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The urban experience and subjectivities of people are constituted in each other, both affect and shape the other. Peoples’ bodies, as humans and urban subjects, move in places that are materially produced in relation to urban political economic decisions which evolved over time. The monolith of urban existence does not exist; there are some similarities to urban experience across time and space, but there is no homogeneity in living it. There is a struggle entangled in the production of places, a process with fosters dialectical realities and relationships to places, particularly in cities. As places of urban geography, cities are associated with struggles of injustice due to the nature of capitalistic relationship, and its dialectical history. Urban geography is a material manifestation of capital relationships. Each and every cycle of capitalism has produced forms of urban geography that are entangled with different subject formations and lifestyles in cities. As long as each cycle constitutes a struggle for the people, then resistance comes out of the city subjects’ response to massive exploitation. Political upheaval, revolts, intifadas, and movements are met with counter-powers of oppression. The means of security that are used to manifest this oppression come in various forms, such as physical violence of state-security techniques and forces. Additionally, indirect methods of securitization include long-term plans which transform the urban geography by shaping movements of the people. In this piece, and building on the above philosophy, I offer some essential readings that highlight intersections of scholarships and theorizations on urban geography, subjectivity, and security.
Urban Geography
After a century of capitalism’s formation, Walter Benjamin ([1935] 1982), in his piece Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, analyses different aspects of the transformations in Paris that are influenced by new construction materials. Benjamin showed the multiple components of the city, including securitization, as mechanisms to quell the French resistance. Manuel Castells, in the Urban Question (1972), and City, Class, and Power (1978) gave a foundational understanding to urban structures and formations’ connection to social and political economic orders and the preservation of the interests of dominant and ruling classes. In the same years, Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space (1974) differentiated between natural space and physical spaces and argued how the social space is produced within the intersection of lived spaces, conceived spaces, and perceived spaces. Doreen Massey’s Space, Place, and Gender (1994) added a theoretical contribution to unpack people in places and spaces, and how places have multiple identities, and moreover, how such places are processes in time. The City of Walls, by Teresa Caldeira (2000), adds a dimension of the global south, highlighting cities in Latin America and the segregation and exclusions which urban poor classes suffer from because of urban development processes. Additionally, Caldeira analyzed the materiality of production places, adding to it the complexity of the subjects at these places who are a political subject within unregulated forms of economy. The above theorists provide a political economy understanding of places that is concerned with peoples’ experience in places and how the superstructures intermingle these experiences in cities and urban centers.
Subjectivity
These changes in places within the urban geography do affect the subjectivity formation of people. As the urban geography experience to people is phenomenological in its effect. Subject formation is a continuous process, which makes human beings as subjects in the process of becoming. Starting from Gilles Deleuze (1995), in Difference and Repetition, as he unpacks how the becoming of subjects, and consciousness formation, in a product of a continuous struggle. This struggle comes phenomenologically within the lived events and experience. This dialectical subject formation is shown in Svati Shah’s, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai (2014), where Shah understands the lives of women at the city of Mumbai as migrants, and their labor within spheres of violence and sex work. Shah shows how stigmatized laborers navigate and negotiate their work within informal economies. Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (2004), shows the multiple narratives and causes of having gangs on the roads in the intersections of commercial activities, activities which are not only to be analyzed through licit and illicit activities but also in seeing the entanglement of the state and the people in the regimes of rule over roads and crime. The Global South cases elaborate the complexities and multiple layers of the urban struggle and show contextually how to stay away from a reduction of binaries of formal and informal; otherwise, looking and studying the multiplicity of the context and how places and subjectivities are produced within this context. Meanwhile Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, in Violence and Subjectivity (2001), understand how violent practices affect subjectivities’ formation. As the everyday life in violent circumstances change people ability to live and interact with the everyday life. Due to the social suffering which people are subjected to. Their agency within violent context is influenced whether to take decisions of resistance or denying the meanings of violence in their political geography
Security
As part of understanding the subjectivity formation and its changes within urban geography, we should look at securitization policies within superstructures which affect the everyday experiences in places. The twenty and twenty-first centuries are both periods rife with securitization and control as superstructures demanding certain performances from city populations. Nation-states act in a surveilled set of rules and laws, these policies create a social contract wherein citizens do participate in the making of these policies or not. Pierre-Felix Guattari, in his article, “Pour une refondation des pratiques sociale” (1992), theorized on how credit and debit cards transform our relationships with the city and one’s apartment, as we no longer need to leave our places. Gilles Deleuze, in his Society of Control (1992), analyzed Foucault’s and Guattari’s contributions in terms of understanding the history of struggle within societies of control, which Jeff Maskovsky developed as an antisocial security understanding of how social groups would be singled out and stigmatized as a surveilling mechanism. In his article, “Reclaiming the Streets: Black urban insurgency and antisocial security in twenty-first-century Philadelphia” (2017), Maskovsky move away from the binary opposition between freedom and surveillance is essential to understanding the new antisocial security regimes and their surveillance of groups of people. Maskovsky says: “antisocial security also must work almost paradoxically to privilege elite groups of shoppers, workers, and residents; to racialize public space, and to subjugate urban African Americans and other people of color.” Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago (2013) compares Egypt and Brazil within the neoliberal state economy, which produced a state-security apparatus based on the human-security state that formed many counterinsurgent groups, along with paramilitaries groups. While Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore in Restating the Obvious (2008) study and theorize how state-violence is embedded in geographies and its policing system, they unpack the historical formation of this policing system and how it is entrenched in place-based processes of capitalism. Lastly, Deniz Yonucu, in Police, Provocation, and Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (2022) shows how urban poor neighborhoods in Istanbul are formed within structures of governance seeking to stabilize urban life and prevent emergence of political possibilities through various policing strategies.
Conclusion
In summary, I specify my essential readings to intersections of places of urban geography, entangled with surveillance and securitization, and how subjectivities are in shaping within the two. The social movements and political upheavals, such as the Arab Spring, and those in Turkey, Greece, Spain, India, and elsewhere, are places that have been witnessing huge shifts in their urban formation and securitization. This in turn influences how subjectivities are being disciplined in the everyday life in parallel with how regimes of rule surveil the reclamation of urban geographies.