Against Safety, Against Security: Reinvigorating Urban Life

Abstract

Antiurbanism takes many forms, economic as well as social, political as well as cultural. One way that antiurbanism—defined perhaps as an opposition to the publicness of the city—has become manifest in the spaces of the city itself is through an overweening concern with safety and security. One ideal of urbanism is precisely that it is there, in the city, that chance, serendipity, the unexpected, has the best chance to flourish, and out of chancy, serendipitous, and unexpected encounters new social, cultural, and political formations might arise. Rarely achieved in practice, this ideal of urbanism is nonetheless critical to contemporary theories of citizenship—as something to be struggled toward.¹ Control over city space, practices of safety and security, that is, has never been stronger to the production of urban space; but in recent history (and not just since 9/11) certain practices of security (separating out “strangers,” mechanical and human surveillance, defensive design), have become, in many ways, defining. Discourses of safety have become dominant in discussions of “good” urban space. There is nothing wrong with being concerned with, and seeking to design in relation to, security, especially bodily security, or the safety of urban space users. But, I want to suggest in what follows, that when security and safety are defining, a certain antiurbanism rooted in fear—what I call “social agoraphobia”—comes to be the primary structuring force of urban life.

A different version of this chapter was printed in the proceedings of the 2007 Deutsche Geographentag, Umgang mit Risiken: Katastrophen, Destabilisierung, Sicherheit (Coping with Risk: Catastrophe, Destabilization, Security) (Bayreuth 2007).