Fragile cities in the global South: Societal security, environmental vulnerability and representative justice.

Proyecto: Investigación

Detalles del proyecto

Descripción

Cities are emerging as key arenas to deal with crucial challenges related to societal security, environmental vulnerability and representative justice. This holds true especially in the global South, where 72% of the world¿s urban population is currently living (UN 2015). This project will find new ways to manage the three critical issues for fragile cities of the global South ¿ societal insecurity, environmental vulnerability and representative injustice ¿ in order to promote enhanced security, well-being and equality. Societal security and environmental safety have traditionally been issues largely dealt with through national development agendas and international governance strategies. In recent years, however, states have proved to be poorly prepared to face the new challenges linked to urban governance. Governmental responses to insecurity, provision of infrastructural services and management of environmental risks and vulnerabilities have often been insufficient or repressive, while international regimes¿ attempts, to deal with social inequality and environmental vulnerability characteristic of Southern cities, have turned out to be limited. Citizen allegiance to the state can no longer be taken for granted given the high degree of social inequality in many parts of the global South (Earle 2012, Roy 2011). In this situation, city authorities, development and humanitarian organizations, civil-society groups and actors engaged in informal networks are seeking new ways to deal with emergent problems of urban insecurity and environmental uncertainty. Socio-spatial segregation, political repression and organized crime take concrete forms, especially in the so-called fragile cities of the global South (Caldeira 2008, Koonings & Kruijit 2009, Guarneros-Meza 2009). A fragile city is understood as an urban area, whose governance arrangements exhibit a declining ability and/or willingness to deliver on the social contract (Muggah 2014: 345-46). As Beall et al. (2013) note, violent civic conflict is often linked to state failure to provide security and welfare in urban areas. Several scholars have stated that fragile cities may pose security threats on a scale hitherto not encountered (Reid-Henry & Sending 2014). Yet, relatively little is known about the different dimensions of fragility characteristic of Southern cities. In recent years, diverse social movements and networks of everyday resistance have gained popularity in many parts of the South in search for alternative ways to imagine the future (Bayat & Biekart 2009, Holston 2011, Simone 2010). Consequently, new forms of urban governance and co-production of knowledge are urgently needed in the fields of societal security and environmental safety, where transparent governance, representative justice and the search for a more open society are key issues. There is a growing need to consider urban security and safety from a perspective that allows more room for multi-scale governance, where a diversity of actors engage in the creation of more inclusive cities. The main hypothesis of the research is that cities, including the diversity of actors within them, are de facto components of multi-scale governance. The traditional way of approaching security issues allows for little consideration of how local actors are intrinsically linked to global processes of governance. The local actors to be studied in this project include new coalitions of city authorities, business-group alliances, neighbourhood associations, organizations of victims of state repression, human-rights advocates and anticorruption movements. Illegal networks associated with global criminal flows, such as drug trafficking and arm smuggling, are also part of local agency. All of these actors are important players in the multi-scale structures of urban governance, even if some of them are rendered invisible in formal policy-making. During the project, we aim to develop a revised theory of urban political ecology and urban justice in order to better understand the interlinkages and scalar complexities of societal security, environmental vulnerability and representative justice (Lawhon et al. 2014). Our research departs from traditional theoretical framing, and more carefully considers: 1) the historical legacies of societal insecurity and urban violence; 2) the actual conditions of societal insecurity, environmental unsafety and representative injustice; and 3) the ways that people in fragile cities cope with, recover from and contest the structural causes of chronic violence and environmental vulnerability. Special attention will be paid to people¿s everyday experiences of insecurity and unsafety, as well as to the efforts of new constellations of actors and institutions that are formulating alternative strategies to reduce violence and develop more just cities. The project will analyse each of the three dimensions of societal security (see Rationale above) in tailored ways. First, concerning the dimension of governance of insecurity and creation of accountable institutions, the focus will be on how the governmental authorities, private enterprises and civil-society groups are coping with the issues of insecurity and crime. This aspect will be analysed in all four of the cities considered, especially concerning Guatemala City and Calcutta. Guatemala City is one of the most violent cities in the world, and one of the most segregated and unequal cities in Latin America. Its post-war violence has coincided with a formal reconciliation process, an uneven transition from authoritarian regimes to democratic institutions, a shift from state-centred to market-based economic policies, and organized crime linked to drug trade (Thomas & O¿Neill 2011). The study will examine how the transference of schemes of governance to private firms and civil society groups is negotiated and contested by initiatives that are searching for ways to create more accountable state institutions and more open networks for public policy. The Calcutta study will analyse the vertical and horizontal dimensions of societal security, focusing on the deterritorialisation and dehumanization of security mechanisms through top-down instruments in a spatial and structural sense. In current security mechanisms, the ground-based, human actor ¿ such as patrolling police ¿ is moved into distant spheres of control from above and behind. Fragile cities develop extra-national characteristics through their drive towards globalization and economic significance. The study will analyse how human security is affected by these developments, and what are the security challenges faced by the state during the transfiguration of fragile cities into transnational units. The second dimension of societal security to be analysed focuses on the issues of authoritarian legacies and efforts at political representation. In cities with a violent past, the lived understanding of security is based on the relationship between citizens and the security sector. Recently, the states have begun to erect public memorials to avoid repeating past atrocities (Bickford 2014). However, the collective memory of political violence persists in streets and plazas, where authorities have repressed social protests in harsh ways in order to prevent the escalation of demands for justice into wider-scale movements. In previous decades, thousands of people have been subjected to arbitrary arrests during demonstrations, torture in secret detention centres, and mysterious disappearances. These issues will be examined through an analysis of the response mechanisms to political protests in all four cities, and especially in Bogotá, Colombia. The analysis situates the prevailing policies into a historical perspective of political violence in fragile cities. By examining the wider context of repressive policies and the citizens¿ everyday experiences and social memories of the limits of political representation, the analysis contributes to the theoretical and policy discussions on societal security and representative justice in the context of multi-scale governance. The third dimension of societal security to be analysed is the governance of environmental risks and vulnerabilities and the search for representative justice. This dimension will be examined throughout the case cities, but especially in Bogotá, Colombia, and Villahermosa, Mexico. In Bogotá, the focus will be on challenges related to global environmental change, with palpable variations in the intensity of rainy and dry seasons. These variations especially affect the urban poor, who struggle with heightened flood risk and the rising costs of water supply. Recently, several social initiatives have sought more sustainable forms of protecting water sources and providing waste management, aiming to transform the prevalent forms of market-based development through new forms of environmental regulation. The study will examine the role of local politics in the global agenda for mitigating environmental risks and improving local livelihoods in fragile cities. In Villahermosa, the study will focus on the forms of cooperation, negotiation and contestation employed by different government, private and civil-society actors, together with local residents, in their dealings with new forms of environmental governance in a situation, where catastrophic floods and everyday struggles for infrastructural services characterize the urban-governance arena. Our study, on socio-spatial distribution of environmental risks and vulnerabilities in this highly segregated but dynamically interconnected city, seeks to develop theoretical and methodological insights into a better understanding of the hybrid forms of urban governance, by linking local-level regimes of environmental regulation with multi-scale urban policy and planning.
EstadoFinalizado
Fecha de inicio/Fecha fin15/01/1714/01/20

Financiación de proyectos

  • Interna
  • PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD JAVERIANA