Christine Hentschel

Making (In)Visible CCTV, “Living Cameras,” and Their Objects in a Post-Apartheid Metropolis

This article focuses on the new plurality of social and spatial categorizing in everyday policing and watching in urban South Africa. It is argued that the pluralization of control produces new forms of social sorting that are neither reducible to after-pains of racial apartheid nor to an often-claimed new economic segregation. By investigating different, not only state-driven, modes of observing public space, mapping hotspots, controlling bars, or identifying “intruders,” it is shown that “the will-to-see” goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to force from view. Outlined is how the interaction of these opposing logics of making visible and making invisible in the everyday policing of “crime and grime” in the coastal town of Durban can provide insights into practices of inclusion in the new South Africa.

Der Schlanke Staat und der dicke Konsument

„Das Ausmaβ unserer Taille ist wohl nicht langer unsere Privatangelegenheit“, konstatierte ein vieldiskutierter Artikel der Baltimore Sun im Mai 2003 (Baltimore Sun 2003)1. Immer mehr Menschen scheinen an der ihnen zugeschriebenen Aufgabe zu scheitern, schlank und schon zu sein. In immer mehr Staaten der Welt erregt dieses Scheitern offentliche Besorgnis: In den USA ist die Rede von der Verfettung der Nation, die der Bedrohung durch den internationalen Terrorismus in nichts nachstehe und einen ebenso resolut gefuhrten “Krieg gegen das Fett“ nach sich ziehen musse (Findlay 2004; Kuntzman 2004; Sullum 2004). In Grosbritannien und Frankreich wird uber die Einfuhrung einer Fettsteuer diskutiert, um die Burger von Staats wegen vor ihren eigenen Fehlgriffen zu bewahren (AFP 2004; Klein 2004). In Deutschland entstand im September 2004 die Plattform Bewegung und Ernahrung, die in einer gesamtgesellschaftlichen Kraftanstrengung die heutigen Jugendlichen als „Fit Kids“ ins 21. Jahrhundert bringen mochte (KuCnast 2004). Und schlieslich hat die Wahrnehmung von Fettleibigkeit als Problem auch die Grenzen der ‚ersten Welt‘ uberschritten: In Sudafrika beispielsweise wird Dickleibigkeit bereits als das drittwichtigste Gesundheitsproblem neben Aids und Unterernahrung gesehen (Lichtarowicz 2004).

The infrastructural passions of urban mutuality

The article suggests an “infrastructural” approach to mutuality in the city. What organises mutuality is less a matter of the common urban horizon or the grown community than of “enabling conditions” (Calhoun) we would call infrastructures: their makeup shapes how urbanites live together, share, partake, cooperate or make deals. Concretely, the article looks at three infrastructural experiments in Durban, South Africa, in recent years, all intervening into a crisis of urban insecurity: first, the Priority Zone in downtown Durban with its passion for clean urban surfaces and with its imaginary of being itself an infrastructural creature; second, the commercial and traffic hub of Warwick Junction with its slow infrastructure of building trust, ownership and responsibility; and, third, the less place-bound instant infrastructures organizing the sharing of safety-relevant information between responsible urbanites on their way through the city. I argue that an infrastructural inquiry into mutuality of the urban necessitates a curiosity for those infrastructures that seem chaotic, lagging, in crisis, or messy and it needs to grasp the city at large.

Outcharming crime in (D)urban space

This paper is an inquiry into the uses of space and emotions in the governance of urban dangers. Cities have always been affective assemblages, yet the role of both space and affect in the control of urban crime has dramatically changed over the century. What defines spatial urban management today, in Africa and elsewhere, are not the prohibitive, moralising or forcefully exclusionary techniques of the past; instead, the powers of seduction and atmosphere have gained pride of place and given rise to a regime of spatial management through flirty surfaces. Crime, according to security strategists and city makers in the South African city of Durban, can be literally charmed out from particular bubbles of governance. Urban practitioners do not search for the root causes of violent crime somewhere deep in the history of society, but rather in space itself, right at the citys surface. While part of a worldwide trend, this recent fascination with the charming aspects of space has a particularly strong South African dramatic. Governing through handsome space in South Africa is not simply a creation of beautiful illusions against the reality of pervasive violence, but a constant endeavour to re‐draw a troubled spatial history.