Análisis de la vulnerabilidad al cambio climático

An ‘outward unfolding’ (Scarry, 1985: 40), civilization is contingent on the

progressive occupation, modification, and regulation of spaces exterior to the human body. In this regard, as Osborne & Rose (2004: 209) have noted, space conditions the possibilities and dynamics of human life. In establishing forms of existence, space shapes the parameters of action and defines practices of regulative abstraction, symbolic intervention, as well as material appropriation (Chatterjee, 2009; Gregory, 1995; Huxley, 2007). The demarcation,

5 Where the interplay between specific force relations takes place and practices are articulated. This in the context of his analysis of micropractices of individuals’ management⁵ (Foucault, 1995) and biopolitical technologies exerted through the bodies of a population (Foucault 1979, 1991).

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division, distribution, modification, and integration of spaces shape the configuration of groups and individuals (Elden, 2013). Space and identity are extensively entangled through the appropriation and modification of the landscapes and intimate “spaces of existence. In this regard, space grounds, frames, and informs human agency by positioning and distributing individuals across it (Gregory, 1995). Central to this process are the ways in which space is imagined and represented as it informs modalities of intervention and identification,

producing structures of exclusion and separation (Gregory, 1995: 456).

A branch of the literature on space and power has encouraged us to see the built environment as a foundational element in the organization of social space, alternatively conditioning activities, distributing opportunities, inflicting pain, and distributing power (Azoulay & Ophir, 2013; Caldeira, 2000; Chatterjee, 2009; Graham, 2010; 2016; Low, 2003;

Madanipour, 2003; Weizman; 2007). By means of its direct integration within the

organization and formation of political subjects, Caldeira (2000) and Low (2003) for example have successfully demonstrated how built space in residential locations structures

mechanisms of exclusion and segregation by informing the identity of their residents.

Building on the experiences of India and Israel respectively, Chatterje (2009) and Weizman (2007) have investigated the roles architecture, and its destruction, have in inflicting durable pain and achieving control over behaviours. In this regard, they have analysed the ways in which the re-ordering of space is deeply involved in the governing of individuals. Along the same lines, Huxley (2009) explains how space is incorporated as an element in the operative rationales of government, influencing the conduct of subjects by fostering environmental qualities. Conversely, contingency, creative agency, and everyday processes impact on the organization and dynamic of spaces, challenging their embedded meanings and impositions (Craib, 2004; Yeh, 2017).

In this context, governing is a matter of structuring spaces to make them amenable for intervention, distributing forces, segmenting energy, locating intensities, and redirecting movements to regulate and control individuals (Chatterje, 2009; Rose, 2004: 31; Weizman, 2001). Analysing the relationship between power and subjection requires attention to the importance of the spatial conditions that make possible the constitution of political identities and the governance of individuals.

As Feldman (1991: 8) observes, the control and regulation of individuals, is a “(…) matter of regimenting the circulation of bodies in time and space in a manner analogous to the circulation of things”. Intertwined with the control of space, the analysis of the formation of subjects is concerned with the localization of the routines, habits, and techniques within which power is materialized. Therefore, situated at the intersection between bodies, built

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environment, social performances and representations (Madanipour, 2003), space is central to understand how power works

A spatial focus enables one to understand how power penetrates onto everyday life, projecting forms of occupation, visualization, and movement, fostering tangible

transformations in the ways in which individuals and communities organize, move, and use public spaces. In addition, it concerns the recognition of the spatial arrangements where power is embodied, indicating the importance of the particular and the local in its relationship with broader strategies of control. To this extent, a spatial arrangement involves the

interrelation and interplay of rationalities, practices and geographies that produce or manage different kinds of conduct. They are the embodiments of the forces that shape conduct (Weizman, 2007; Huxley, 2007). Space thus interplays with the languages and practices of representation which express how “(…) locales and agents are to be connected with one another, what problems are to be solved and what objectives are to be sought” (Taylor, 1984:

176).

Foucault’s investigations on the constitution and modelling of individuals emphasize the importance of space, from the urban organization of the city and the distribution of individuals across it to the management of their vital process. Power is actively constituted in the city, across its streets and through its walls, and realised through populations and

individual bodies (Curtis, 2002; Hunt, 1996).

