Urban insecurity, citizen participation, and neighboring care: The quest for protection in neighborhoods

Abstract

In Chile, fear of crime has produced an intense agenda of citizen participation in the territories. Inspired by the postulates of environmental criminology and urban ecology, neighborhood participation schemes have spread, whose theories assume that organization and social ties act as an informal barrier to insecurity in neighborhoods. There is little analysis regarding aspects that refer to how these processes are produced in daily life, what role the state plays, and what mechanisms make security possible. Based on an ethnographic study in a neighborhood in Santiago, the article proposes that the feeling of lack of protection experienced by the subjects mobilizes practices that acquire the texture of care that allows them to deal with the uncertainty produced by danger. This is possible in a context in which the neighborhood and the community are shaped by the state’s call for citizenship, which mobilizes mutual care while at the same time segregating and stigmatizing the poorest. These practices are promoted by neo-ecological security policies in the territories, limiting life in common in the city.