Urban Security (Previous Project)

Cities are or have become the key locales of everyday life. With it, the protection of ‘the urban’ also becomes an ever more important policy challenge: The securing of the city, i.e., the development of comprehensive security dispositives specifically targeted to urban habitats, becomes a pressing policymaker issue. At the same time, urban security politics broadly defined also emerges as a new, more expansive and increasingly interdisciplinary, research topic in international security studies.This Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Ambizione research project, institutionally attached to the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy and affiliated to the Urbanisation Research Incubator there, contributes to this new reflexive security studies focus on cities.

Based on a comparative empirical analysis of urban security politics and practices in Switzerland (2015-2016), Morocco (2016-2017), Nepal (2017) and Montevideo (2018), it examines how urban security dispositives are turned towards an integrated management of local, national and international dangers of all sorts. It analyses how this process includes use of new tools and actors, and integration and internationalization of existing ones, and it ponders the influence of political, technological, cultural and architectural constraints over the design and adaptation of security dispositives in urban spaces.