Contours of the Neoliberal City: fragmentation, frontier geographies, and the new circularity
Nasser is an urban planner, researcher and self-declared Jerusalemite whose research interests revolve around the nexus between space, coloniality and contemporary restructuring with a secondary but stubborn fascination with systems theory. He currently lives between Jerusalem and Ramallah where he attempts to negotiate a discordant daily life and keep a lid on the rage!
Modernity, writes Marshall Berman [1988], is a state of perpetual becoming, a maelstrom of relentless disintegration and renewal that throws bodies and brick, flesh and stone into continuous upheaval. The modern city, partly constitutive, partly reflective of this ‘creative-destruction’, is in constant flux – the embodiment of a dialectical urbanism laced with fluid contradictions, irreconcilable conflicts and irreducible ambiguities. Think of cities, Thrift urges us, as performative, as in use, urban landscapes as incomplete [2000: 234]. This may be an idealistic assertion belied by the closed planning systems of the ‘brittle city’ [Sennett 2006], but it underlines a fundamental fact: cites are never static, they bespeak an inherent indeterminacy and open-endedness.
Yet it would be wrong to imagine a linear or teleological progression in urban change or transition. There are historical moments – ‘moments of crisis’ – when relatively ossified and embedded social structures and institutions, when established urban practices are rapidly reformed; ‘openings’ in which the rules can be re-written, from above or below, in which new constellations appear (constellations that can hark back to past arrangements just as easily as leap into novel, unknown configurations). Ed Soja [1987] has demonstrated that modern urban transition parallels the wider reforms associated with official responses to the cyclical crises of international capitalism. With the global economic crisis and wide-reaching structural changes of the late 1970s and 1980s, urban policy-making and governance, and in turn form and morphology, similarly underwent significant (elite-led) change.
These political-economic and spatial transformations that were unfolding first across the cities of the advanced industrial core and then steadily over most other urban systems were described as a kind of ‘restructuring’ [Soja 1987; Brenner & Theodore 2005]. As early as 1989, David Harvey [1989] mapped out the shifts in urban policy that re-oriented governing institutions away from ‘managerialism’ and towards ‘entrepreneurialism’, or away from ‘social reproduction’ to a more strict concern with ‘production’ or accumulation [Smith 2002]. Since then theorists and commentators have been steadily observing and describing novel urban spatial patterns: Stephen Graham [2001] talks of the “splintering” of urban space and infrastructure; Ed Soja [2000] of “post-metropolitan landscapes”; Mike Davis [1990] coined the term ‘fortress city’; Fainstein et al [1992] employ the concept of the ‘dual city’; while Marcuse and van Kempen [2002] prefer the term ‘partitioned city’.
All of these critical narratives reflect the fact that the established urban morphological patterns of the second half of the twentieth century and the relatively stable institutional structures they supported have undergone a tectonic and turbulent shift. At the same time a number of writers have begun to elucidate the causal relationship between these new spatial forms and the shift in accumulative structures associated with the neoliberal turn: Massey [2006], Caldeira [2000] and Rodgers [2004], in different ways, look at cities as the concrete reflection of new geographically proximate (and often violent) inequalities; Balbo [1993] emphasizes the withdrawal of the state-as-planner structure and the centripetal pressures of informal networks; Portes [2003] looks at a more mobile capital that complexifies and ‘localises’ patterns of uneven geographical development, ‘activating’ and ‘de-activating’ different parts of the city; and Davis [2004, 2006] looks at Structural Adjustment programs that have levered hundreds of thousands of ‘surplus’ peasants into economically contracting cities1 and slums. More recently work has been done to frame these perspectives within a more holistic and overarching framework that examines the problematic of neoliberalism and speaks of the neoliberal(izing) urban order or the neoliberal(izing) city [Peck and Tcikell 2002; Brenner and Theodore 2002a; 2002b; 2005]. “The point is not only that neoliberalism effects cities, but also that cities have become key institutional arenas in and through which neoliberalism itself is evolving” [Brenner 2002a: 345]. What we have witnessed in effect is the neoliberalization of urban space and the urbanization of neoliberalism.
