Urban Safety and Peacebuilding

New Perspectives on Sustaining Peace in the City

Achim Wennmann, Oliver Jütersonke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351371346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This volume draws together original research related to conceptual and practical advances at the interface of urban safety and peacebuilding.

The book reflects the advances in urban safety and peacebuilding to help address the rapidly increasing risk of conflict and insecurity in cities. Specifically, it draws on contributions to the Technical Working Group on the Confluence of Urban Safety and Peacebuilding Practice, an informal expert network co-facilitated by the United Nations Office at Geneva, UN-Habitat's Safer Cities Programme, and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform. A focus on 'sustaining peace' serves as a framework for situating new policy responses against conflict, violence, and exclusion in the city, and for promoting a conversation across disciplinary and specialist silos. The volume thereby broadens the optic of peacebuilding practice beyond interstate and intrastate armed conflicts – and especially their aftermath – and reconnects it to the community-level origins of building peace. The analysis and practice presented here will remind those willing to work towards peaceful and inclusive cities that there are tried and tested approaches available, and a host of experts and practitioners ready to accompany those prepared to lead in their respective contexts.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of peacebuilding, urban studies, security studies, and international relations.

1 Understanding the grammar of the city

Urban safety and peacebuilding practice through a semiotic lens

Jonathan Luke Austin and Oliver Jütersonke

Introduction

The relationship between urban safety, peacebuilding practice, and efforts to sustain urban peace is both obvious and obscure. It is obvious in the mutual focus of practitioners working within these fields on the problems of crime, violence, and societal conflict in urban centres. It is obscure when it comes to disentangling what is actually distinct about the practical or analytical content of the programming of each approach in dealing with these issues – not least because their similarities often result in a great deal of overlap when it comes to practical activities. The difference between the two approaches, not the overlap, is what needs clarification today. In this chapter we attempt to provide this clarification by exploring the commonalities, contrasts, and intersections between urban safety and peacebuilding practice.

Providing greater clarity over the distinction between the two approaches is important because, in the absence of conceptual precision, resources risk being wasted on redundant programming instead of fostering a constructive complementarity harnessing the expertise of each approach. The politically charged environment in which this debate is carried out – and to which this entire volume attests – only intensifies the risk. Because each approach involves different communities of practice (informed by different academic and expert circles), as well as potentially competing donor and state interests, debates over the nature of the relationship between urban safety and peacebuilding are not just technical but also about political interests and priorities. More than this, developing an integrated approach that leverages the expertise of both is critical because today’s urban centres, according to Chinese scholars Kaizhen Cai and Jinguo Wang (2009: 219), face a ‘complex and urgent situation’ that goes beyond ‘traditional safety problems’ like traffic accidents, natural disasters, and crime incidents to involve ‘nontraditional security problems’ such as terrorism, pandemics, and eco-environmental safety.

Indeed, the contemporary challenges faced by urban safety and peacebuilding practitioners relate to a complex combination of different types of harms occurring in cities, which are settings whose conflictual dynamics are still relatively poorly understood (see Jütersonke and Krause 2013; Jütersonke et al. 2007). As we explore in this chapter, the texts in this volume all broadly take the view that urban safety and peacebuilding have the potential to be mutually complementary in the fight against this complex set of urban challenges. To achieve this, however, we need to clarify their distinct areas of expertise by asking how the symbiotic relationship between the public sphere of urban government (urban safety) and the generally more informal processes of conflict prevention, mitigation, and transformation (peacebuilding) might be harnessed. To answer this question, we need to understand the particular expertise of the urban safety approach and how it contrasts with and complements that of peacebuilding. In what follows we seek to pursue that task, proceeding in five main stages.

First, we define and clarify the concepts of urban safety and peacebuilding in ideal-type and minimalist terms. We parse back to the basic roots of the concepts to see how their genealogy (i.e. the evolution of their meanings over time) may affect the multiplicity of definitions and understandings that can be gleaned from contemporary practice. Second, with minimalist definitions in hand, we dissect the productivity of the interface between urban safety and peacebuilding by introducing a basic model of their approaches inspired by semiotics: a field of study looking at the way in which ‘signs’ shape the way we make sense of everyday interactions by exploring how our use of language and interaction with material objects (e.g. traffic signage) construct human society. This model clarifies how each approach in its minimalist ideal type takes a different route towards ‘meaning-making’ in urban settings so as to reduce the possibility of crime, violence, and societal conflict. We then construct a heuristic typology of the foci of urban safety and peacebuilding initiatives vis-à-vis their levels of analysis, models of intervention, institutional foci, and the problems with which they deal.

