Imprisonment and internment: Comparing penal facilities North and South

Recent references to the ‘warehouse prison’ in the United States and the prisión-depósito in Latin America seem to indicate that penal confinement in the western hemisphere has converged on a similar model. However, this article suggests otherwise. It contrasts penal facilities in North America and Latin America in terms of six interrelated aspects: regimentation; surveillance; isolation; supervision; accountability; and formalization. Quantitatively, control in North American penal facilities is assiduous (unceasing, persistent and intrusive), while in Latin America it is perfunctory (sporadic, indifferent and cursory). Qualitatively, North American penal facilities produce imprisonment (which enacts penal intervention through confinement), while in Latin America they produce internment (which enacts penal intervention through release). Closely entwined with this qualitative difference are distinct practices of judicial involvement in sentencing and penal supervision. Those practices, and the cultural and political factors that underpin them, represent an interesting starting point for the explanation of the contrasting nature of imprisonment and internment

Fortified enclaves: The new urban segregation

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Participatory urban planning in Brazil

This paper focuses on participatory urban planning as a model of urban reform and democratic invention in Brazil. Its case material regards the formulation and implementation of two sets of urban laws of very broad consequence. First, we discuss briefly the chapter on urban policy in the 1988 Citizen Constitution and the federal law that it mandates. The latter is the Estatuto da Cidade, the City Statute, from 2001, which required that 1600 cities (approximately 30%) of Brazilian municipalities either create Master Plans or reformulate existing ones according to its principles and on the basis of popular participation. Second, we focus on São Paulo’s Master Plan (2002) and Zoning Law (2004) that fulfill this requirement and on the Plan’s required revision in 2007. By examining this massive constitutionally mandated formulation of urban policy, our aim is to analyse the development of a new paradigm of urban policy that reinvents master planning

Introduction:Terrorism as a threat to open societies

In the introduction, I offer an overview of the book and the issues discussed in it. I introduce the individual chapters, but also familiarize readers with the basics of risk assessment and risk management as parts of the field of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). In particular, I briefly talk about criticality, vulnerability, and threat, to then address questions on how to manage or mitigate risks posed by terrorism. In that regard, I highlight the role of technology in countering this threat and its relevance for both CIP and Critical Infrastructure Resilience (CIR). In a nutshell, the introduction aims at firmly anchoring the book in the field of CIP/CIR in order to give it a shelf life that goes beyond the current threat posed by Al Qaeda and ISIS/Daesh.</p

Archipelagos of Fear:CT technology and the securitisation of everyday life

In this chapter, I re-examine the transformation of our cities under the impression of recent terrorist attacks from a critical perspective. I argue that a ‘discourse of fear’ enables a process that turns ever more of our public spaces into ‘safe spaces’ which are essentially ‘quasi-public’ only – quasi-public in the sense that they can be accessed only by those citizens fortunate enough to have the right credentials, thus excluding or ‘othering’ all those we deem to be ‘undesirables’, however defined. I point out that this exclusion already is a common practice – and not necessarily connected to the threat of terrorism. Rather, in my view a ‘hostile architecture’ has emerged that targets everyone who does not fit in. To defend my point of view, I discuss concepts such as ‘defensible space’, ‘architecture of fear’ and ‘archipelagos of fear’ in the shape of loosely connected inner-cities citadels and gated communities in the suburbs.</p

Infrastructural violence: Introduction to the special issue

This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of ‘infrastructural violence’. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of ‘infrastructural violence’ can nuance our analyses of the relations between people and things that converge daily in urban life to the detriment of marginalized actors, while also proposing a normative reflexivity that can provide a concrete means through which to talk, imagine and build towards greater regimes of quality and collective benefit. Finally, we conclude with a summary of each of the contributions to this special issue