Securing Urbanism by Mark Laurence Jackson & Mark Hanlen

Author:Mark Laurence Jackson & Mark Hanlen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811599644
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Foucault introduces four key themes by which he will engage with apparatuses of security, commencing with spaces of security, which we will address in terms of Foucault’s discussion of town planning. Second, is what we intimated above as key to security’s fundamental shift as a mechanism of power, that is, the notion of uncertainty, what Foucault calls the “aleatory” (11). This attention to risk or uncertainty becomes our key concern, especially in our concluding chapter. It is by way of the work of Foucault that we initially introduce it.49 While Foucault has emphasised the normalizing regimes that are effected by disciplinary mechanisms, the normalizing procedures of security take a completely different direction. This becomes a key theme for Foucault in determining the emergence of liberalism as a problem for government in the eighteenth century and the question of how the art of government manages the milieu. The fourth concern is the correlation between security and population. But, crucially, population becomes not the object of security so much as an effect of the application of a new mechanism of power: “Population is undoubtedly an idea and a reality that is absolutely modern in relation to the functioning of political power, but also in relation to knowledge and political theory, prior to the eighteenth century” (11). If discipline’s target was individuating bodies, security maintains its mechanisms at the level of the milieu, and with the techniques of statistics, invents a new horizon of knowing for the agency of those mechanisms in what it comes to name population.50

Foucault introduces his discussion of town planning in terms of the three frameworks we have identified: that of the sovereign and his territory; Raison d’État, disciplinary mechanisms and the techniques of police; and that of security with its questioning of probable events and a future that is not definable. The three planning arrangements concern that of the sovereign survey of territory and the siting of a territory’s capital; secondly, that of constructing new towns or artificial towns, during the eighteenth century, according to mechanisms of segmentation, surveillance and control. The third is the re-modelling, or alteration to, existing towns to accommodate new political and economic imperatives, growth of population, increases in trade and industry and, crucially, attempts to account for future growth that cannot itself be clearly predicted. It is not as if fundamental concerns with mechanisms of power and spatiality fully dislodged the problem of a territory’s capital, with the advent of discipline, or even the sovereign notion of territory. Nor were the rigid series of spatial demarcations and containments of discipline overcome with security.51 Rather, mechanisms of security continue to adopt precisely these problems, but according to new concerns with respect to the aleatory, rather than the symbolic display of sovereign power, or sequestration of bodies. In introducing the notion of sovereign territory, Foucault references a seventeenth-century text by Alexandre Le Maître, La Métropolitée, that discusses the placement of a territory’s capital. The capital must have a geometrical relation to its territory; it must be in the centre.

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