Video: “Urban Politics, Urban Security”

The new regime of urban security has been tracked back to the 9/11 events, but its origins are longer and deeper. As many theorists from Lefebvre onward have suggested, real estate investment in city building offers a means of displacing crises of capitalist accumulation from the industrial sector, and indeed the “Great Recession” beginning in 2007 exploded out from the nexus of finance capital and real estate which reached its apogee during the neoliberal moment of capitalist development. The hollowing out of one arena of state practices (social reproduction support) has, ironically, raised fears of a direct diminution of social security, not as government program but as everyday experience, and 9/11 became at best the excuse for a more direct securitization and militarization of urban life. This paper explores these issues drawing on the recent strategic police crackdown at the Toronto G20 protests, and asks what this means for urban politics during a period in which neoliberalism is “dominant but dead.”

Post Picture: CC licensed: Delano United by jarito