Abstract
This paper critically engages with, and draws inspiration from the `vertical turn’ in political geographies of security. In so doing, I expose fragilities in its conceptual vocabulary and theoretical orientations, and call into question the security imaginaries on which notions of three-dimensional securitisation are predicated. This provides an important entry point for interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of political geography and security studies; while the latter is not especially noted for its contribution to the study of verticalities, re-reading `volumetric security’ through the spatial framings which underpin contemporary security studies does have considerable analytical merit and clears the ground – via Foucault's notion of the milieu - for (re)thinking three-dimensional security in ontologically, epistemologically and politically inventive ways.
Highlights
This paper critically engages with, and draws inspiration from thevertical turn’ in political geographies of security
Though, I want to focus on four different concerns which collectively unsettle current conceptualisations of volumetric security spaces: firstly, vertical security tends to be read through a selective and narrow range of theoretical and empirical frameworks; secondly, its prioritisation of the urban as the classicus locus of vertical security obviates other settings and contexts of security practice; thirdly, it tends to reproduce, on a vertical axis, the geometric optics of horizontalist thinking, and perpetuates vocabularies of enclosure and spatial segmentation; and fourthly, in light of these limitations, volumetric approaches generate an enervated notion of security which is problematic for contemporary security studies
Territory, Population (2007), that we find a topological prospectus predicated on the relational concept of the milieu, which has the potential to innovate vertical security frameworks and overcome their conceptual limitations
Summary
Securing the vertical space of cities of tomorrow would fundamentally entail more than traditional strategies for vertical patrols and neighbourhood watch. Intelligence-led policing would require a three-dimensional appreciation of the operating terrain, as crime hotspots, persons of interest and anomalous activities, including hostile drones, might not be horizontally limited to the streets (Rahman, 2017). In his commentary piece for Singapore's Today, Rahman seems slightly behind the curve in proposingthe coming’ verticalisation of contemporary cities. Graham (2016) is in the vanguard of a burgeoning and innovative scholarship which insists that we look upwards and downwards, as well as across and through the urban landscape to better grasp its three-dimensional geographies It calls for a vertical or volumetric (Elden, 2013) perspective which challenges and questions the persistence and prevalence of horizontal thinking, and promotesa fully volumetric urbanism ... Some have complained that analyses subscribe to an overly suspicious political orientation (Harker, 2014) and reproducea particular kind of state/technocratic gaze that is difficult to escape’ (Adey, 2013a, p. 53); ignore historical continuities in the verticalities of urban worlds (Daneshmir & Spiridonoff, 2012); pay scant attention to the embodied, aesthetic and affective dynamics of volumetric space (Adey, 2013a; Garrett, 2016); and lack an ethnographic sensibility
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