Abstract
How will security in cities be understood in the future? For whom will it be provided? What are the ways by which urban security provision will be governed? And, what impact will violence and order in cities have on the processes of state-building in fragile contexts in the future? This article reports on a foresight study that addresses these questions. A key finding is that there are multiple and overlapping forms of urban violence, and the ways these interact have important consequences for understanding order in future cities.
Highlights
Cities are critical nodes of governance in the global North and South, and play a ‘critical role in the processes of state consolidation, transformation and erosion’ (Beall, Goodfellow and Rodgers 2013: 1)
For the foresight workshop, a group of urban experts and leading thinkers representing a broad range of disciplinary perspectives gathered to identify what the drivers of violence and order in cities might be in the near future
6 Conclusions Using foresight methods, we find that there is a continuing need for donors to invest in more evidence-gathering and to undertake more detailed research on the interplay between violence and order in cities
Summary
Cities are critical nodes of governance in the global North and South, and play a ‘critical role in the processes of state consolidation, transformation and erosion’ (Beall, Goodfellow and Rodgers 2013: 1). The most complex of these relationships are invariably playing out in the cities of low- and middle-income countries (Muggah 2015a), where most of the urban population growth in the coming three decades is set to take place (United Nations 2014) It is in these contexts that everyday lived experiences of violence undermine the confidence of citizens in government systems, directly and indirectly have a negative impact on livelihoods, and frequently reduce the quality and quantity of service provision. Though these impacts are varied and often characterised as hyper-local, they do collectively shape wider discussions on governance and state fragility at the national scale (Commins 2010) When it comes to the subtleties of addressing the concerns of how security will be provided in cities in the future, there has been a lack of thinking beyond simplistic doomsday scenarios or utopian projections. A growing body of evidence showcases the heterogeneity of security processes and outcomes, both within and Figure 1 Design of cities, violence and order study
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