The rise and fall of the punitive turn agenda at the local level

• In Event: Urban safety and neighbourliness in Spanish medium-sized cities.

Abstract

One of the defining features of the so-called punitive turn in Europe, back in the 1990s and 2000s was the increasing involvement of local administrations in the penal field, adopting punitive agendas to govern social order in towns and cities. Although several indicators suggest that Spanish political actors showed less interest in punitive policies than many of their European counterparts, Spain was no exception to this trend. By the mid-2000s, many Spanish local administrations had embraced the punitive turn, developing legal and logistical mechanisms to implement their own punitive agendas. This included regulating the use of public space through local civic ordinances that prohibited a wide range of activities labelled as annoying, often with markedly detrimental consequences for marginalized groups.
This paper presents the first provisional findings of the TranSMedias and ConviMedias projects, which explore policing and urban safety policies in a diverse selection of medium-sized cities in Spain. These preliminary results suggest that, in recent years, the appetite shown by city councils to significantly expand their urban safety apparatus has notably declined, against the backdrop of the resistance organised by a wide variety of community groups in many Spanish localities. At the same time, our findings suggest that the consolidation of this model of policing public space poses challenges to the development of alternative discourses on order and public space.

Authors

• Cristina Fernandez Bessa, University of A Coruna

• Jose A. Brandariz, University of A Coruna