Third, from this conceptual base the chapter draws a more practical analogy between the two modes of meaning-making outlined by examining two forms of care that constitute the basis of medical interventions: curative care and palliative care. We argue that peacebuilding, conceived in its minimalist ideal type, seeks to ‘cure’ violence; by contrast, urban safety has usually been concerned with mitigating and reducing harm. And while these divisions have blurred over time as the two approaches have become intertwined, they remain driving forces that tend to be hidden in the shadows of ongoing programming discussions. Fourth, we continue by dealing with the key problem faced by the minimalist and idea-type description of the contrasts between the two approaches: namely that they are frequently employed together and often ‘drift’ towards one another. We clarify that both urban safety and peacebuilding initiatives can be analysed in terms of the level of aggregation (or granularity) of their interventions, as well as the level of politicization to which their activities are subject. We discuss several pressures that have forced both approaches to deviate from their ideal-type form, beyond simple programmatic necessity, and chart their resulting confluence schematically.

Fifth and finally, we conclude with a discussion of how our semiotic clarification of the relationship between urban safety and peacebuilding practice can assist us in moving towards a truly integrated approach. This entails highlighting dangers in their confluence as well as opportunities that will enable us to leverage their respective strengths. The conclusion therefore stresses how it may be useful to parse back to the minimalist and ideal-type forms of urban safety and peacebuilding initiatives to see how this genealogy of their origins continues to impact how they are being implemented today, even as the scope of their initiatives has broadened and blurred considerably. Doing so, we suggest, will allow a better division of labour between the two approaches moving forward.

Minimalist conceptualizations of urban safety and peacebuilding

Twenty years after Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s now famous Agenda for Peace (UNSG 1992) laid out a basic framework on which peacebuilding practice has to proceed, we must begin by noting that:

… the post-conflict framing of peacebuilding has been overtaken by the evolution of violent conflict and the ensuing adaptation of the response. Peacebuilding practice now occurs in a wider variety of contexts ranging from fluid political transitions to regions under increased stress due to climate change, rapid urbanization, or contentious large-scale investments.

(Geneva Peacebuilding Platform 2015a: 3, emphasis added)

Against the backdrop of such a fluid and complex programming context, it has become clear that generating a one-size-fits-all conceptualization of peacebuilding has become increasingly futile and even counterproductive (Geneva Peacebuilding Platform 2015b). Instead, practitioners and scholars working within the domain of peacebuilding have come to focus on what are thought to be some of the essential characteristics of efforts to build peace, including ‘the use of dialogue, trust-building, and consensus-seeking processes to resolve or manage conflict through non-violent means’ (ibid.: 6). Such an approach is taken in acknowledgement of the fact that ‘at the field level, many people simply get on with doing what is needed to build peace and do not worry about definitions’ and, in this vein, it seems that analytical accounts of peacebuilding might also work without ‘preconceived analytical categories (e.g. a particular definition of peacebuilding)’, instead allowing ‘patterns of consent and disagreement to emerge from the data itself’ (ibid.: 17).

Making sense of peacebuilding in this adaptive manner has proved crucial to keeping up with a rapidly changing world. However, it is also one of the main difficulties obscuring the nature of the relationship between urban safety and peacebuilding practice. We believe that clarifying this relationship requires an ideal-type return to minimalist definitions of peacebuilding and urban safety. We do not mean to suggest these definitions are in any way preferable to current understandings, or in any way reflect the reality of practice today. Quite the contrary: broader contemporary definitions are the basis of countless productive programming initiatives globally, and are continuously debated and redrawn in both multilateral forums such as the United Nations – reflected in the recent turn to the vocabulary of ‘sustaining peace’ in United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 2282 (UNSC 2016) – and community-driven peacebuilding work at the grassroots level. We are seeking to return to minimalist definitions only in order to appreciate the conceptual history of these broader understandings of urban safety and peacebuilding. We argue that the origin of current approaches in these minimalist definitions continues to affect many of their activities, and appreciating this is thus important to clarify the relationship between urban safety and peacebuilding practice today.

