3. 1. Introduction:
Urbanization,
‘Security’
and ‘Resilience’
• 2007 50% of world’s population live in urban area.
• These 3.3 billion people concentrated on 2.4% of earth’s
surface
• 75% global population urban by 2050; growth
overwhelmingly in the Global South
• This has huge implications for the geography and politics
of risks and vulnerability in today’s world
4. 2. Concepts of ‘Security’ and “Resilience”?
•
‘Security’ (Oxford English Dictionary)
•
/noun (plural securities)1 [mass noun] the state of being free from
danger or threat:the system is designed to provide maximum
security against toxic spills
job security
the safety of a state or organization against criminal activity such
as terrorism, theft, or espionage:a matter of national security
procedures followed or measures taken to ensure the security of a
state or organization:amid tight security the presidents met in the
Colombian resort
the state of feeling safe, stable, and free from fear or anxiety:this
man could give her the emotional security she needed
5. The Vulnerability of Contemporary Cities
• Cities rely on spectrum of mobilities, flows
and connections, obvious and hidden, to
sustain ‘normal’ urban life
• Urbanites "are particularly at risk when
their complex and sophisticated
infrastructure systems are destroyed and
rendered inoperable, or when they
become isolated from external
contacts" (Barakat, 1998)
• Usually few or no alternatives; increasingly
tightly-coupled and multi-scale
interdependencies: ‘cascade effects’ (e.g.
electricity)
• Exposure to social, technological, ‘natural’
risks in cities is both very uneven and
socially and politically manufactured
6.
7. Bill Joy: When Turning Off Becomes Suicide
• Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun
Microsystems, caused a furore
amongst, suggested that the
mediation of human societies by
astonishingly complex computerised
infrastructure systems will soon reach
the stage when "people won't be able
to just turn the machines off, because
they will be so dependent on them
that turning them off would amount to
suicide" (2000, 239).
8. ‘Securitisation’
• Definition of ideas of security, risk and threat is
profoundly political
• Some threats to cities (terrorism) become a political
obsession; others (2m annual deaths through traffic
accidents) are largely ignored
• ‘Securitisation’ is the process through which elites call
attention to certain alleged risks as a focus of
government action
• Idea developed by political theorists at Copenhagen
University
• Different and CONFLICTING ideas of security: ‘national
security; ‘urban security’, ‘human security’ etc
10. Need human concept of
security – attending to the
social, psychological,
material, educational, food,
water, energy and economic
needs of 7 billion humans
and 3 ½ billion urbanites –
rather than hard-edged
militarised notion of security
11. ‘Resilience’
• Word increasingly common in
debates about climate change,
sustainability, ‘peak oil’, water, food
and energy crises, economic
collapse, social polarisation, urban
infrastructure etc.
• Originally a physical sciences term:
“the power or ability to return to the
original form, position, etc., after
being bent, compressed, or
stretched” (dictionary.reference.com)
• Also used to describe ability of
ecological communities to withstand
crises and shocks
• Now ‘migrating’ to dominate debates
about cities, risk, vulnerability and
security
12. Dominant Urban Policy for ‘Resilience’
• More of the same! Restarting flows
and mobilities for elites, global
business, tourism, trade etc. within
‘neoliberal’ framework
• But only certain risks, threats and
crises, to certain privileged parts of
cities, tend to be of concern
13. • Poorest communities usually most vulnerable to
technological risks (Bhopal disaster, India, top left,
1984), political violence and war, social risks and
‘natural’ hazards (landslide in Rio favela, top right)
14. • But ‘Critical infrastructure
protection’ usually
geared towards needs of
global business (airports,
high-tech parks, financial
centres)
• ‘Emergency planning’
centres on disruptions to
disruptions to city formal
economies through
terrorism, technical
failure or ‘natural’
disasters
• In other words, which
risks and ;security’
threats are of concern is
a political, not a technical
decision
15.