One reoccurring theme in all of this has been spatial fragmentation – both of the physical built environment and of political and social space. This essay seeks to critically examine urban fragmentation in Southern metropolises (where this phenomenon is most clear but by no means limited to) as an outcome and expression (and ultimately catalyst of) of broader neoliberlization processes. While some argue that the postcolonial city has always been a city of fragments, always marked by a “continuously discontinuous pattern” [Balbo 1993], some of the changes are new and need to be located in the multi-scalar process of political and economic restructuring associated with the neoliberal turn, many aspects of which are still evolving and at times in still illegible ways.
In the built environment fragmentation is manifest in deepening landscapes of inequality, acute socio-spatial polarisation and a fractalised morphological pattern that can be described as a kind of ‘enclave’ urbanism – the segregation of urban populations into self-enclosed ‘islands’ with parallel but distinct realities, physically proximate but institutionally and cognitively estranged. As Alsayyad and Roy [2006] point out the paradigmatic spaces of contemporary urbanism are the gated community, the slum and the camp. This fractured and exclusionary micro-geography is rationalised through a spectacular diffusion of security architecture (fences, fortified roads etc.), obligatory passage points (gates, checkpoints etc.), technologies of social control (‘smart’ CCTV, biometric tagging, etc.) and punitive revanchist urban policing. Once again, catalysed by class anxiety and paranoid fanaticism, walls are becoming a ubiquitous feature of our urban (and international) syntax. Apart from the dissolution of notions of shared space, solidarity and responsibility, this spatial reality entails a political and institutional fragmentation of urban jurisdiction and spaces of citizenship with serious reverberations for the notions of urban representation, liveability and the promise of the city as locus of freedom and tolerance, conviviality and serendipity. To some, this seems to be the advent of a kind of frontier urban geography in which the continuous and linear divides associated with nation-state territoriality are steadily replaced by more flexible, patchy and localised, if less permeable, demarcations of the inside/outside binary [Weizman 2006; Graham 2006].
This paper is a conceptual paper, while it borrows from a variety of empirical sources it is not developed around specific case studies, fieldwork or an examination of a specific set of empirical data. The aim is to survey prevalent patterns in order to tease out some conceptual and analytic generalizations that will ultimately help us think about what kind of frameworks can best capture the connections between political-economic restructuring, institutional change and spatial transformation.
Neoliberalism(s)and the cities of the ‘glocal’ South
But how far can we talk about the universal ‘neoliberal city’? Can we speak, in the same breath, so sweepingly about clearly diverse and distinct cities? And, why focus on the cities of the global South? In trying to map out general trends, tensions between the particular and the universal invariably surface; a certain contextual specificity, the particularities of place, the fine detail and delicate socio-spatial fabric of a city are all lost. Thrift, typical of the orthodoxies of ‘postmodern’ intellectual zeitgeist, rejects overarching and meta-narratives of the city, refusing any “naturalizing espitemoligcal account that assumes there is a common urban order we can all access” [2000: 257]. Yet as Jamie Peck illustrates, the ideational and ideological diffusion of neoliberal urban policy and orthodoxy has been startling and largely concurrent; there remains a remarkable coherence and doctrinal consistency even as it is transported and adapted to specific urban contexts [2006]. While neoliberal doctrine is partial and reiterative it is nonetheless hegemonic and pervasive2 [Liu]. This is not to imply some kind of mechanical mediation, there is no automatic transmission belt from an etheral sphere of greater forces to reality on the ground [Massey 2007: 11]. Brenner and Theodore [2002b: 353] point out that neoliberal urban transition has been “uneven, contentious, volatile and uncertain”; it is path-dependent and place and context-specific, a complex mediation of “agentic generalizing properties and local specificities” [MacLeod 2002: 618]. They point to cities’ inherited institutional and regulatory landscapes – policy regimes, historical legacies and political struggles – as forces that locally shape transition, giving neoliberal urban order a ‘contextual embeddednes’ [2002b: 358]. Nor has this rapid diffusion produced anything close to a ‘flat world’ or displaced the core-periphery relationship. On the contrary, neoliberalism has exarcebated uneven geogrpahical development. This is as true of cities as it is of states. Cities are crucial to neoliberal globalization, as Massey writes, but figure in very diverse, if relational, ways within it: London as a command and control centre is a powerful part of the same dynamic that produces elsewhere slum conurbations. Rather, with the partial integration of new hierarchies of cities, what we can observe is simultaneous convergence and divergence. While universal processes engender divergent spatial and temporal outcomes, the pervasive institutionalization, across different urban contexts, of a distinctly neoliberal production of space, and its contingent geographical imaginary, generates a kind of convergence in experience and urban form and challenges established binaries and dualities, or rather redraws dualities along new socio-spatial lines.
