New security heterotopias as public spaces: Marseille and Johannesburg as contextual laboratories

Keywords: Urbanities - Heterotopia - Criminalisation - Public Space - Fear - Johannesburg - Marseille - Southern Turn
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

By exploring spatial practices influenced by negative representations of the 'urban' induced by urban violence and/or perceived insecurity, this presentation highlights the conjunction of fear and criminalisation and the imposition of new security heterotopias as public spaces. Johannesburg and Marseille provide two different but significant case studies to explore the redefinition of "ordinary" urban practices regarding the social and racial segmentation of cities. Johannesburg's post-Apartheid spatialities reveal a reshaping of the fault lines inherited from Apartheid. Its composite images consist of its status as an economic and cultural capital as well as a "city of crime" par excellence. In this context of mistrust of the criminalized "others", the urban renewal projects and new infrastructures of the polycentric city emerges. They become privileged places of interaction for the upper classes in which securitization relies on the use of a massive working force. In order to emphasize the current changes in urbanities through the "sense of insecurity", we propose a perspective "across geographies" between the "Global South" and the "Global North". In Marseille, we will see how the perceptions of young people in working-class neighbourhoods reveal a fractured city that is hostile to certain social categories of "non-consumers". The correlation of such exclusion with inequalities and "bad reputation" of places and groups of people draw the pattern of a fragmented city. The way in which the presence of the past is fuelled by the "securitization" and privatization of public spaces, appears as a challenge to the right to the contemporary city.