Everyday security: privatized policing, local legitimacy and atmospheres of control

Abstract

In this paper I examine the tactics, underpinning logics and forms of legitimacy through which urban security is produced and maintained in a volatile urban environment. I argue that urban security is produced through subtle, everyday practices, as much as it relies on the use of force.Research from Johannesburg's inner-city reveals that even powerful actors, such as private security personnel, have to engage in contingent, everyday practices which adapt to the sociospatial realities they are confronted with in order to effectively create regimes of security and order. The article makes a novel contribution by combining literature from policing and security studies with work on gentrification, ambient power and the privatization of public space. It also draws on original empirical research carried out in inner-city Johannesburg over an extended period of time. The central goal of the article is to shift analytic lenses to examine the ways in which social and spatial realities shape security and policing practices and agendas, and to broaden our understanding of the rationales, logics and meanings of urban security, particularly in volatile, conflictual urban spaces (mostly, but not exclusively) in the Global South.

Affective atmospheres of gentrification: Wellbeing amid neighbourhood change

“…The articles dealing with the impacts of gentrification and regeneration on the local community within a single neighbourhood (Butcher, 2019;Butcher & Dickens, 2016;Linz, 2017;Paiva & Sánchez-Fuarros, 2021;Yarker, 2018) are complemented by: a more focused, comparative study of two cafes within a gentrifying neighbourhood (Kuruoğlu & Woodward, 2021); an analysis of atmospheric engineering performed by the architecture of commercial spaces (Kindynis, 2021); a study of atmospheres emerging in a neighbourhood under intensive construction (Marotta & Cummings, 2019); a study of the impacts of a city's metropolitan area expansion on a neighbourhood (Paiva, 2016); a study of the impacts of introducing private security policing in a crime-ridden neighbourhood (Mosselson, 2019). Additionally, I have decided to include a theoretical article (Andrews & Duff, 2020) which accurately complements the selected empirical studies by more explicitly emphasising the connection between spatial, territorialised atmospheric production and broader, non-material socioeconomic processes.…”

“…The previous section has intentionally omitted two articles (Kindynis, 2021;Mosselson, 2019) which will now serve to illuminate the tension underlying the atmospheric production of gentrification-that between wellbeing and affective capitalism (Andrews & Duff, 2020; Karppi et al, 2016). Massumi forges the link between affect and capitalism as follows: 'The ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is itself a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late-capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory' (as cited in Karppi et al, 2016, p. 2).…”

“…Nevertheless, it is important to note that spatial imposition of control cannot be grasped as one-dimensionally harmful-there is a tension between harm and improvement. For instance, Mosselson (2019) demonstrates how private security policing in Hillbrow, the neighbourhood reporting the highest crime rates in Johannesburg, has not only alleviated the community's wellbeing but was also desired. The atmosphere of regulation produced by the introduction of CCTV cameras and regular street patrolling-yielding subtle rather than coercive methods of control-has significantly decreased anti-social behaviour due to changing attitudes towards the area.…”

Sensing insecurity as skill: Urban violence and the politics of sensorial enskilment

“…Within urban studies debates in and beyond anthropology, state and non‐state security practices have for long served as sites through which to understand contested forms of governance, citizenship, and inequality (e.g., Akarsu, 2020; Fawaz et al., 2012; Glück, 2017; Mosselson, 2019). In his influential call for critical anthropological engagement with the topic, Daniel Goldstein (2010, p. 487) situates “security” as a wide‐ranging field of discourse and practice that, by filling the gaps and solving the tensions that are constitutive of neoliberal capitalism, serves “as a principal tool of state formation and governmentality.” In resonance with this call, and drawing on a diverse range of geographical contexts, anthropologists of urban security have extensively engaged this vast domain as discourse and as practice, with a special focus on the unequal socio‐spatial orders that it works to make and maintain.…”

Introduction: The urbanisation of imagination in South Africa

“…Although not all properties falling within the district are members of Ekhaya, the initiative is able to exert control over space by clustering and sharing resources, exchanging information and working The Ekhaya CID hosts events for children during the school holidays and festive periods and promotes cultural activities such as life-skills theatre and intercultural festivals. It therefore attempts to introduce opportunities for socialisation into the neighbourhood and create an atmosphere that is conducive to interactions, friendship and communal life (Mosselson, 2018). The CID also takes responsibility for managing Ekhaya Park.…”