Consuming private security: Consumer citizenship and defensive urbanism in Singapore

Abstract

Recent scholarship in criminology has suggested that we are witnessing the emergence of an uneven patchwork of urban policing and security provision, increasingly determined by the ability and willingness of consumers to pay for private security goods and services. In particular, it has been argued that the commodification of urban policing and private security has given rise to new forms of ‘consumer citizenship’ and identity and alongside these, the creation of new secured spaces of consumption. This article seeks to examine one specific manifestation of such a security product—the gated community. While the proliferation of gated communities and the frantic construction of such ‘architecture of fear’ (Ellin, 1997) have often been associated with an American-style ‘defensive urbanism’, the emergence of such security-enhanced urban landscapes is invariably time and place specific. Using the context of Singapore, a city-state with strong state control and relatively low crime rate, the article traces the development of such enclosed residential enclaves to show how the rise of private policing and security are bound up in the creation of fortified residential spaces in which an exclusive social-spatial order comes to be defined and enforced.

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