Equality is the Key
Austin Zeiderman on cities caught between security and justice
Ever since the attacks on September 11, 2001, security has been back on the global agenda. But what really makes cities safer and what conditions do architects and urban planners need for their work? We spoke with the author of “Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá” about real and perceived sources of urban insecurity.
If we believe the current political narrative, then the task of politics is to defend against dangers: global warming, terrorist attacks, refugee crises. Voters reward alarmists in almost all democracies – especially in rural areas. Will Armageddon hit the cities later?
We’re used to thinking about authoritarianism, or authoritarian populism, and its mobilization of fear as being a rural, suburban, post-industrial, or non-urban phenomenon. In some ways, this is related to the role of urban centers within the global, political, and economic order and the concentration of resources, opportunities, infrastructures, and power in cities. The alarmist security politics that your question points to, and the alarmists who are rewarded with votes, do reflect the particular way cities have come to dominate the global economic order.
However, alongside the fear-based security politics that you mentioned, it is also worth noting the outsize attention given to protecting cities over and above rural areas, remote places, or the planet at large. There’s an interesting tension around the spatial politics of security and how they play out in different places and times.
My broader response to your question is that we shouldn't necessarily surrender the concept of ‘security’ to any one political position—especially not to the right, or to nationalist, militaristic, or authoritarian politics. To paraphrase Foucault, who said that progressive or radical forms of government had not yet been invented, we can say the same thing about security. That’s where I would like us to think more about the politics of security in the contemporary moment.
There are many different ways of dealing with security in the city around the globe. If you compare the cities from Africa, Asia, or South America to the Western approach of security in the city: Could you give me a short description of what you see as being the main differences in approach?
I’d like to talk about differences as well as similarities. The way I would approach the question of difference is through what some Latin American thinkers have called ‘modernity/coloniality’. Here I’m thinking about the long history of uneven global development through which cities around the world, especially in the colonized world, were prevented from experiencing urban modernity in the same ways that the cities of the North Atlantic or the cities of the Global North did. You can see this historically produced inequality reflected in the domain of security, in particular in terms of the resources cities dedicate to it.
I think there’s also an argument to be made that we’re at a moment of real transformation, where the cities of the Global North are now struggling with threats and challenges that other places in what we often call the Global South have experienced for a very long time. The question of how to deal with a radically uncertain future is now highly relevant to the Global North, and this could be understood as an interesting inversion of the flow of thinking around urbanism.
I think if we start by recognizing the historically produced forms of inequality between cities, and the uneven geographies that are evident across the contemporary urban world, this leads us to an interesting global conversation. Many of the concerns that we’re thinking about these days fundamentally challenge and often transcend the Global North/Global South binary. To use climate change and current discussions of Anthropocene as an example, the lines dividing the North and South get in the way of important planetary conversations even as they mark real material differences.
How many hours of sociology should an architecture student spend learning today?
I do think a serious engagement with sociology, anthropology, history, and geography is necessary. Many architecture students are already doing this, but mostly on a theoretical register, whereas I would like to see them pay at least as much attention to less sexy topics like research methodology, or to questions of research ethics and what we count as evidence. These are questions we often struggle with in the social and human sciences. How much do we need to know about a place or a topic, or a period of history, in order to say something about it? I think architects should be asking these methodological questions, like what does it mean to do long term field work as an architect? How does that influence the architect’s practice? How does that shape the kinds of proposals, plans, or ideas the architect comes up with?
But this question goes both ways: how many hours of architecture should a geographer, historian, sociologist, or anthropologist learn? There are some key things that I think can be learned by people coming out of my sort of training, such as how to develop a keen spatial sensitivity and awareness relative to broader social and cultural questions. Also, an engagement with the visual and the aesthetic are key things we in the humanities and social sciences can learn from architects. The imaginative resources that are fostered and encouraged within architecture schools are often somewhat lacking from our disciplines, where the emphasis is placed on what we can empirically document.
How safe can a city be?
I do think that these questions are fundamentally important and I don’t want to dismiss them simply because the idea that any city can be fully, completely, or permanently safe is a fiction. That said, one of the things that concerns me most about security as an ideal or value that is central to the urban imagination is that the demand for security can never be fulfilled.
We can never be fully safe or secure. I don’t know what to call that particular paradox, but it’s one in which you can never actually fulfill the demand for a safe and secure city, which produces more demands for the safe and secure city, and the only demand you can ask of that city is simply for more security and safety. That’s my concern about the ways in which security always produces demands for more of the same thing in ways that other urban values or ideals do not.
