Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-398
Author(s):  
Maya Mynster Christensen ◽  
Peter Albrecht
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Police Work ◽  
Urban Policing ◽  
Global North ◽  
Fear And Anxiety ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The City ◽  
North And South

This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and South, borders and bordering practices are reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to threaten social order and have thus become manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows. At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. By approaching urban policing as a practice of bordering that is informed by material and imaginary manifestations, tensions between (de)territorializing and (de)stabilization are highlighted as both the vehicle and outcome of bordering practices. These tensions, we propose, can be captured through the concept of trembling. Trembling implies both a physical and emotional response to anxiety, excitement and frailty that is paradoxically built into borders and bordering practices.

scholarly journals Crime, insecurity and corruption: Considering the growth of urban private security

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (5) ◽  
pp. 1111-1120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Garmany ◽  
Ana Paula Galdeano
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Organised Crime ◽  
Private Security ◽  
Urban Crime ◽  
Public Security ◽  
Private Security Companies ◽  
Changing Patterns ◽  
Global North ◽  
The City ◽  
North And South

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.

Narrating The City: spaces Of Urban Change, South London

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
Suzanne M. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Inner City ◽  
The Other ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Spatial Transformation ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The City ◽  
North And South ◽  
Official Data ◽  
Over Time

This paper explores the documentation of social and spatial transformation in the Walworth area, South London. Spatial narratives are the entry point for my exploration, where official and ‘unofficial’ representations of history are aligned to capture the nature of urban change. Looking at the city from street level provides a worldly view of social encounter and spaces that are expressive of how citizens experience and shape the city. A more distanced view of the city accessed from official data reveals different constructs. In overlaying near and far views and data and experience, correlations and contestations emerge. As a method of research, the narrative is the potential palimpsest, incorporating fragments of the immediate and historic without representing a comprehensive whole. In this paper Walworth is documented as a local and Inner City context where remnants and insertions are juxtaposed, where white working class culture and diverse ethnicities experience difference and change. A primary aim is to consider the diverse experiences of groups and individuals over time, through their relationship with their street, neighbourhood and city. In relating the Walworth area to London I use three spatial narratives to articulate the contemporary and historic relationship of people to place: the other side examines the physical discrimination between north and south London, the other half looks at distinctions of class and race and other histories explores the histories displaced from official accounts.

scholarly journals From Crisis to Compensation: Reinventing Identity and Place in the Sideshow and the Laboratory

Humanities ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Elisavet Ioannidou
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Laboratory Experiments ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Peripheral Location ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Physical Resemblance

Examining the ambivalent place of the sideshow and the laboratory within Victorian culture and its reimaginings, this essay explores the contradiction between the narratively orchestrating role and peripheral location of the sideshow in Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels (2015) and the laboratory in NBC’s Dracula (2013–2014), reading these neo-Victorian spaces as heterotopias, relational places simultaneously belonging to and excluded from the dominant social order. These spaces’ impacts on individual identity illustrate this uneasy relationship. Both the sideshow and the laboratory constitute sites of resignification, emerging as “crisis heterotopias” or sites of passage: in Parry’s novel, the sideshow allows the Church twins to embrace their unique identities, surpassing the limitations of their physical resemblance; in Dracula, laboratory experiments reverse Dracula’s undead condition. Effecting reinvention, these spaces reconfigure the characters’ senses of belonging, propelling them to places beyond their confines, and thus projecting the latter’s heterotopic qualities onto the city. Potentially harmful, yet opening up urban space to include identities which are considered aberrant, these relocations envision the city as a “heterotopia of compensation”: an alternative, possibly idealized, space that reifies the sideshow’s and the laboratory’s attempts to achieve greater extroversion and visibility for their liminal occupants, thus fostering neo-Victorianism’s outreach efforts to support the disempowered.