Keeping this in mind is important, because neoliberal restructuring has implied another shift: one in the primary location of experimental urban change. Neil Smith’s now classic paper The New Globalism New Urbanism contains a reformulation of the hierarchy of the global cities thesis; in emphasising the participation of cities in the global production of surplus value (rather than command functions) Smith can argue that the frontier of change has radically shifted:
“The leading edge in the combined restructuring of urban scale and function does not lie in the old cities of advanced capitalism…rather, it lies in the large and rapidly expanding metropolises of Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa, where the Keynesian welfare state was never significantly installed, the definitive link between the city and social reproduction was never paramount, and the fetter of old forms and landscapes is much less strong” [2002: 436].
Neoliberal globalization, then, has rescaled and geographically re-oriented production; not only has the metropolitan scale come to dominate regions again, but the geographical diffusion of production means that Sao Paulo and Bangkok, Mexico and Shanghai, Mumbai and Seoul have emerged as significant, if still peripheral and subordinate, nodes in international circuits of accumulation [2002: 434]. It is in these “production hearths of a new globalism” that we witness the purest incarnation of neoliberal urban policy, that “transnational architectures of control, wealth and power” unleash a more pronounced fragmented and militarised geography.
This has led in a sense to a new kind of circularity of urban models and ‘best practices’: ideological formations, economic norms, spatial forms and governance styles forged in the command and control centres of the North and diffused through their pedagogic, media, cultural and institutional infrastructure reach a more ‘pure’ fruition in the South only to be ‘recycled’ back in the form of established practice. In this context, cities in the South can be seen as a new experimental frontier or laboratory, testing sites for non-linear change and wholesale urban restructuring and as such harbingers of potential futures. Witness Singapore’s discriminatory electronic road pricing system touted in the UK as potential solution to congestion [Graham 2000]; or what Jamie Peck [2006] describes as a first-world Structural Adjustment Program drawn up for post-Katrina New Orleans; the speculative, monumental and spectacular architectural styles tested in China and Dubai and now sprouting in places like London; or Israel-Palestine the testing ground par excellence for military urbanism, urban counter-insurgency, racialized segregation as well as subversive spatial counter-practices. This, I believe, is part of what Jean and John Comaroff describe when they write that postcolonies have become especially critical sites for the production of social theory; that they are indispensable sites in this respect lies in “the fact that many of the great historical tsunamis of the twenty-first century appear to be breaking first on their shores – or, if not first, then in their most hyperextended form – thence to reverberate around the Northern Hemispheric cosmopoles” [2006: ix]. It is an epochal defining process well and truly underway.
Fractured Built Environment: Juxtaposed Enclaves-Exclaves
Perhaps the most emblematic symbols of fragmentation are the juxtaposed polarities of the slum and the gated community – in physical proximity enforced and voluntary segregation nestle side by side. In his recent book Mike Davis [2006] delves into a myriad of sources to sketch a Third World urban topography marked by deep segregation and the exponential growth of slums. The readily available statistics on the rate(s) of ‘slumification’ are staggering but not worth repeating. Suffice to say, that slums, today, figure as a pervasive and diverse ecology with multiple processes of development and consolidation, constituting a considerable portion of the built environment in the cities of the global South [Alsayyad and Roy 2006: 8; Davis 2006].