Focused on the analysis of the plurality of social spaces instigated by both the

demographic expansion and industrialization of Europe, at the crux of these processes it is the emergence of population as a problem (Foucault, 2000: 215). At issue is how to (best)

distribute the growing number of human beings for efficient and effective production, and in doing so, to manage the problems of proximity, arbitrariness and asymmetry resulting from that growth (Curtis, 2002). Such processes foster the political rationalizations that seek to make individuals’ bodies amenable to intervention. Governing is therefore managing

populations in and through the spaces in which these developments occur. The city becomes the quintessential political space and backdrop through which the correlative concept of government, power, and space are thought. Whether it is about the micro-regulation of workers, students, soldiers, and/or inmates in particular spaces (discipline), or the control of whole populations (biopolitics), the urban fabric acts as the medium in which things occur

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and power is structured in endless relationships bounding up subjects and objects (Curtis, 2002; Usher, 2014).⁶

Thus, while the body acts as the main target in this process of refinement and

intervention, there is an unavoidable link between what happens to individuals and the places designed to produce the desired effects of the techniques put into operation to gain access to those bodies. As Foucault (1984) himself explains, it is people's own practices of freedom in particular places that determines the direction of power and the final integration of space within broadest circuits of domination. The relation between spatial environment and the rule over bodies can thus be conceived as an “(…) sphere of coexisting heterogeneity” (Massey, 2005: 9). In other words, it is a relation mediated and produced by institutions, individual understandings (of the self), and domains of cognition which make behaviours and the world amenable to intervention (Massey, 2005). Space emerges as a contingent ‘force-field’

established between objects permanently negotiated, resisted, and re-configured (Gibson-Graham, 1996). The built environment is thus traversed by a set of relations that concern the distribution of the relations of power within which individuals become subjects (Hannah, 1997).

Foucault’s (1977) examination of the forms through which individuals are disciplined is a good case in point to illustrate the entanglement between subjectification and space. The analysis of the spatial organization of the disciplines is relevant as it distinguishes

theoretically amongst place specific regimes of practices, the importance of the different locales through which power is materialized, the roles forms of rationalization have in the implementation of projects of governmentality, and the historically contingent nature of these mechanisms.⁷ Spatial analysis here thus defines instruments to understand how power is spatialized through regimes of practices, rationalizations, and bodies.

At its core, Discipline and Punish (1977) explores three intertwined themes. Firstly, it explores the technical interventions developed to separate, classify, and order individuals.

Secondly, it identifies the regimentation of human spaces as a central concern for the administration of modern urban agglomerations. (Driver, 1985; Elden, 2003). Finally, it analyses the series of understandings, representations, and techniques from which disciplinary mechanisms emerge. The underlying assumptions of this disciplinary model of spatial

6 Central in this development is the emergence of the police, which rather than just contemporary focus on law enforcement, entails a type of rationality about urban administration (Elden, 2003; Foucault, 1984).

7 In addition, it challenges structuralist explanations that attribute fixed interests to the state, by situating social life in a process of movement and contestation that occurs in the organization of the everyday life. Moreover, these spaces allow to observe how the power of state is formally and informally ‘subcontracted to remote, local, and specialized authorities’. See Coleman & Agnew (2007) for a detailed discussion of these topics.

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regulation illustrate the connection between the representation of space, the distribution of individuals, and the ulterior implementation of mechanisms for the regulation of human bodies.

At the base of disciplinary dynamics and procedures are the medical interventions developed to control “the plague-stricken town”, which Foucault observes, is the “(…) utopia of the perfectly governed city” as it synthetizes the sovereign aspiration to total order

(Foucault, 1977: 198). The diagram of “the plague-stricken town” is built upon a single aspiration: the partition of urban geography into clear and transparent sections, as well as the allocation and distribution of positions for the residents of the city according to

individualizing distinctions. An uninterrupted circuit of surveillance, ‘omnipresent and omniscient’, to control the details of every aspect relevant for the correct functioning of the city, this order aims to see and control everything through the individualization of its residents and the segmentation of space. “Rulers”, says Foucault (1977: 199), “dreamt of the state of plague” to make the city and its residents governable. Disciplines are in this context intensive techniques of observation that alongside the spatial formations arising from its

implementation, such as the camp, or the Panopticon, act as means of general visibility (Elden, 2001: 139).

