Infrastructures of urban repair: Policing and the ecological governance of place

• In Event: POLWG Panel 6: Environmental Policing: Climate change, criminalising protests and ecological governance

Abstract

Our recent study of demands for, and practices of, everyday security in one English town (Macclesfield, in north-west England), intimates that calls for police attention have become entangled with a wider set of concerns to do with who ‘takes care’ of the social relations and physical fabric of the town and its neighbourhoods. Our research (which was a return to a field-site we originally studied in the mid-1990s) shows a diminished level of anger directed at the performance and failings of the police (at least compared to the 1990s) and an intensification of concern about the absence of basic urban governance. These worries, we suggest, form part of a climate in which people’s everyday concerns about disorder are wrapped-up with questions to do with the liveability and sustainability of the places they inhabit. In this paper, we describe the contours of these shifting orientations towards questions of urban care and repair. But we also use our findings as the springboard for an ‘analytical redescription’ (Bhan et al. 2024; Cities Rethought: A New Urban Disposition) of how policing features – and might in future feature – in what one might term the ecological governance of security. How, in other words, might we locate policing in practices of regulation and repair oriented to mitigating risk, and adaptively enhancing the possibilities of urban life – at a time of climate breakdown?

Authors

• Ian Loader, University of Oxford

• Ben Bradford, University College London

• Evi Girling, University of Oxford

• Richard Sparks, University of Edinburgh