Paralleling the growth of slums in nearly all the major metropolises of the South has been the rise of the gated community and the voluntary segregation of the rich. Says Davis, “the novel global trend since the 1990s has been the explosive growth of exclusive, closed suburbs on the peripheries of Third World cities” [Davis 2006: 115]; indeed AlSayyad and Roy affirm that “in cities from Los Angeles to Manila, the most common paradigm of spatial organization is today the gated enclave” [2006: 5]. These gated communities, what Davis dubs ‘off-worlds’, are often imagineered as replicas of American or specifically Southern Californian theme-parked suburbs and are often eponymous with their Northern counterparts. They represent a kind of inverse (self)ghettoization and the physical fortification of privilege and wealth. Like slums there is some regularity in design but marked differences in the processes of development as well as the impacts on and implications for wider urban place [Webster et al 2002]. There remains a nuanced and complex interweaving of an elite global urban repertoire – of which fortified enclaves are an established part – and local requirements. Nevertheless, as urban anthropologist Teresa Caldeira writes, and despite the fact that the proliferation of these practices of segregation intertwine with distinct processes of social transformation, “the forms of exclusion and enclosure under which current spatial transformations occur are so generalized that one feels tempted to treat them as a formula adopted by city elites in large cities everywhere” [2000: 1].
In addition to slums and gated communities, the rise of exclusionary security zones, free trade export zones, fortified financial districts, black site prisons and camps (internment, labour, detention, refugee, asylum) all compound the fragmentation of urban space. The camp, which is fast becoming the analytical referent among urban theorists, in particular, configures, symbolically and otherwise, many of the most acute relational and dialectical tensions between exclusion and inclusion, freedom and unfreedom that definitively and constitutively mark today’s cities.
Splintering Infrastructure and Securitized Landscapes
The disintegration of urban space would not be possible without a concomitant splintering of infrastructure. The construction of high-speed highways for the motorized ‘public’ facilitated the suburbanization of wealth in American cities and, likewise, infrastructure networks are what rationalize fragmentation in the urban South. As AlSayyad and Roy point out, the secessionary network spaces of splintering urbanism are held together through premium-networked infrastructure that quite literally secedes from surrounding urban environments [2006: 5]. Moreover, this segregation is three-dimensional, manifesting itself both horizontally (quasi-private toll roads) and vertically (fortressed high-rise structures) [ibid]. In Sao Paulo, for example, elites have abandoned the street level altogether, and command the world’s largest fleet of private helicopters. Managua provides another telling case. Here gated enclaves only work as a ‘fortified network’, as a viable ‘system’ of interconnected private spaces, because of a strategic set of well-maintained, well-lit and fast moving roads [Davis 2006: 118; Rodgers 2004]. Infrastructure design is increasingly premised on the security, connectivity and aesthetic sensibility of SUV owners3: privately built motorways in Buenos Aires that connect elites with their ‘country’ homes in Pilar; a vast expressway built on top of cleared slums in Lagos to facilitate the movement of managers and state officials to and from the wealthy suburb of Ajah [Davis 2006: 119]; or electronic road pricing systems in Singapore and Honk Kong that allow elites to bypass rush-hour traffic jams (a lucid example of space-time compression versus space-time expansion) [Graham 2001: 366]. Perhaps more than ever the motorised rich are synonymous with that much planned-for abstraction known as ‘the public’. What we are talking about are more than mere changes in design; in Managua, according to Rodgers, a whole urban layer has been ripped out of the fabric of the metropolis for exclusive use by city elites with profound implications for urban social relations [2004: 123]. “It is important to grasp”, Davis reminds us, “that we are dealing here with a fundamental reorganisation of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of the intersections between the lives of the rich and the poor…” [2006: 119].
