Practicing (In)Security in the City

On May 12–14, 2010, the graduate program in urban planning, policy and design at the American University of Beirut (AUB) organized its annual conference, City Debates, on the theme of security. Titled “Security of/in the City,” the eighth edition of City Debates included more than 25 scholars and covered over a dozen geographic contexts, mostly in the Global South. Most contributions focused on the Middle-East which is notoriously misrepresented in urban studies. They included Egypt, Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, but also Indonesia, Brazil, and others. Security, however, is not proper to Beirut or its region only. Writing from Beirut, security had however been a critical element of our experiences in the city. The end of the civil war in 1990 and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from South Lebanon a decade later considerably reduced the intensity of securitization. In 2005, the security deployment re-intensified with the reemergence of local and regional conflicts within a shifting geo-political global order (see Fawaz, Harb and el Gharbieh, this issue). In many cities, surveillance cameras, barbed wire, and concrete barriers have superseded benches and streetlights as the main elements of a public infrastructure. In others, the public infrastructure has itself been dubbed as the source of insecurity, as parks were closed off and public benches redesigned to secure cities from their poorest constituents (Davis 1990). Almost everywhere, security has been normalized. It has been stripped of its political significance, so that threats are taken at face value and generalized in the name of a hypothesized common good, without much recognition of their historical, geographic, and social contexts. The theme of securitization in fact originated at a particular global moment when everyday experiences were increasingly punctuated by security interruptions of variegated intensity, whether one moved within cities or travelled international borders. Echoing this reality, “security” has figured prominently in the work of urban researchers in the last decades (e.g. Graham 2004 and 2011;