As forms of visibility, disciplinary mechanisms are articulated at the intersection between the knowledge developed to individualize the residents of towns and the practices implemented to allocate individuals, as well as control and segment the urban space.⁸ Understood as optical devices, the disciplinary codifying apparatuses incorporate space and subjection in a complex system of individual observation by the authorities and

self-observation by individuals themselves. Accordingly, a more fundamental question about the relationship between power and space underlies the examination of disciplines. Jackson &

Hanlen (2015: 16) formulate it as follows “(…) how [does] an ordering of knowing [have] its specific correlates in spatial practices?”

Foucault points out a continuum of spaces and practices through which individuals are disciplined and power is embedded. The body, the asylum, the monastery, the prison, the military camp, the school, all spaces he examines, are regimented by means of enclosure and partition. Through them, a series of exchanges and flows of information, orders, and physical training, organize, distance, and rank bodies in relation to one another and among spaces themselves (Foucault, 1977). Behavioural patterns and obedience are instigated through the

8 In line with this proposition, the formation and arrangement of the mechanism to discipline individuals, act in parallel with the juridical power of the sovereign, by organizing the social space through the production of forms of visibility.

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classification of individuals according to distinctions between reason/unreason and

normal/abnormal (Taylor, 1984: 175). These classifications establish connections between groups and subjects, creating objects of observation that can be knowable (Foucault, 1977;

1989). Observation and classification introduce order by making possible the production of knowledge.

Disciplinary spaces expose myriad points for the execution and exertion of power, including the inner states of individuals and multiple agencies, institutions, and sites (schools, board unions) connected to the state and/or economic structures. Constituted through relations of measurement, normalization, treatment, and rehabilitation which are not typically relevant to sovereign power (Foucault, 1991), these spaces describe an intensive “institutional time-space geometry” (Philo, 1992). Aiming to make time-space transparent for the purposes of intervention by means of enclosure, isolation, and circumscription, disciplinary formations thus organize the subjection of individuals through the regulation of bodily movements and the deployment of time through rigorous schedules (Foucault, 1977).⁹ At the centre of this project of absolute transparency and spatial hyper-regulation is the Panopticon. The Panopticon is a tower in a prison from where every cell can be observed; however, it is designed such that inmates cannot tell if they are being observed, or if there is even an observer in post. Thus, inmates assume they are always being watched and regulate their behaviour accordingly. This mechanism designed to make the inmate complicit in her own surveillance, the Panopticon is the entity that allows the inscription of the order of the plague town onto the individual body. It does so, by shaping their desires and most intimate

movements.

Through techniques of surveillance, using the subject’s own possibility to speak and inwardly articulate the truth of their relationship with the exterior and others, individuals internalize the power relations at the basis of the Panopticon. In internalizing such relations, individuals become subjects by conforming to the indications and procedures of the

permanent surveillance. In doing so, the exertion of direct violence is reduced, conformity is elicited, and the individuals’ freedom remains as the basic condition that makes possible the functioning of this process (Feldman, 1991: 127).

Regulated through timetables, rhythms, and dressage, these forces position individuals within that order, becoming the means to make the body a unit of power through its seamless

9 The disciplinary techniques Foucault (1977) identifies are surveillance; regulation; classification of groups of actors establishing boundaries; distribution of bodies in space (relative to the classification, hierarchization, the establishing of groups of individuals; standardization; normalization (setting, invoking, requiring, or conforming standards); exclusion (negative side of normalization).

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analysis and arrangement. Thus, individuals become the very medium of power, as self-government is instigated at the intersection between the codification of space, the

classification of individuals, and the assigning of positions according to that order (Foucault, 1977). In this regard, disciplinary space is regimented fundamentally through an intensive process of enclosure, and codification. Individuals are classified according to functional orders within spaces and their subsequent distributions across them are essential to the general command of the political order. Space, central to this process, emerges from the division, classification, and positioning of individuals across it.¹⁰

Overall, Foucault’s analysis of discipline shows how regimes of governmentality articulate coherent systems of social practices and discourses through which spaces are represented, modelled, and intervened upon to make subjects governable. In other words, Foucault’s explorations of disciplinary relations of power explain how power spatializes by defining boundaries, representing categories, creating zones of full visibility, and risk classifications. Such is the case of the ‘plague-stricken town’, whose demarcation by means of strict segmentations and mechanisms to inhibit the circulation of disease, formulates the space of the city as a map to enable the unlimited intervention of the sovereign to these ends.

Ruling in this sense is at first an operation of visualization dependent on the formation of limits that aim to clarify the fields in need of control and intervention.