The deracination of Third World elites and their immersion into (seemingly) ethereal, a-territorial and virtual global networks and circuits is made possible by a distinctly territorial, if fractured, fortification and securitization of space. While gated enclaves are heavily fortified and protected (leading some to talk of a distinct rise in ‘bunker architecture’ [Mendietta 2005]), they are not the only exclusion zones germinating in the Third World city (or beyond). Coaffee mentions the increasing “popularity of physical or symbolic notions of boundaries and territorial closures – for example, enclosed defensive enclaves around residential gated communities, airports, civic buildings or major financial districts, into which access and regress is restricted” [2005: 449]. More and more, the city is cantonised into no-go areas, separated by series of ‘obligatory passage points’ [Graham 2007]
This ‘ecology of fear’ eventually begins to act as a positive feedback loop: securitisation and the attempts to design out crime, “have served to further fragment the urban landscape, creating radicalized and increasingly complex patterns of segregation and displacement, and of inclusion and exclusion” [Coaffe 2005: 449]. A global security and control paradigm is becoming the hegemonic driving logic behind practices of urban governance. Much of this is rationalised through security architecture and technologies of social control. Beyond (apparently ‘smarter’) CCTV “a host of military technologies increasingly colonize the civilian sphere” [ibid: 454], with power not only to deter but also to classify people and sort them into categories. Though these technologies are not constitutive, in themselves, of anything new, they are as Deleuze [1992] noted in his seminal ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ key to the new exercises of power. For Deleuze, contemporary society is marked by ultra-rapid free-floating forms of control, in which ‘codes’ and computers effect a universal modulation and track each person’s position and accessibility across virtual and physical barriers. While this techno-panoptic sublime might be some way off yet – at least in the global South – it does seem that the ‘informational economy’ and ‘network society’ reinforce the dual and fractured character of the city. Graham following in Deleuze’s footsteps affirms exactly this when he writes, “biased use of new technologies can support new extremes of inequality and a splintering of previously homogenous infrastructural experiences” [2001: 366]. Advances in computerised information technology clearly embody a dialectical tension.
However, despite the proliferation of emerging technologies of control, the most ubiquitous symbol of securitised ‘enclave urbanism’ is the relatively low-tech wall (albeit with its powers of deterrence and surveillance technologically enhanced); and though they differ in purpose and function from medieval walls (which were external walls concerned with external enemies see Pullan 2004; Bauman 2005), the presence of today’s walls alongside digital and virtual barriers is testament to the endurance and salience of so many features and phenomena usually consigned by observers to a traditional or pre-modern past. In spite of the globalist hyperbole about personal freedom and mobility,4 walls, with dizzying pace, now straddle fault lines between enclaves and countries alike, fencing ‘out’ camp-dwellers/refugees/poverty/ desperation and fencing ‘in’ elites/wealth/privilege/safety/capital with the same absolutist and fanaticist logic, albeit with radically varied permeability.
Citizenship (Re)Bound
This fragmented, patchwork geography of enclaves also produces multiple, imbricated and differentiated landscapes of sovereignty. In their essay, ‘Medieval Modernity’, Alsayyad and Roy, try to explain the rescaling of citizenship and exclusionary power away from the singular regimes of nation-states to the fragmented domain of enclaved cities by historicising ostensibly ‘new’ urban practices. They seek to break away from a linear periodisation of history and teleological understandings of the modern by mobilizing the concept of the ‘medieval’ as a tans-historical analytical category. In a similar vein to Berman, they argue that modernity, should be understood as “an inevitably fractured, divided and contradicted project”; the seemingly oxymoronic phrasing of ‘medieval modernity’ “thus reveals the inherent paradoxes of the modern: fiefdoms of democracy, the materialist immediacy of religious fundamentalism, the simultaneity of war and humanitarianism” [2006: 17].5 Likewise, thinking about ‘medieval urbanism’6, they write, helps illuminate the paradoxes of contemporary urban spaces. They identify three main aspects of contemporary citizenship that reveal its deeply fragmented character and highlight a congruence between medieval and contemporary cities: first, is the emergence of forms of citizenship located in urban enclaves, this comes at the expense of modern citizenship thought of as a set of abstract individual rights embedded in the concept of the nation-state (the latter in any case no longer being the main scale at which inside-outside binaries are constructed); secondly, contemporary forms of citizenship substitute for the state, they are private systems of governance; thirdly, this emerging logic of rule has territorial manifestations, the modern city displays a kind of “medieval ordering of space” with a honeycomb of jurisdictions of irregular, diverse, and overlapping private memberships [2006: 3; see also Holston and Appadurai 1999].
