Outcharming crime in (D)urban space

Abstract

This paper is an inquiry into the uses of space and emotions in the governance of urban dangers. Cities have always been affective assemblages, yet the role of both space and affect in the control of urban crime has dramatically changed over the century. What defines spatial urban management today, in Africa and elsewhere, are not the prohibitive, moralising or forcefully exclusionary techniques of the past; instead, the powers of seduction and atmosphere have gained pride of place and given rise to a regime of spatial management through flirty surfaces. Crime, according to security strategists and city makers in the South African city of Durban, can be literally charmed out from particular bubbles of governance. Urban practitioners do not search for the root causes of violent crime somewhere deep in the history of society, but rather in space itself, right at the city's surface. While part of a worldwide trend, this recent fascination with the charming aspects of space has a particularly strong South African dramatic. Governing through handsome space in South Africa is not simply a creation of beautiful illusions against the reality of pervasive violence, but a constant endeavour to re‐draw a troubled spatial history.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• post‐apartheid space
• urban security governance
• affect
• atmosphere

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on several periods of field research conducted between 2005 and 2009 in the context of my PhD thesis, The Spatial Life of Security: Durban, South Africa (Hentschel 2010). I would like to thank Katrin Pahl, Nadine Blumer, Heather Cameron, Edgar Pieterse, Maliq Simone, Vyjayanthi Rao, Karen Press and two anonymous reviewers for their inspiring comments on earlier versions of the text.

Notes

1. The effect of the so‐called ‘Durban system’ reached beyond the regulation of African men's beer consumption. The municipality used the revenues earned from the beer monopoly to finance segregated housing for urban African workers and their regimentation through police action (e.g. Hemson 1996, p. 149, Maylam 1996, p. 6). By drinking in the municipal beer halls, African men, as it were, subsidised the police officer who would arrest them under the curfew laws on their way back to the hostel.

2. At later visits to the bar, there were sometimes friendly strongmen sitting at the door and checking who went in and out. This is, however, not at the core of the security conception that the bar owner pinpointed. It seems more like a necessary evil that he does not bother mentioning, since employing bouncers and security guards is such a common practice in South African cities.

3. The term ‘criminologies of place’ critically labels American and British approaches that address crime as a problem of spatial management – especially the ‘broken windows’ theory (Wilson and Kelling 1982) and ‘situational crime prevention’ (Clarke 1992). In these internationally highly popular crime prevention strategies, the relationship between urban space and crime control is depicted as negative and restrictive: crime can be ‘designed out’ from particular places, for example through ‘target hardening’, surveillance systems, and through a built environment that makes the ‘rational offender’ decide that this particular place is not worth the effort. Critical criminologists and urban sociologists have pointed to the exclusionary (side‐)effects of these measures and the aggressiveness with which they act towards the poor (Harcourt 2001, Murray 2008).

4. See www.lovemarks.com, accessed 8 January 2009.

5. Criminologists Shearing and Wood originally used the term ‘Bubble of Governance’ to describe different sorts of ‘communal spaces’, such as shopping malls or Business Improvement Districts, in which usually more affluent people are able to extend service provision. These bubbles are not accessible to poorer people, whose limited abilities of consumption disqualify them from the status of ‘denizen’ in these areas; they are ‘left to live and work in spaces surrounding the bubbles’ (Shearing and Wood 2005, p. 105). In my own work, I have extended Shearing and Wood's understanding of a bubble of governance: ‘my’ bubbles do not necessarily mark an area of privileged service provision. I promote all regulatory regimes of particular time‐spaces as bubbles of governance. A bubble is then not necessarily a privileged space, but it is an articulated chronotope of attention and regulation in the city – in this case with the objective of making it safer. Bubbles can be imagined as connected or isolated, geographically fixed or in motion, robust or soft, impermeable or precarious. They have a spatial and a temporal lifespan. They can be made out of brick or of tight camera supervision, out of networks of communication or atmospheric cues.

6. See www.durbanpeoplemover.co.za, accessed 11 January 2009.

7. See www.durbanpeoplemover.co.za, accessed 20 January 2009.

8. To be sure, these messages resonate especially well with tourists; locals are certainly not that excited about the tropical touch of a bus, not to mention that they know that they can get the real funky feeling cheaper when using a mini‐bus taxi.

9. Under apartheid, so‐called ‘black on black crime’ literally did not count, because ‘blacks did not count’, since they were not conceived as belonging to the South African nation (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, p. 220, MacDonald 2006, p. 13). Before 1994, national crime data excluded crimes that were reported in the ‘autonomous’ and ‘self‐governing’ territories. The South African state and its police force widely neglected the brutalities within black areas, all while policing black people's lawlessness, political offences and transgressions of racial frontiers with rigour (Shaw 2002, p. 15, Shearing and Berg 2006, p. 197).