Securing Sustainable Communities

Abstract

During the 2000s spatial and urban policy in the UK has become increasingly concerned with the creation of sustainable communities. The urban renaissance's focus on security through design has been replaced by new, more holistic discourses which emphasize `community safety' and the ways in which the planning process can be reformed in order to achieve this. The new emphasis is on the responsibilization of neighbourhood communities with the police becoming more `citizen-focused' in the design and implementation of their strategies. This article examines the shift towards sustainable community building and assesses its implications for the policing and securitization of places. It argues that a paradox lies at the heart of the government's new agendas. On the one hand, they promote community balance, mix and diversity as a vehicle for the creation of more functional and less crime-ridden places. On the other hand, they simultaneously identify diversity as a threat to community safety. Security policy, the article argues, has therefore become focused on the deployment of new types of relational citizenship, based on top-down conceptions of whose presence or absence is required to make a community sustainable. In this context `sustainability' is being used as a discursive cover for a series of potentially repressive and counter-productive policy measures. Rather than increasing a sense of security within newly built and regenerated places, the new focus of policy may encourage the formation of new governmentalities of insecurity and fear.