Liquid modernity

Quoting Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1990), Sharon Zukin describes the new look of Los Angeles public spaces reshaped by the security concerns of the residents and their elected or appointed custodians:

"Helicopters buzz the skies over ghetto neighbourhords, police hassle teenagers as putative gang members, homeowners buy into the type of armed defense they can afford or have nerve enough to use". The 1960s and early 1970s were, Zukin says, "a watershed in the institutionalization of urban fear".

Voters and elites - a broadly conceived middle class in the United States - could have faced the choice of approving government policies to eliminate poverty, manage ethnic competition, and integrate everyone into common public institutions. Instead, they chose to buy protection, fuelling the growth of the private security industry.

The most tangible danger to what she calls "public culture" Zukin finds in "the politics of everyday fear" The blood-curdling and nerve-breaking spectre of "unsafe streets" keeps people away from public spaces and turns them away from seeking the art and the skills needed to share public life.

"Getting tough" on crime by building more prisons and imposing the death penalty are all too common answers to the politics of fear. "Lock up the whole population", I heard a man say on the bus, at a stroke reducing the solution to its ridiculous extreme. Another answer is to privatize and militarize public space - making streets, parks, and even shops more secure but less free.

Community defined by its closely watched borders rather than its contents; "defence of the community" translated as the hiring of armed gatekeepers to control the entry; stalker and prowler promoted to the rank of public enemy number one; paring public areas down to "defensible" enclaves with selective access; separation in lieu of the negotiation of life in common, rounded up by the criminalization of residual difference - these are the principal dimensions of the current evolution of urban life.

Zygmunt Bauman

1905 - 2017