SPATIAL SEGREGATION AND VIOLENCE: FORMS OF
DISCRIMINATION IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
Ana Falú and Olga Segovia
The issues around violence and urban insecurity were brought to the frontline of present political agendas and discussions. In Latin America, they have prompted an intense activity at universities, international cooperation organizations, multilateral institutions, state-based agencies and local governments. As a reflex, new studies, analises, conducts, proposals, counterproposals and tools have emerged as approaches to the issues of urban violence.
The objects of the present article are the phonemena of urban segregation and fragmentation. Its contribution to the present conceptual and methodological discussions, we believe, is contained in the reflections that have emerged from studies and from the implementation of strategies and current proposals. The central question that guided these reflections is: how could better proposals and urban policies be planned in order to advance the creation of spaces and territories with greater inclusion, social diversity and equity? Its motif, thus, is the search for places in which relations are freer from violence and discrimination, and in which a citizen-based construction with governance may broaden the limits of autonomy with prospects of self-fulfillment for all persons.
The text is structured around four main sections:
The first section, Urban transformations and forms of spatial behavior, identifies some of the main urban tendencies that influence social conduct and contribute to an increase in spatial and social fragmentation, along with the perception of insecurity in cities. Highlights among these tendencies that increase insecurity are the facts of inequality, spatial marginalization, spatial polarization and the abandonment of public spaces.
The second section, Violence and insecurity versus urban coexistence, portrays aspects of ongoing discussions about urban safety and security policies and points out to concepts and approach strategies, in particular approaches directed to the youth and women.
The third section, Two approaches to segregation and violence, describes a case study of racial discrimination in the city of Brasilia and a case study that identifies gender differences in the crimes reported in the city of Santiago.
The fourth and last section, A proposal from a gender-based perspective, presents a Regional Program developed by UNIFEM with the support of AECI. The Program seeks to strengthen active citizenship by women and to guarantee women’s rights in order to decrease the burden of public and private violence perpetrated against them in cities. It deepens the relation between governments and civil society with a view to safer cities for women and for all persons.
1. URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS AND FORMS OF SPATIAL BEHAVIOR
In the last decades, an increasing transformation can be noticed in the cities and spaces of our daily lives as a result of several recent economic, social, cutural and tecnological phenomena. The urban society has become more complex; this process has brought about changes in social behaviors, in the use of time and in forms of mobility and communication.
The report about “The State of the World Cities” (UNCHS, 1999)[1] confirms the new role of cities as development sites and as privileged mirrors for the performance of governments and institutions in the combat of social exclusion, in the conservation of natural resources and in the promotion of economic and national development. With the increasing pace of globalization both for post-industrial and emerging/dependent countries, the transformations in territorial and social structure have intensified. As Falu and Carmona (2001) affirmed, it is evident that the processes of urbanization and urban growth are co-conducive to spatial, economic and social polarization. These are not independent phenomena, but part of a global process of increasing interdependencies. It is necessary, therefore, to challenge the development trends that express fragmentation, segregation and violence in cities.
Remedi (2000) maintains that perhaps the most perceptible and characteristic of these changes is the essential modification of social space, which propitiates new forms of real and symbolic reorganization in city spaces. This reorganization is seen as a result of new and different ways of living in citis, of belonging and relating in them.
Against the background of contradictory changes and tendencies, many Latin American cities experience tensions in the coexistence of extreme forms of tradition and global modernity, which become manifest in the increasing gaps between rich and poor that characterize the region as one with the greatest social inequalities. The cities of today seem more ungraspable, less knowable and readable. As such, they become the object of unyielding fears and contrasts.
The Alfa Ibis Network has seeked to recognize these complexities in the context of increase and intensification of the globalization phenomena, by focusing on urban forms and governance amidst these global phenomena, and affirmed that they are not dissociated from the forces that operate and express in city territories. Likewise, Burgess (1998) has been a pioneer in raising urban violence as one of the themes in the new urban agenda. He remarked that “violence occurs at every spatial scale at which societies are organized and in this sense urban violence is a social problem with an urban expression, while other argue that there is something about cities, urban society and culture that make them intrinsically violent”.
Inequality, marginalization and spatial polarization
According to several authors, there are no evidences that modernization has contributed to solve or diminish the problems related to segregation – quite the contrary, modernization has contributed to worsen these problems. Most of the times, the modern individual is confronted with a rigid spatial segregation that expresses a strong homogeneity in each social grouping. Social segregation in urban spaces has increased, along with inequalities of income and real access to urban oportunities within populations; populations are found in a situation of grave vulnerability, living in ghettos or the periphery; working and commuting time has increased, identities and references have been lost or weakened, and there are crises of political representation and transparency in the institutions that operate in the territories (Borja 2005). The excessive concentration of people, activity and information at the heart of a monocentric urban structure, surrounded by a low density peripheral sprawl has created a host of environmental, economic and social sustainability problems (Burgess 2001).
Gaps have become manifest between global urban patterns, on the one hand, and the traditional non-integrated city on the other, most conspicuously in developing countries. In Latin America, cities experience the tensions between these two extreme forces of tradition and global modernity. The fractures between them make way for oportunities of international integration and, at the same time, for inequality, social and economic exclusion (Canclini 2000). Additionally, Borja and Castells (1998) have pointed out the high risk that globalization becomes a reality only for the elites: “one part of the city is then selled, whereas the other is abandoned”.
