Paper short abstract:

This paper will critically examine how middle class residents and their everyday securitization practices produce and reinforce displacement and differential mobility in the built environment.

Paper long abstract:

The processes of displacement and immobility that create inequality and access to urban resources are produced by a number of securitization processes. By securitization I am referring to a nexus of individuals searching for safety within an insecure state, state militarization and production of fearful citizens, and financial securitization of mortgages and other monetary instruments that are attempts at reducing risk at multiple scales. These processes, however, contribute and in some cases even determine the physical, moral, and legal environments that enable displacement and immobility and that differentially impact people. I am particularly interested in how the middle class participates in inscribing and governing the displacement of the poor, the marginal, and more generally the "other." To illustrate the role middle class New Yorkers play in the social segregation and exclusion of others, this paper will examine five of these securitization processes—spatial enclosure; surveillance/policing; legal rules and regulations; private governance; and financialization of everyday life—based on data collected from the ethnographic study of public spaces, cooperative housing, and gated communities in New York City and Long Island, New York. The objective will be to critically examine how middle class residents and their everyday practices produce and reinforce displacement and differential mobility in the built environment.