a climate of increasing pluralisation of community policing it provides a citizen perspective on such developments.
The power of police officers to shape social action depends fundamentally on their capacity to control space. Without effective territorial strategies, police officers would be unable to create order in the majority of incidents they handle.This paper draws upon fieldwork in one patrol division of the Los Angeles Police Department to illustrate the significance of territoriality to police efforts at social control. The fieldwork illuminates the complex structuring influences on the processes by which officers define and seek to control the spaces they patrol. Legal and bureaucratic stipulations shape police territoriality, but so too do subcultural norms and values. I mobilize the concept of a “normative order”—defined as a set of rules and practices that are structured around a central value—as a means of capturing the mix of influences on police efforts at socio-spatial control. The discussion explains how six of those orders—the law, bureaucratic control, adventure/machismo, safety, competence, and morality—structure the territorial tactics of the LAPD.
This symposium focuses on the circulation of security governance models in cities of Southern Africa (Johannesburg, Cape Town, Windhoek and Maputo). It consists of three articles analysing at different scales (regional, national and intra-urban) the circulation of specific neighbourhood-based solutions to security issues, such as road closures, gated residential developments and business improvement districts. This spreading process, with the South African case at its core, is analysed within the theoretical framework of neoliberalism. The symposium, via this discussion of security models and the way they reflect the changing relationships between state and private actors locally, discusses the relevance of this framework to a fuller understanding of the transformation of Southern African cities.
Cette collection d'articles porte sur la circulation de modèles de gouvernance sécuritaire dans les villes d'Afrique australe (Johannesburg, Cape Town, Windhoek et Maputo). Les trois articles qui la constituent analysent, à différentes échelles (régionale, nationale et intra-urbaine), la circulation de certains dispositifs locaux de lutte contre l'insécurité, tels que les enclosures, les complexes résidentiels fermés et les Business Improvement Districts. Ces processus de diffusion, qui ont souvent pour centre l'Afrique du Sud, sont analysés à travers le cadre théorique du néolibéralisme. Cette collection, en analysant la manière dont ces modèles sécuritaires reflètent les relations dynamiques entre l'Etat et les acteurs privés locaux, questionne la pertinence de ce cadre théorique pour comprendre les transformations des villes d'Afrique australe.
The entrenchment of neoliberalism in the United States has coincided with an unprecedented expansion of punishment practices that intensify social divisions rooted in class and race. We explore the political culture of this hyperpunitiveness through a discussion of two popularized explanations for urban crime: broken windows and situational crime prevention. These popular criminological theories help legitimate the deepening of social and spatial divisions. They also rest their precepts upon the foundation of a particular geographic imagination. We use this paper to reveal and critique the core assumptions about space upon which each of these theories critically relies. We suggest that each theory understands society–space interactions too simplistically to provide comprehensive insight into the dynamics of landscape construction and interpretation. We argue further that the logics and practices of broken windows and situational crime prevention possess significant elective affinities with social dynamics characteristic of neoliberalism. For these reasons, these popularized criminologies both reflect and reinforce the processes through which neoliberalism exacerbates social differences.
Nothwithstanding crisis and critique, development remains an enduring frame within which much social and economic transformation is interpreted and envisaged. In the context of arguments about the need for a nuanced spatial vantage point on development, this paper asks what this means in the context of new conjunctures and constellations? It focuses on intensified processes and patterns of uneven development manifest as enclaves. The paper explores these drawing on literatures about Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Gulf.
Crime and vigilantism in South Africa are generally seen as a reaction to the breakdown of formal law. Both are constituted outside the state and emerge when the new social contract has been broken — that is, when the state can no longer provide security. This article argues that there is often an intimate relationship between vigilante formations and state structures. It explores this apparent paradox through public discourses on crime and the emergence of twilight institutions such as vigilante groups. It suggests that vigilantism has to be analysed as an attempt to promulgate a new legal-political order, despite being constructed outside this order. This argument is explored in the context of the Amadlozi, a vigilante group operating in the townships of Port Elizabeth. The article situates this discussion within an examination of discourses on crime, as well as the production of township residents and their protection from crime. Finally, it proffers some ideas on sovereignty and its relationship to twilight institutions.
There is a link between changes in the contemporary political economy and the criminalization of homelessness. Anti-homeless legislation can be understood as an attempt to annihilate the spaces in which homeless people must live, and perform everyday functions. This annihilation is a response to the economic uncertainty produced by the current political economy. The process of criminalizing homelessness 1) destroys the very right of homeless people to be; and 2) reinforces particularly brutal notions of citizenship within the public sphere. Such laws are made possible when urban government and surrounding communities and elites seek to promote the urban landscape at the expense of urban public space. This usurpation of public space will have profound impact not only on homeless people but also on how the housed interact with each other.
This paper examines the evolution of policing in the townships of Cape Town in the context of a neo-liberalising city. Policing is situated in relation to the shifting meaning of security, the city's emphasis on economic growth and attempts to develop the townships through a law-enforcement-driven urban renewal process. Research conducted in the city suggests that current approaches to urban renewal risk exacerbating social instability by reproducing aggressive forms of policing associated with the apartheid era. Further, as crime is framed as a security threat because of the danger it is thought to pose to market-led growth, urban governance in the townships increasingly takes on the character of a containment strategy. Current security ideology and policing practice create an expanding law enforcement web in which millions of poor residents are caught annually and which appears to undermine the very developmental goals used to justify its expansion.
Numerous commentators argue that the nation-state is an endangered species. External forces of globalization and internal forces of social differentiation, many suggest, are significantly weakening the state's capacity to regulate its subject population within its jurisdictionally-defined space. Such an argument is often made in the specific case of crime control. The spread of international communications networks and the growth of international policing suggest that single-state crime control efforts will increasingly be insufficient, the growth of private security and community-oriented crime reduction efforts suggest that the state is surrendering crime control to other domestic agencies. This paper examines the specific case of crime control in the United States to argue that the putative weakening of the state is not in fact occurring. When examined more closely, suggested evidence of decreased state power vis-a-vis crime turns out, if anything, to demonstrate the opposite. The analysis demonstrates that, in the American case especially, the state remains startlingly relevant when it comes to efforts to combat crime and maintain order. Because police agencies are bureaucratic institutions that must demonstrate their relevance to ensure their continued health, and because the state's broader legitimacy is linked to the provision of security, the public crime control apparatus promises to remain robust for the indefinite future.
The ability to dissent and to protest is a cornerstone of western liberal democracies. But dissent always threatens to exceed its bounds and to become a threat. The issue facing liberal states, then, has not only been how to incorporate dissent, but also how to shape dissent. In this project, the politics of public space has assumed a central role, as material public spaces have become a primary venue for the shaping of dissent. This article examines the ways in which dissent is incorporated into the liberal democratic state through a case study of protest in Washington, DC. In that city, as in others throughout North America and Western Europe, protest permit systems have evolved as a bureaucratic means to actively shape, if not directly control, public dissent. And yet, even as permit systems are becoming fully regularized, debates over their legitimacy suggest that geographically based permit systems might be inadequate to the task of incorporating dissent. As we indicate, recent protest activity shows just how important geography is to regulating, incorporating and policing dissent, even as those protests expose just how blunt and how fragile a tool that geography is.
Crime in Cape Town’s CBD down (www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/crime-in-cape-town-s-cbd-down-1.422563
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