Urban Insecurity

Este trabajo trata sobre los imaginarios urbanos de lo maléfico y su influencia en la elección residencial de fraccionamientos cerrados o con evidentes elementos arquitectónicos de control de acceso, como una medida para aminorar el miedo por la inseguridad real o sentida que experimentan algunos ciudadanos en la actualidad. Se estudia el proceso de proliferación de esta clase de fraccionamientos en Monterrey como una respuesta a la ola de violencia que se vivió al final de la década de 2000 y al principio de la presente;se estudian las principales asociaciones subjetivas de la seguridad e inseguridad con elementos urbanos en entornos habitacionales y las maneras en que éstas fueron interpretadas por fraccionadores y autoridades a través de las obras urbanas en los fraccionamientos cerrados.Por medio de análisis documentales y un estudio netnográfico se hace una interpretación de los elementos urbanos que constituyen a los fraccionamientos cerrados en la actualidad y su efectividad para aminorar la inseguridad subjetiva experimentada por sus moradores.
This work deals with the urban imaginaries of maleficent and its influence in the residential election of fenced neighborhoods or with obvious architectonic elements of controlled access as a measure to moderate the fear of real or subjective insecurity that some inhabitants experiment nowadays. We study the proliferation of fenced neighborhoods in Monterrey as a response to the crime wave lived in the city in late 2000’s and early present decade, we study the most common subjective associations of experimented violence by the population of Monterrey with the architectonic and urban elements in neighborhoods and the ways it was interpreted by house developers and authorities thru urbanization of new fenced neighborhoods. Through document analysis and nethnography we make an interpretation of the sense of urban elements that constitutes the actual fenced neighborhoods and its effectivity to moderate the subjective insecurity of inhabitants.

Socio-cultural approaches to fear of crime have suggested that responses to questionnaires may channel broader social attitudes towards other culturally-related topics also shaping the public meaning of ‘crime’, such as immigration. Building on this idea, this article uses a discourse analytic framework to examine how xeno-racist ideas, claims and positions are metonymically worked through everyday opinions about ‘urban insecurity’ as a crime-related construct. The analysis of open-ended interviews to ordinary citizens in Barcelona shows that the position of a ‘threatening Other’, typically afforded by the insecurity narrative, is pervasively constructed in xeno-racial terms -whether explicitly or by implication-, but is rhetorically rejected on the narrative grounds of its alleged criminal acts. This xeno-racial version of the criminalised Other is itself managed in interaction as a sensitive topic through a set of deracialization strategies that displace rejection from the language of immigration towards culturally contiguous languages of incivilities, cultural differences and socioeconomic disadvantage. The article deepens in the ideological versatility of discourses that subtly warrant the structural privilege of ‘natives’ vis-à-vis ‘immigrants’, thereby legitimizing a tenacious system of native supremacy.

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This essay develops the concept of protective arrangements—a socio-material relationship between house architecture—objects and human practices, in order to develop a new understanding of urban social segregation. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in La Plata (Argentina) I compare the protective arrangements of lower and upper middle-class residents against the background of the commonly sensed need to self-organize protection. While in gated communities for the upper middle class walls and fences enclose an ‘open interior space’, members of the upper middle class who live in or close to the city centre protect their homes with individual security systems. In contrast, people at the poorer end of society attune their repertoires of protection against the constant threat of eviction and burglary using dogs and improvised fences and by guaranteeing the permanent presence in the home of one of the household members. The analysis of these strategies at the house scale shows an increasing process of social-spatial fragmentation in the city as a product of the materialization of discursive-material practices deployed in search of protection.

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Presses de Sciences Po. © Presses de Sciences Po. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.