Objects of Urban Security, Part I: Background and Research Starts

Cities are populated by mechanisms of security. Notice the many intrusive devices and repertoires of control at airport departure gates, office reception, subways, and other sites of modern life. But the presence of security, at least more broadly construed to include infrastructures that channel, inhibit, and intrude, did not originate with 9/11 in America. Indeed, the beginning of cities is virtually synonymous with the rise of apparatuses for exclusion and collective inclusion, the ancient city walls being the prominent exemplar. From the perspective of this essay, it is useful to think of security as an intrinsic part of urban life. To the famous Louis Wirth list of attributes of the city (1938)—numbers, density, and heterogeneity—we need to add instruments of security. Urbanism entails security; it is not a simple add-on. Deliberately or by happenstance, the presence of large numbers of diverse people in small spaces opens the way for collision. People need to be allocated to particular spaces in specific ways, either by force or guidance through more genteel maneuver. Technological developments in building construction (e.g., high-rise), transportation appliances (cars and buses), and the impersonality of urban life mean that threats, many arising internally, are omnipresent and nonspecific as to source. This essay asks how this instrumentation works, how it “blends in” with social practices including larger political structures through which it operates. In addressing such questions, we approach important topics that have long occupied the agenda of urban studies and analyses of civic life more generally but most often in separation from one another. As remedy, we must traverse intellectual domains usually treated as discrete—things, cities, and security and find ways to present them as coherently linked. We also need to depart from common orientations that, while critiquing security, surveillance in particular, leave largely unexamined the materiality involved and the social practices of on-the-ground human–thing encounter. Keywords: artifacts; security; materiality; city