Cities, (in)‘security’, ‘resilience’: ���Starting points

•  1. Multiple, contradictory discourses at multiple scales:

‘urban security’/’urban resilience’/ ‘human security’/’resilience’ ‘social security/resilience’; ‘economic security/resilience’; ‘ecological security/resilience’; ‘food/water/energy security’ ‘bio-security’/ ‘resilience’ ‘physical security/resilience’; ‘infrastructural security/resilience’ ‘national/international security etc.

•  2. Often terms become free-floating signifiers •  Vague, depoliticised referrents to unspecified objects •  Claude Lévi-Strauss "to represent an undetermined quantity of

signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning"

•  In other words, terms ‘security’ and ‘resilience’ have very high levels of interpretive flexibility. They can be filled with a myriad of loose and vague meanings…

•  This is exploited by political discourses to build disparate coalitions where each actor fills words with their own disparate meanings

•  This works to hide conflict and contradiction; often leads to unravelling of coalitions later on

3. Security and Precarity/Insecurity������

Such processes hide fact that, within neoliberalised, austerity-driven and increasingly unequal cities, processes of securitisation and resilience-making for some necessarily involve the productions of insecurity and precarity for

others/elsewhere

•  Indeed, contemporary, increasingly urbanised societies, organised through:

- complex productions of technological nature and cyborg-like life

- predatory financialisation and ‘revanchist’ urbanism;

- growth of security-industrial complexes; and

- the dismantling of welfare-Keynesianism

are transmission-belts for various processes of insecuritisisation and the systemic manufacture of precarity at various scales (especially for poor and marginalised groups)

4. Need Radical/Critical Approaches to the ���Relational Politics of Security

•  Need to look critically at the political work done by security and resilience speak -- and ‘regeneration speak’! -- to see how they:

•  Obsess about certain putative risks to some interests and actors -- including security-industrial-surveillance complexes -- whilst systematically hiding others

•  Work to cover up the production of insecurity within contexts marked by increasing inequality and increasingly punitive and authoritarian social policies

•  Operate as highly conservative symbolic markers/performances/theatres

•  Need radical, grassroots concepts of security/resilience

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5. Some Brief Examples������

Example 1 Mega-Events in Austerity Cities���2012 Olympics: ‘all risks planning’ for mega-sports events within cities marked by austerity, welfare dismantling/marketisation, and increasingly precarious social life for the less wealthy within and beyond as London is reorganised as a receiving

space for global elites

Example 2 Hurricane Katrina: Inconvenient Insecurity

Example 3:���The ‘Street as a Murderous Technology’: ���

Securitisation of the Automobile, ���Environmental Injustice ���

and Environmental Insecurity,

•  Example 4: ‘Water insecurity’ and ‘water crisis’ in Mumbai