The concept of imaginative geography (Gregory, 1995), illustrates the connections amongst discursive operations, institutional interventions, the codification/production of space, and the command of individuals. In observing how bodies are regulated through socially embedded interpretations of identity and space, Gregory (1995) details the links between the construction of identity, the constitution of spaces, and the governing of subjects.

Imaginative geographies are spatial views of things by means of which individuals are inscribed and positioned in particular contexts through the implementation of a series of divisions, exclusions, and oppositions (Gregory, 1995: 457). The imaginary element of this concept implies the ensemble of constructed meanings and representations, inscribed within broader societal narratives that frame and organize the distribution of socially shared

meanings that create the world as a coherent unit through which individuals act. These imaginaries have performative and normative properties—they articulate the horizons of credibility through which truth claims are integrated (Taylor, 2004: 23-25). In other words,

10 In this regard, Hoffman (2011), Legg (2007), Prieto (2012: 87) have argued that in Foucault’s analysis on power relations, the attention to spaces is accessory of his more fundamental interest on abstract social structures. According to this interpretation, built space is for Foucault “ontologically unimportant” and secondary to understand that power is exerted through regimes of practices, failing in capturing the complexity of concrete places.

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these geographical imaginations are a set of procedures (representational, symbolic, technical) through which difference is represented and distributed in space, organizing a coherent

system for the understanding of the distribution of the resources and individuals in a given space. It implies essentially the practices of visualization and representation that allow one to frame and construct a ‘… fragmented polity [as] an aesthetic and visual unity and [give] an imagined entity a very material tangibility’ (Craib, 2004: 8). In this regard, these geographical imaginations belong to the vast repertoire of knowledges and discourses informing the

collective points of view through which actions are performed.

Accordingly, distinctions drawn by these geographical imaginations establish objects, set boundaries, and designate identities for individuals and spaces alike. Such distinctions are embedded in complex rules of meaning, ordering rationalities, techniques, and practices that make things able to be seen in specific ways. As ‘tableaux vivant’ (Foucault, 1977: 148), these imaginative geographies are grids of intelligibility through which difference is distributed, places are assigned, classifications enabled, and order is imposed by folding distance into difference and distinguishing the “self” from the “other” (Gregory, 2004: 17).

Through the production of synoptic effects, i.e., the purposeful production of an aggregate and selective view of an aspect of reality that aims to differentiate it, to make it amenable for knowledge, intervention, and management, these geographies constitute subjects in space by shaping their performances and interventions.

Concerned with the implementation of a series of tactics to order (and bring order to) the territory of Mexico, the WoD has returned to the sovereign project of absolute territorial transparency in seeking to determine the territorial basis and limits of its power. The output of these processes of demarcation and designation integral to imaginative geographies are comparable by analogy to the practices of division that intersect in the WoD. In a similar fashion to the ‘plague-stricken town’, the WoD’s designers conceptualised Mexican territory and its residents as if they had been infected by crime. Dividing the country’s territory into plazas –or market-places- whose control was contested by shifting constellations of drug cartels, this territorial re-configuration of space has allowed for ongoing state violence. As the representation of the country as a crime-ridden territory has gained emotional purchase and a practical form, the militarized policing of the country has intensified. The focus of the

research for this thesis will be on how imagining the territory and its residents as

criminogenic has animated specific types of interventions, and how these interventions have constructed particular spaces as dangerous. Police-military deployments, institutional interventions, and other regulatory practices through which territorial divisions have

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intertwined with the imaginative geographies of Mexican territory have produced substantial modifications to the spatial organization of the country.

The Mexican WoD lacks the accuracy and effectiveness of the disciplinary

mechanisms described by Foucault. Notwithstanding, it seeks omniscient control of Mexico and its subjects by representing multiple spaces and their residents as unruly. The spaces the WoD has created have structured a continuum between the state interpretation of insecurity and the zones of exclusion brought about by the implementation of the military policing of urban centres. This all-encompassing visualization of the country as a criminal space and its residents as criminal suspects has instigated a collective social distrust from the state to

mechanisms described by Foucault. Notwithstanding, it seeks omniscient control of Mexico and its subjects by representing multiple spaces and their residents as unruly. The spaces the WoD has created have structured a continuum between the state interpretation of insecurity and the zones of exclusion brought about by the implementation of the military policing of urban centres. This all-encompassing visualization of the country as a criminal space and its residents as criminal suspects has instigated a collective social distrust from the state to