Abandonment of public spaces and increase in insecurity
Violence is a long-standing phenomenon and a chapter of its own in the history of cities. However, today the urban locus is marked by situations of insecurity. In Latin America, nearly 30 cities have more than one million inhabitants[2]: it is in these cities at once that the contrast is seen at its strongest between the possibilities of transformation and development, on the one hand; and inequality, poverty, segregation, violence and drugs on the other. It is also in them where public spaces are perceived mostly as a threat. An example of this reality is the city of Rio de Janeiro, in which 25 persons are killed every day in the wake of an increasing violence.
Moreover, the mass media – newspapers, radios and television – contribute, with the presentation of true but singular stories, to the perception that an unsustainable situation has been reached, in which a clearcut negative tendency has been associated between public spaces and the question of insecurity. ‘Natural’ reactions to this perceived threat – which only increase the figures of fear and terror – are the avoidance of public spaces, little exposition to contact and the refuge in private sites, well-locked automobiles, high walls around houses, guarded and gated neighborhoods and suburbs (Davis, 2001). Likewise, the places of recreation and consumption have been increasingly confined to gated and controled sites.
The anthropologist Néstor García Canclini portrays the situation with the following words: “the public space of the streets is left as an abandoned space, a symptom of dis-urbanization and oblivion to the modern ideals of openness, equality and community; instead of the universality of rights, what has emerged are separations between different and irreconcilable sectors that wish to stop seeing and to stop being seen by others”.
Within this context of socially constructed insecurity, public spaces have been abandoned and, as a concomitant paradox, the retreat back into ‘protected’ spaces has created or strengthened insecurity. The perception of insecurity and abandonment of public spaces is a circular and cumulative process. Once the spaces of social interaction – the places where a feeling of collective belongingness can emerge – are lost, there is an increase in insecurity (Segovia & Dascal, 2000); thus public spaces become merely a place of transit and stops being a vital space, a crucial spot for the socialization of urban life.
Nonetheless, and almost as a mirrowing situation, women from popular sectors in all Latin American cities must leave their homes still before dawn and tread dark streets and empty sites – true traps that threaten their security – to guarantee their survival in the informal economic sector, for instance as bench and street sellers. Once again, there is the expression of two phenomena of contrary directions: one of defensive nature, in which the perception of fear prevails, and another in which necessity defeats all fears.
2. VIOLENCE AND INSECURITY VERSUS URBAN COEXISTENCE
According to analyses presented by various international organizations, among them UNDP (2006) and UNIFEM (2006), urban violence has become one of the greatest scourges of Latin American countries. As Dammert (2004) asserts, in the 1990s the region reached the sad second place in world violence, with homicide rates that virtually double the worldwide averages. It is important to point out the appalling violence figures of Latin America according to IDB (2001): each year, an estimated 140 thousand Latin-Americans are murdered; 54 families are robbed each minute, that is, 28 million families each year. The destruction and the transference of resources reached an approximate 14.2% of the Latin American GDP. Burgess (1998) estimated that the ‘costs of fighting urban crime and violence consume 10-15% of developing countries’ public budgets’. These figures mean that violence rates, regardless of the adopted means of measurement, are five times larger in this region than in the rest of the world.
In the same vein, the perception of insecurity has become a central concern for most citizens in the countries of the region, second only to economic and labour-related questions. Indeed, violence has become a priority issue which is also present in the political agenda. Its manifestations have expanded with unusual strength in cities through a conspicuous increase in crime rates, also generating a significant change in its perception by the individuals. In connection with this increase, the transformations in cities and in their visual layout, as well as the gated neighborhoods, the new forms of residential segregation, the urban fragmentation, the new behaviors of populations and their social interaction in terms of a reduced citizenship, including the militarization of cities, have as a whole an impact on the general quality of life. Violence is not only ubiquitous and elusive, but seems to be increasing each day and multiplying rapidly in the entire planet. It is already and will definitely be one of the most difficult and important problems of the XXI century (Echeverri, FLACSO, Quito).
The discussion on safety and security policies
One crucial element of discussions about urban safety and security in Latin America is the attempt to import policies from abroad. In many cases, even actions whose efficacy still remains doubtful in their own contexts of origin have been implemented in the region. They include the execution of programs such as Zero Tolerance, Community Policing and Three Strikes & You Are Out, and even the decrease in the youngsters’ legal age. But here the focus has been placed mostly on the execution of these actions, instead of on the real need for their adaptation to local contexts. Among the central conclusions reached by experts who analyze safety and security policies are the reasoning that the task of safety and security involves all persons; that the problem is not exclusively a police issue and that, for this very reason, there is the need for a security co-authorship.
Gomáriz and García (2003) remark that the concept of ‘citizen safety and security’ frequently arises in connection with the discussion of democratic governance, which presupposes on its turn the political and institutional channeling of conflicts within society, and also among society and state. However, they point out an important fact: ‘the problem in Latin America is that such paradox (the concomitant democratization of the safety and security ideal while there is an increase in citizen insecurity) demands considerable efforts by the public powers, so that an adequate response may emerge to the essential challenges of citizen safety and security. Overloaded judicial branches and penal systems, along with under-trained and underpaid police forces, among other realities, are visible evidences of the region’s daily life’.
Many persons believe that urban poverty is one of the causes of violence. However, a clear-cut and decisive correlation between both phenomena has not yet been asserted. Countries such as Haiti and Bolivia, which rank among the poorest of Latin America, are not among those countries that have the highest violence rates. The same happens when one compares different regions of a same country; for example in Venezuela, crimes are a reality in the metropolitan area of Caracas and in richer states such as Carabobo and Aragua – and not in the regions with higher rates of unsatisfied basic needs, such as Trujillo, Apure or Sucre (Vanderschueren and Lunecke, 2004). It is important, therefore, to refute the automatic – and stigmatizing – linkage between poverty, on the one hand, and violence/delinquency on the other.