Revisiting Cognitive Mapping

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-40
Author(s):  
Özgün Eylül İşcen
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
The Social ◽  
Global North ◽  
State Capital ◽  
The Aesthetic

The increasingly complex, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, attentive to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations, is still helpful for addressing the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers of extraction. I am interested in tracing the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, and militarism. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in the realm of media arts that contest the aesthetic regime through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize its imperial logic and violence. My reconfiguration of cognitive mapping as countervisuality in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms demonstrates that there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space across the Global North/ South divide.

scholarly journals Alma-Ata: some architectural narratives of the soviet city

2021 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-21
Author(s):  
Z. B Abylkhozhin ◽  
◽  
I. Krupko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
Visual Narratives ◽  
Post War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This article explores some visual narratives of the architectural landscape of Alma-Ata city (modern Almaty). Historical narratives produced or studied by historians in the text are no less vividly and distinctly manifested in the visual sphere. In many ways, this can be attributed to the design of urban space and its architecture. Architecture not only directly depends on the socio-political, ideological, and symbolic regime, but often creates it. Being a product of the era, a zone of perception and reflection of its impulses, the architectural landscape of the city creates a socio-cultural space, which in turn forms the mental background for the inhabitants of this city. Knowledge about cities is a special subject field for comparative urban studies, including a culturalanthropological and ethnographic basis. The article attempts to describe the two main architectural narratives of the city of Almaty (Stalinist Empire style and Soviet modernism) and their projections in the space of historical memory, as well as the relationship of these narratives with the corresponding ideologies (imperial geopolitical ambitions of the USSR in the post-war period and the ideology of modernism of the 60-80s biennium). The problem of updating the cultural heritage of Soviet architecture in the historical memory of the Kazakh society is also posed.

scholarly journals Architectural objects as elements of the social space of the city in the subject field of social sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Н. К. Міхно
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Symbolic Interaction ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

The study tested that cities are studied from different perspectives: from city-to-city links, structural elements of urban space to everyday practices of cities. Among the representatives of the scientific field, which made a significant contribution to the development of the theory of urban research is to highlight J. Bodriyar, P. Bourdieu, D. Becker, D. Jacobs, C. Lynch, A. Lefevra, M. Castells, D. Garvey, A. Scott, R. Pal, J. Fischer, H. Delitz and others. Moreover interesting and thorough are the scientific works of Ukrainian researchers – V. Sereda, M. Sobolevskaya, L. Males, Y. Soroka, D. Sudin, A. Petrenko-Lisak, A. Mikheeva, L. Nagorna, O. Musiyuzdov and a number of others. In this case, the methodological position of the researchers is relevant, which states that the symbolic space of the city is formed through the ability of visual objects to translate cultural and symbolic codes with the help of geometric, semantic and aesthetic characteristics. For example, in this work, one of the key terms is «architectural landscapes» with which it is possible to analyze the combination of spatial forms in the city with meaningful cultural and ideological content. It was recorded that the signs or symbolic markers can serve as architectural buildings, monuments, memorable signs, street names, informational and promotional posters, and so on. The main objects of research in the sociology of the study of architectural forms gradually became the phenomenon of buildings and structures, as well as the development of theoretical directions in architecture, the study of the place and role of space in sociology and cultural studies. As a result in the methodological space, along with the phenomenological, anthropological, and linguistic turns, the term «architectural turn» appears. From the point of view of the system theory, architecture is not seen as the main subject of research, namely communication on architecture. Accordingly, institutional theory in sociology considers architecture as an «institutional mechanism» that firmly asks individuals a certain social order and allows for the implementation of architectural ideas. On the other hand, at the same time, open questions remain regarding the meaningful content of the meanings contained in the objects of architecture. The postmodern direction, which reveals other aspects of the study of architectural forms, deserves special attention. Discreteness Architectural of social life, «decentralization of the subject», the decomposition of reality into actual and virtual, freedom and spontaneity as characteristics of the postmodern era are reflected and read in the architecture of postmodern. The architectural space of the city is considered by a number of domestic and foreign researchers in the context of symbolic interaction between power structures and actors through architectural constructions and design of a living environment.

The Camp

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nasser Abourahme
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Management ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Refugee Camp ◽  
Global South ◽  
Political Control ◽  
Global North ◽  
Palestinian Refugee ◽  
The City

Abstract The figure of the camp towers over our present. Our planners find it indispensable. Our political grammar finds it unavoidable. Our very conceptions of “the city,” and its once stable inside/outside demarcations, find its challenge insuperable. Not only do more people and more categories of people inhabit camps than ever before, from refugees and migrants to the homeless and detainees, but the camp form today proliferates at the heart of urban space and across the global North/global South divide. Camps are no longer temporary sites of emergency management. They are a global logic of government, an enduring colonial technology at the heart of the response to the climate/border crisis. Taking up the example of the Palestinian refugee camp, this article argues that camps no longer teach us anything about legal exceptions; rather they underline the politics of inhabitation. Camps enact the collapse of the separation between life and politics by making the very fact of inhabitation in itself the basis of political control and contestation. If our world is becoming uninhabitable, the camp, the most common defense against racialized bodies moving to find a place to live, becomes the place where the very political stakes of inhabitation come to the fore.