Alsayyad and Roy concede that this conceptualisation of ‘medieval urbanism’ is not necessary in the analysis of recent urban change but remains helpful in highlighting the enduring paradoxes of urban life and form [2006: 5]. Their thesis, in any case, highlights the profound and reciprocal relationship between new spatial forms and citizenship and governmentality. The slum and the gated community are at the heart of these changes. For Balbo they represent the emergence of ‘microstates’ and the ‘tribalisation’ of city spaces [1993: 25]. The slum in and of itself creates a different kind of governmentality; AlSayyad and Roy point out that the apparently unregulated practices of squatting are in fact a distinct form of regulation, “a set of tactics that recreate informality as governmentality” [2006: 8]. This informality operates through the constant negotiability of value (as opposed to the fixing of value that characterises formality) and can be seen as an expression of the sovereign power to establish the state of exception – i.e. in the sense that the legal and planning apparatus of the state enact suspension and define what is informal and what is not. Informal squatting, then, is in fact a highly regulated practice with distinct forms of governance and particular forms of negotiated citizenship. This negotiation does not only, or even necessarily, involve state actors: “non-state actors have emerged as the de facto state in informal settlements in various world-regions” [ibid: 10]. Davis [2004] points to the role religious groups play in providing urban services in slums across cities in the global South; in parts of Cairo and other Arab cities Islamic groups provide almost all social services as well as popular leaders, in Mumbai the Hindu fundamentalists Shiv Sena are involved in acquiring and transferring habitable land and in Latin American slums Pentecostalism has emerged as the “main logic of governance and politics” [Alsayyad and Roy 2006: 11; Davis 2004]. Even when religious groups are not involved slums develop their own distinct politics, regimes of rule and institutional dynamics. Balbo highlights the example of Villa el Salvador, a famous barriada of Lima “where the 300,000 residents have given themselves a set of norms and laws of local bosses over which the state has hardly any control” [1993: 25]. In slums the state, religious associations, NGOs can all compete as different territorialized forms of association and patronage [Alsayyad and Roy 2004: 12].
Gated communities embody a similarly “distinctive territorialisation of citizenship” or a new “spatial governmentality” [ibid: 6]. Key here is the fact these enclaves are usually governed by private bodies as exemplified in ‘community associations’ or ‘common interest developments’. Both involve “reciprocal rights and obligations enforced by a private governing body” [ibid]; they are “contractual associations that deliver some form of neighbourhood-level governance in the forms of regulations and local civic good and services on the basis of assessments (fees) collected from members” [Webster et al 2002: 315]. In this sense gated communities, with their internal regulations and codes, represent new forms of private government in which “contract law is the supreme authority; property values are the foundation of community life; and exclusion is the foundation of social organisation” [AlSayyad and Roy 2006: 6]. As such they are more than just the ‘effects’ of neoliberal urban reform but active “technologies of subjectivation, sovereignty and spatiality” [ibid]. Or as Jeremy Seabrook puts in a nicely sardonic polemic: in “gilded captivity” Third World Elites “cease to be citizens of their own countries and become nomads belonging to, and owing allegiance to, a superterrestrial topography of money; they become patriots of wealth, nationalists of an elusive and golden nowhere” [cited in Davis 2006: 120].
Slums and gated communities, thus, can be read as part of a process that carves up the city into different orders of citizenship in which the “logic of patronage becomes the logic of rule” [ibid: 11-12]. Neither slum nor gated community fall wholly under the domain of nation-state regulation; they both straddle a fuzzy inside-outside nexus.
Back to The Wild West: a rush to the frontier?