16. Of course for a billion urbanites or more, infrastructural failure,
exclusion and precarity is perpetually and profoundly visible &
imprivisation is constant
Infrastructures have “always been foregrounded in the lives of more
precarious social groups — i.e. those with reduced access or without
access or who have been disconnected, as a result either of sociospatial differentiation strategies or infrastructure crises or collapse.”
Colin McFarlane and Jonathan Rutherford (2008)
17. • Climate change
accentuating hurricanes
• Hitting a city denuded of
natural protection and
• Very poorly covered by a
levee network that was
systematically racially
biased over centuries of
constructed socio-nature in
context of a
• A Neoconservative and
racist Federal Government
that had systematically
skewed Emergency
Planning towards terrorism
for political ends
19. 3. Case Study: ‘Security, ‘Resilience’ and
Hurricane Katrina
• Watch the two videos: the BBC news report and ‘the
Katrina Myth: The Truth About a Thoroughly
Unnatural Disaster’. As you watch these, note down:
• (1) what the second video considers to be
Thoroughly Unnatural about the disaster?
• (2) the social aspects of risk and vulnerability in New
Orleans that the disaster exposed; and
• (3) what might a socially progressive or pro-poor
policy of urban resilience might look like in New
Orleans in the future?
20. 4. Conclusion: The Politics of Urban ‘Resilience’
• A critical perspective challenges notions of ‘natural disaster’,
‘technical’ failure etc.
• Politics of urban resilience remain hidden continued modernist
binaries: cities and nature; cities and ‘the environment’, ‘NorthSouth’, ‘peace/war’, ‘inside’/’outside’ of nations etc.
• Need to traces and politics of the ‘cyborg city’ and its vulnerabilities
• Need to explore how conventional policy responses to ‘security’
threats merely work to protect ‘normal’ circulations and mobilities of
the privileged whilst ignoring those faced by marginal communities
• Need a radical politics of ‘resilience’ which addresses environmental
and social injustice and the need to build resilient cities through
addressing these, within the context of an extremely challenging
context involving climate change, sea-level rises, food, water and
energy crises, ‘peak oil’.
21. References
•
•
•
•
•
•
Barakat, Seymore ‘City war zones, Urban Age, Spring, 1999, 11-19.
Gandy, Matthew (2005), “Cyborg urbanization: Complexity and monstrosity in
the contemporary city,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,
Volume 29.1 March, 2005, 26-49.
Graham, S. (2009), (ed.), Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, Routledge:
New York. Introduction plus Chapters by Keil and Harris Ali, Luke, Marvin and
Medd, McFarlane.
Joy, W. (2000), “Why the future doesn’t need us”, Wired, April, 238-260, pp.
238.
McFarlane, Colin and Rutherford, Jonathan (2008), “Political Infrastructures:
Governing and Experiencing the Fabric of the City,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research, Volume 32.2 June 2008 363–74
Swyngedouw, Eric (1993), "Communication, mobility and the struggle for power
over space". In Giannopoulos, G. and Gillespie, A. (1993) Transport and
Communications in the New Europe, London : Belhaven., 305-325.
23. Assessment
3,500 essay to be handed in on 12th January 2012 by
12 noon
“The way cities expand and organize themselves, both
in developed and developing countries will be critical
for humanity.”(The State of World Population 2007
Report, U.N. Population Fund, United Nations: New
York).
Discuss this statement addressing either the social,
economic, environmental or cultural aspects of cities
and urbanization. Illustrate your discussion with
examples. In your conclusions, draw out some of the
implications of your discussion for urban planning and
management.
24. • “The way cities expand and organize themselves,
both in developed and developing countries will be
critical for humanity.”(The State of World Population
2007 Report, U.N. Population Fund, United Nations:
New York).
• Discuss this statement addressing either the social,
economic, environmental or cultural aspects of cities
and urbanization.
• Illustrate your discussion with examples.
• In your conclusions, draw out some of the
implications of your discussion for urban planning and
management.