Japanese Gentrification from a Local Community Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 618-637
Author(s):  
Meriç Kırmızı
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Neighborhood Change ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Global North ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City ◽  
North And South ◽  
City Centres

Japanese urban change after the 1990s, studied mostly under the name of reurbanization or “return to the city centres,” was little understood abroad. To locate Japan in the literature on gentrification, the Horie neighborhood in Osaka's Nishi Ward was studied as an example of post–bubble neighborhood change. The aim of this study was to account for Horie's present situation after Tachibana Street's revitalization from the perspectives of different social groups. The research, based on a three–year long qualitative field study, found that the attitudes of these various social groups to revitalization were connected to the type and intensity of their relationships with the area. Furthermore, Horie's lack of irresolvable social tensions over revitalization indicated a major difference between Japanese post–industrial urban change and other gentrification models of the Global North and South. The study concludes by suggesting we should think out of the revitalization construct to protect the local neighborhood culture.

scholarly journals A economia urbana e os artistas de rua: performance, mobilidades e conflitos em um espaço público turistificado

GeoTextos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
António Cláudio do Nascimento Silva ◽  
Daniel Paiva
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Economy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Historic Centre ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

<p>Este artigo pretende refletir sobre a complexa relação entre os artistas de rua, as suas performances e o espaço urbano. Para esta reflexão, baseamo-nos num estudo desenvolvido na Baixa lisboeta, localizada no centro histórico da cidade de Lisboa, Portugal. Metodologicamente, o estudo implicou observação sombreada com recurso a caminhadas e à videografia entre 2016 e 2021, bem como um conjunto de 15 entrevistas realizadas a artistas de rua em 2018. Conceptualmente, o estudo recorre ao crescente corpo de bibliografia no âmbito da geografia sensorial e da etnomusicologia, nomeadamente em relação aos artistas de rua e às suas performances, e a sua intersecção com questões económicas, os aspetos da urbanidade, a influência do turismo e as experiências sensoriais. Os nossos resultados desvendam o processo de territorialização dos locais de performance na Baixa lisboeta, o impacto das performances artísticas no espaço público, e a relação dos artistas de rua com os agentes formais da economia urbana. Concluímos o artigo com uma breve reflexão sobre a importância do turismo para a expansão do busking.</p><p><span>Abstract</span></p><p>URBAN ECONOMY AND STREET ARTISTS: PERFORMANCE, MOBILITY, AND CONFLICT IN A TOURISTIFIED PUBLIC SPACE</p><p>This article reflects on the complex relationship between street artists, their performances and urban space. For this reflection, we draw upon a study conducted in the Baixa, located in the historic centre of the city of Lisbon, Portugal. Methodologically, the study involved shadowed observation, including walks and videography, which took place between 2016 and 2021, as well as a set of 15 interviews with street artists which were conducted in 2018. Conceptually, the study draws upon the growing body of works within the scope of sensory geography and ethnomusicology, namely regarding street artists and their performances, and their intersection with economic issues, aspects of urbanity, the influence of tourism and sensory experiences. Our results reveal the process of territorialization of performance sites in Lisbon’s Baixa, the impact of artistic performances in the public space, and the relationship of street artists with the formal agents of the urban economy. We conclude the article with a brief reflection on the significance of tourism for the expansion of busking.</p>

scholarly journals Perubahan Makna serta Benturan Klaim akan Ruang Kota pada Kawasan Taman Kencana Bogor

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Karya Widyawati ◽  
◽  
Nia Suryani ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Residential Area ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Government Employees ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Qualitative Data Collection

Taman Kencana Bogor be a witness of the development of the city of Bogor from the colonial period as a residential area for researchers and government employees. Since the development of Bogor this area has drastic changes. Utilization of buildings as a place of business has changed the structure of many urban space. In addition, the more famous Taman Kencana as a culinary tourist point in Bogor also gives impact to this place. To reveal the impact of the development of this region, conducted with qualitative data collection, archival research, and interviews and observations on a regular basis. This situation also indicates a relationship of attraction between the interests of the function area as a residential area and culinary tourism, and there was a clash of claims to space.

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