One way of conceptualizing these patterns is to think in terms of what Eyal Weizman [2005] described as ‘frontier geography’. Despite much of their primitive appearance most of today’s walls are not traditionally territorial or spatially static. Many are virtual, extra-territorial and extra-national as well as highly ‘flexible’ or ‘responsive’. It can be said that they belong more to a fluid frontier notion of geography rather than a linear nation-state spatial imaginary. Weizman [2005] explicated the principles of frontier geography in the context of colonial spaces. There are, however, signs that these ‘principles’ can be extended to analyse, not only the geopolitical confrontation points of Empire’s re-territorialization through the ‘war on terror’, but also the everyday life-spaces of the ‘normal’ cities of the global South. Frontier geography, says Weizman, is characterized by a non-linear, non-continuous, non-contiguous demarcation of space; it is anti-ethical to fixed lines preferring an elastic and shifting geography with local and irregular divides. Where borders are linear and fixed, frontiers are deep, fragmented and flexible – lines of engagement and confrontation are temporary and marked by makeshift boundaries. Frontier conditions, according to Weizman, can be found in varying degrees wherever one looks at geographically expanding power. There is no doubt that some of these principles characterize the archipelago spaces of enclaved Third World cities – defined as they are most clearly by the ‘spacing-out’ of elite power. Weizman himself sees the extendibility of the concept beyond colonial spaces: “contemporary geopolitical space has several frontier characteristics. Instead of being demarcated by continuous lines, it has come to resemble a territorial patchwork of introvert enclaves” [2005: ]. Enclaves that are protected by mobile, non-linear borders and barriers that can expand and constrict right across the infrastructural capillaries of urban and regional space. The mobile barrier replaces the fixed border. Or as Weizman [2006: 86] says:
“The border is in fact everywhere: around every public and private property and infrastructure, taking the form of local and regional fortifications and security apparatuses epitomized by today’s roadblocks, checkpoints, fences, walls, CCTV and sterile parameters”
In this geographical imagining the barbarians are never behind fixed lines, they are always already inside [ibid]; or “the barbarians at the gates have mutated into the dwellers of the slums” as Mendietta [2005: 198] puts it, they are Sorkin’s [2005: xix] ever-lurking dangerous, implacable urban ‘Other’ that motivates so much elite self-ghettoization. Weizman also points out that frontier geographies depend on a complex matrix of points and lines. Lines of communication and transport (most crucially roads) “function as wedges that open up ‘alien terrain’ for further colonization…[and] also create effective barriers that honeycomb local populations into isolated enclaves of limited habitat” [Weizman 2006: 89]. The most obvious example, and the one which Weizman bases much of his analysis on, is the West Bank where a system of Jewish-only bypass roads not only connects the super-fortified settlement enclaves but also serves to carve up, fragment and de-rationalize Palestinian social and political space. But again the concept can be extended as the above examples of infrastructural design illustrate: Managua’s system of roads not only connected elite enclaves but served to displace leftist organization through slum clearance. There is also a temporal aspect to all of this. In the frontier imaginary, the fragmentation of space is mirrored by “temporal non-sequentiality…actions do not unfold in a consistent manner” [Weizman 2006: 91], temporal rhythms are dislocated and distorted. This is also clear in many Third World cities where slumifcation acts in effect as a precarious process of urbanization in reverse and where slum dwellers, refugees and migrants live in a state of constant transience and temporariness, the material foundations of their lives contingent on factors that range from the political exigencies of police authorities to changing weather.
Conclusions: beyond fragmentation
In this paper I have tried to give an overview of some of the different constituent characteristics that make up the global south’s fractured spatial landscapes. I have tried to show that beyond physical patterns of fragmentation, ‘deeper’ fissures and fractures effect political and civic space; they constitute a more profound crisis in the spatiality of citizenship and governance: a crisis of the social contract at precisely the moment when the Fukuyamian triumph of liberal democracy should have been sealed.7 In addition I have argued that part of the response or corollary of these emerging contradictions has been the physical shift towards enclosures and fortification that are part of a broader, historically unprecedented, militarization of urban space. All these shifts I believe need to be understood as part of the broader epochal processes of political and economic restructuring associated with the neoliberal turn.
In a sense, then, the challenge is to go beyond the concept of fragmentation. The anti-urbanism that inscribes so much of contemporary city life and elite geographical imaginaries is also imbricated and inscribed with other interrelated features that the conceptual framework of fragmentation cannot capture. Anti-urban is also anti-poor and violently so. The concept of fragmentation can occlude the class dimension of urban reform and ignore its paroxysmally violent pathology. Weizman’s understanding of frontier geographies, I argued, can go some way in helping us unravel the particularities of contemporary urbanism by incorporating exceptionalism and the generalization of violence into the framework. However, approaches that emphasize states of exception or the violence of the postcolony do not always foreground class conflict as a central dimension. They can lose sight of capitalism as the framework, ignore the epochal nature of the rise of neoliberalism and often end up decentring the state by over-estimating the extent of the privatization or sub-contraction of its coercive capacities.
The violence at the frontier is primarily class violence; and if the state is no longer demarcator of inside/outside divide, no longer arbitrator of social conflict, what is its role? It is clear that some of the order associated with state legitimacy has been eroded and disaggregated in complex and often obfuscated ways; but, while there has been a shift from a welfare state model to a ‘competitive state’ or ‘security state’ model, the state has hardly withered away. Its role has been reconfigured. The nuance in Sassen’s [2006] new approach is that it can account for what she calls a ‘denationalization’ of policy agendas and citizenship without obituarising the state. For Sassen, changes associated with globalization are transformative and foundational but they occur within the framework of the national even as they seek to subvert its exclusivity; so while the institution of citizenship is being destabilized and changing, the nation-state is still its main referent.
