A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Investigates relations between policing (narrowly and broadly understood), incarceration, and the production of space and spatial knowledge. Borders, criminalized neighborhoods, detention centers, heavily securitized areas, internment camps, jails, prisons, rendition sites, and the spatial relations that they rely on and produce are explored as sites of power and subversion.
Madeleine Hamlin's paper critically contends that the Chicago Housing Authority's important pilot program to allow a limited number of individuals with criminal records to live in their housing replicates pervasive fears of crime linking poverty to criminality.
This special issue, edited by Maya Mynster Christensen and Peter Albrecht, introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city.
With an empirical point of departure in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area on the outskirts of Metro Manila, this article by Anna Bræmer Warburg and Steffen Jensen highlights the perspective of the state police in an area that has been heavily exposed to the drug war and can be considered as one of its hot spots.
This article by Naomi van Stapele sets out to explore the ways in which local divisions contribute to and contest “permissive spaces” for police killings in an urban settlement in Nairobi called Mathare. Taking police killings as part of local bordering and bounding draws attention to the underlying social divisions that are implicated in policing these neighborhoods and which enable and contest such killings.
In this article, Francesco Colona shows how the work of heterogeneous security and policing assemblages in Nairobi hinges upon and reproduces physical urban borders, and consequentially enacts social orders.