We begin, then, by outlining our ideal-type minimalist understandings of urban safety and peacebuilding. The term ‘urban safety’ is relatively specialized in comparison to ‘peacebuilding’. Indeed, charting the use of these terms between 1970 and 2005 based on Google Ngram data from collated printed material reveals the vast rise in the use of peacebuilding terminologies over the 1990s and – by contrast – the almost imperceptibly low use of urban safety as a term of reference across the same period. Reviewing the predominance of peacebuilding in this way is misleading, however. Urban safety programmes are most frequently subsumed within urban planning schemes, and UN-Habitat’s Safer Cities Programme itself discusses ‘enhancing safety through planning, management and governance’ (UN-Habitat 2012; emphasis added). Moreover, safety and security are often conflated in these debates – sometimes, indeed, because of linguistic particularities (e.g. safety and security are both termed seguridad in Spanish, as discussed by López Rueda and Cara in this volume) that tend to occlude the distinction. What is clear, however, is that urban safety is closely related to the field of urban planning (and other subfields therein, including urban ecology, urban security, urban design, etc.). Indeed, urban planning is a practical and disciplinary perspective whose work long precedes the rise of peacebuilding (for reviews see Levy 2016 and Kostof 1991), despite the two terms being employed with almost the same degree of frequency today.

The very development of the first cities and their planning was, indeed, about the safety they afforded: ‘the city was a more defensible place than an isolated settlement in the countryside’ (Levy 2016: 62). However, as John M. Levy explains, this early virtue of the city gradually decreased with technological innovations like cannons that could breach city walls, nuclear weapons that could destroy whole cities, and terrorists drawing on everyday objects to penetrate and cause harm inside the city itself (ibid.: 62–63). In combination with the more mundane problems of crime and societal conflict, urban planning became increasingly concerned with the security or safety of the city more generally. A comprehensive urban planning approach is thus, Levy suggests, one that encompasses health, safety, and public welfare. The specifically urban safety component of these three elements, he continues, can ‘manifest itself in numerous’ different ways:

It might mean requiring sufficient road width in new subdivisions to ensure that ambulances and fire equipment have adequate access in emergencies. Many communities have flood plain zoning to keep people from building in flood-prone areas. At the neighbourhood level it might mean planning for a street geometry that permits children to walk from home to school without crossing a major thoroughfare. In a high-crime area it might mean laying out patterns of buildings and spaces that provide fewer sites where muggings and robberies can be committed unobserved.

(Ibid.: 122)

Whereas other aspects of the comprehensive urban planning approach (those relating to health and public welfare) focus more directly on intervening at a human level in the activities of urban dwellers, what is most striking about the urban safety aspect is its focus on material structures. It is by altering the material environment that urban safety hopes to reduce the possible hazards of the city, and it is important to keep this ideal-type definition of urban safety in mind as our discussion proceeds.

The definition of peacebuilding, for its part, has varied over time as it was regularly revised and expanded in scope. Numerous definitions and conceptualizations of peacebuilding now abound (see Barnett et al. 2007; also Chetail and Jütersonke 2014 for an overview of the literature). Building on the work of Tadashi Iwami (2016), variations in our understanding of peacebuilding can usefully be categorized with respect to four substantive elements: the primacy of the military; the importance of order and stability; engagement with political and democratic processes; and state-building agendas and infrastructure development. According to Iwami, the military and related ‘stabilization’ ambitions play a particularly important role in the American conceptualization of peacebuilding as a tool fostering democratic transformation (e.g. post-war Afghanistan/Iraq), while the European approach to peacebuilding places a premium on good governance and political reform agendas that do not necessarily depend on (military) security concerns and are focused more on interventions on the community level. For the sake of comparison, Russian and Chinese understandings of peacebuilding appear to be quite similar to the American variant but are distinctive in the sense that they downplay the importance of domestic transformation: the mission civilisatrice (Paris 2002) of so-called ‘liberal peace’ agendas on democratization, good governance, and human rights promotion (see e.g. Richmond 2006; Heathershaw 2008; Debiel et al. 2016) that are seen as interference in domestic affairs by some (Stepanova 2004; Lei 2011) and championed by others.

In this chapter, however, we deliberately try to steer clear of this ideologically and bureaucratically motivated terminological minefield; instead, we propose to return to the more minimal intellectual genesis of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction: new perspectives on urban safety and peacebuilding
• 1 Understanding the grammar of the city: urban safety and peacebuilding practice through a semiotic lens
• 2 Urban safety and crime prevention: architectural perspectives from Quito and Guayaquil
• 3 Gangland terra nullius: violence, territoriality, and bottom-up spaces of peacebuilding in urban Nicaragua
• 4 Negotiating with criminal armed groups: from prejudice to pragmatism
• 5 ‘Pay up or get hurt’: what extortion says about urban governance, and how it might be curbed
• 6 Beyond the usual suspects: gender considerations at the interface between urban safety and peacebuilding
• 7 The intersection of community crime prevention and security sector reform: the case of Jenin
• 8 Safe services in unsafe cities: the ICRC and urban services in situations of armed conflict and urban violence
• 9 Daring the unconventional on the pathways for peace: on the ‘how’ of sustaining peace in the city
• Index