Other approaches that emphasize exclusion-inclusion divides can also end up mis-estimating the reach of the state. In a recent lecture and article Zizek spoke of social apartheid and slums as one of the principle challenges to global capitalism. Not merely repositories of a novel 1 billion strong social class ejected from the formal economy, slums are also whitespots in the ‘society of total control’; spaces from which state control is not only withdrawn and suspended, but compromised [2008: 2].8 Certainly their sinuous spatial patterns and lack of rationalized housing enumeration challenge conventional policing and panoptic surveillance, and their concentration of alternative daily economic activity makes difficult the disciplinary modulation and serialisation of time. But they are not, by any means, beyond the sovereign or bio power of the state; they are hardly post-control or post-disciplinary spaces. In any case state control is never total, never absolute, always in process. In this sense we can say that the state is not withdrawing but redrawing. Alternative governance or social regulation can coexist with and within formal state control/rule. Nor are slum dwellers simply excluded as Zizek and others seem to allude; they are not on the ‘outside’ of a new locally delineated inside/outside binary. They occupy a much fuzzier inside/outside dialectic: simultaneously inside and outside. Slums are not peripheral or marginal configurations on the physical and metaphorical edges of the ‘normal’ city, they are, as Alsayyad and Roy write, “the ‘constitutive inside’ of cities…the forms of exceptionalism that constitute the grid of the normal” [Alsayyad and Roy 2004: 14, emphasis in original]. The freedoms of the city are premised on the unfreedoms of the slum and the camp, they “come through the bounding and containing of the Other…” [ibid]. Perhaps more than anything it is this liminality that characterizes the subjectivities, temporalities and ‘positionalities’ of so many city dwellers in the neoliberal global South.
It is clear, then, when thinking about the changes and conjunctures abounding in Southern cities, that we need conceptual frameworks that can diffuse the rigid binaries of inside/outside, global/local, colonial/postcolonial, formal/informal and emphasize the liminality, relationality and ambiguity of novel and radical spatial realities; one that can capture the multiple global-local mediations and variegated contextualizations that characterize the diffusion and circularity of hegemonic doctrine and practice. Thinking around militarized neoliberal urbanism – as a spatialized political-economy approach – captures the sometimes paradoxical mixture of exploitation and enclosure; circulation and containment; primitive accumulation and entrepreneurialism; revanchism and renaissance; political liberalization and economic repression; the fetishism of law and the generalization of exception; seemingly de-territorialized, extra-national empire and institutional state violence that configure so much of the contemporary and paradigmatic urbanism of cities in the South. It is one way of thinking about what Harvey describes as the complex and often contradictory relationship between the territorial and capitalistic logics of power [2004: 87-90]; is the evolution of a militarized urbanism not precisely a territorial logic developing its own dynamic and antagonising or undermining a capitalistic logic premised on urban boosterism and tourist flows and forcing it to re-adjust around security industries? Is this not what Naomi Klein [2007: 12-14] describes when she talks about the evolution of the “disaster capitalism complex” into a fully articulated economy? In this sense, such a conceptual framework can elucidate the fact that fragmentation and the seeming chaos and disorder are not as haphazard as they might seem: they are in large part a result of continuously shifting balance – sometimes synergetic, sometimes antagonistic – between the imperatives of control and accumulation. The political-economy of the security state and industry cannot be divorced from spatial transmogrification, nor can the spatial dimension of military power be entirely understood outside economic interests [Smith and Finoki 2007]. The lurch into a fractalised, enclaved and securitized urban world imagineered as a feral, Hobessian and anarchic space, at least in part, signals the (re)emergence of urban strategies of primitive accumulation. The city, then, needs to be read as both site of accumulation and as architectural weapon designed to enforce, discipline and condition the behaviour of colonized, working and toiling classes. This is perhaps nowhere more true or clear than in the laboratorial spaces of the urban South.
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