Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the everyday tactics and processes which produce and maintain order and security in a volatile urban environment. It argues that security and management are contingent practices which adapt to, rather than dominate, the socio-spatial realities they are confronted with.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I examine the tactics and processes through which urban security is produced and maintained in a volatile, 'disorderly' urban environment. I argue that the production of urban security rests on processes of contingency and adaptation, as much as it relies on spectacle and the enactment of force. Research from Johannesburg's inner-city reveals that even powerful actors, such as private security personnel, have to engage in contingent, everyday practices which adapt to the socio-spatial realities they are confronted with in order to effectively create regimes of security and order. Whilst research about urban management, security and governance in Johannesburg has concentrated on spectacular displays of force, such as police raids and 'crackdowns', I demonstrate that, whilst these displays are important for the performance of urban governance and policing, the creation of an urban order rests on more mundane and everyday processes too. As the session conveners note, actors, although creative, are also shaped by the material environment which they are located in. My presentation demonstrates this theoretical insight in practice, by showing how urban management and security personnel, although engaged in practices which actively shape a particular urban environment and the ways people can behave in it, also have to adapt their views and ideals of order and management and practices in relation to the urban social reality they are present in. Thus, management and security are not only spectacular acts of force, but are everyday, contingent processes and practices in which spatial reality, power and agency are mutually-constitutive.