Stepahn Lanz
Where Bosnia Begins in the Middle of Brazil:
Urban Orders of Violence Beyond "Good Governance"

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The workshop whose results are presented in this book was entitled "Beyond Good Governance. Shadow Globalization, Violent Conflict, and Urban Life." But what does "good governance" mean in regard to cities, and what could "beyond" here refer to? What is fundamentally at issue here is not a generally normative criterion for local urban governance, but a concrete project: the concept of good governance, which is both an ideological concept and one used in practical policy. Its career began in the late 1980s, when the World Bank in "peripheral" countries sought out "market-friendly" forms of state intervention. In the course of EXPO 2000, the German government and a "global initiative for sustainable development" initiated the World Conference of the Future of the Cities URBAN 21, bringing together the mayors of the world's thirty largest cities, representatives of the World Bank and IMF, NGOs, and the business world in Berlin. The declaration they issued, addressed to the UN and developed beforehand by a team of experts, proposes a model of "good governance" supposedly applicable around the world. This concept includes several basic ideological assumptions that go unquestioned: for example, that the megacities of the First and Third Worlds were approaching an unified zone of consumption and production in a network of worldwide competition, that their international competitiveness is a fundamental conditional for overall prosperity, that sustainable good governance promotes and does not hinder capitalist market processes, that this is all to take place as the common effort of local governments, civil society, and private businesses, that local government should limit itself to a few central tasks, but privatize most services, or that the poor are to be empowered to help themselves. Ultimately, the concept relies on one key basic premise: that all agents in a city-residents, social groups, business people, state apparatuses-are all in the same boat, and thus have the same interest in and demand for good governance, regardless of their various social, economic, or political position within global hierarchies between centres and peripheries.

The political scientist Neil Brenner terms "good governance" the expression of pure ideology, for it prematurely seeks to harmonize social contradictions (2000). His colleague Bob Jessop considers it a "simulated egalitarianism" that blocking out any relationship to power, exploitation, and domination pretends that a collective of individuals families, and communities is equally challenged by unalterable developments: "No-one could infer from the report that technological change and globalization are deeply politicized processes and the object of struggles within the dominant classes, within states, and in civil society... Thus, whereas globalization, technological change, and competition are depersonalized, human agency enters in through the need for survival and sustainability. There is no reference at all to the economic, political, or ideological roles of multinational companies, transnational banks, strategic alliances among giant companies..., [or] the crucial roles of the IMF...[or] the World Bank." (Jessop 2000: 32f).

In good governance, the "state" is supposed to cooperate with "civil society." But what is the one, and what is the other? No agents, means of power, or interests surface in either of the two blocks, never mind interrelationships between them. While the state appears autonomous, neutral in terms of social politics, an apparatus dedicated to following a clearly defined collective good, it remains an open question whether civil society is organized or disorganized, whether organizations are in the public interest or profit-oriented, or perhaps violent, how they are interlinked with one another, whether one should cooperate with the latter, etc.

To take a perspective "beyond good governance" might thus entail first of all adequately describing the reality of urban forms of government beyond such an ideological viewpoint. In so doing, we start from the premise that in production of existing relations of violence and poverty in the cities of the South, which in the conception of good governance simply appear as results of competition deficits and poor administration, the "globalization of insecurity" in the shadows plays a major role, alongside the politically driven globalization of corporate economies (Altvater/ Mahnkopf 2002). Here, the political and economic structures of the control centres - the "global cities" - are interwoven in various ways. As shall be shown here, multinational corporations are themselves implicated in regional violent conflicts and pre- or early capitalist patterns of exploitation. A global economy based in ruthlessly exploitative capitalism or the drug trade marks the everyday life of many poor areas. Increasingly, urban regions are dominated by regimes of globally embedded low-intensity warriors or neo-colonial patterns of government.
Developments in the cities of the global South thus cannot be separated from those of the North, and the same is true the other way around. This was already true of colonisation, when today's megacities arose out of are violently deformed native settlements (Lagos), built on the ruins of destroyed cities (Mexico City), or were entirely newly founded (Mumbai, Rio de Janiero). The glamour of the world metropolises like London or Paris was at the same time founded on the profits from the colonies. Nonetheless, still today the type of the European city is considered a global model that is not only supposed to have created affluence for all but is a model that is committed to an ideal of "tolerance and cosmopolitanism" (Bogdanovic 1994).

The Global European City

The former mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanovic, termed the Serbian battle against Sarajevo "urbicide," the intentional murder of a city, an act that sought to eradicate the ideal of tolerance and cosmopolitanism was paradigmatically shown in the historic deposits left in the multiethnic population and religious diversity of Sarajevo. He links this process with the development of globalized megacities: In the violent tendencies toward segregation and isolation of the most diverse social groups, he sees - as the art historian Karin Wilhelm also sees it - a "fragmentation of memory" and "destruction of identity" (Wilhelm 2002, S.289) at work similar to that in the battles around Sarajevo. The spatial-social segregation mechanisms of the megacities, according to Wilhelm, correspond to the "separatist desire of ethnic warfare" and could be interpreted as "violent expression of the process of civilization, an inwardly directed, as it were sublimated state of war" (20). The European city model appears in this glorifying perspective as a global cradle of civilization, while at the same time being threatened by violent destruction and the global spreading of the megacity as an urban type.

- Urban Orientalism
Since the mid-1990s, various authors of current urban research have developed threatening scenarios of "the end of the civilized city" in Europe-usually with "American conditions" in mind. A book with this title (Eisner 1997) for example conjures up a vision of "urban crisis" and the "increase of urban violence." Other studies predict social conflicts that destroy the fragile way of life marked by the indifferent coexistence of the mutually foreign, triggering a state of near-civil war in European cities as well. Economic and social processes of division are currently coupled with the retreat of the local government from social policy, according to Hartmut Häußermann: This could mean "that ever more [hopeless] people arm themselves, and life in the cities becomes increasingly violent" (1998, p.171). The conflict researcher Wilhelm Heitmeyer (1998) notes a structural segregation in which migrants and their offspring set themselves apart from the urban society and develop subcultures conducive to violence. When Heitmeyer asserts "the separatist longing" on the part of the later generations, a current look at the social-spatial development of European cites shows above all that affluent parts of the city are homogenizing and blocking out social problems (Dangschat 1997). Studies that conjure up an image of a culture of poverty or violence in neighbouring districts usually operate under a presumed separation of "self" and "other": For example, Heitmeyer et. al (1997) define the heterogeneous young population with a Turkish background as a homogenous unit that differs from his "own" group by professing a regressive Islam. Borrowing from Edward Said, Loic Wacquant (1998) defines such an approach as "urban Orientalism."

In their academic form, scenarios conjuring up the threat of emergent parallel societies see the urban community as decaying due to the explosive power of the social situation; in a more popularized media form they also make for good ratings as "fear in the cities", as the title of one recent German television series was titled. Ultimately, on the political level they have contributed to a backlash in urban control policy over the past decade. Many instruments of surveillance, police strategies of repression, and legal regulation since then have also eroded the general accessibility and usability of European cities, turning against minority groups, who are defined as potential sources of violence (Ronneberger et al. 1999). This already could be seen as a sublimated state of war in the midst of the European city directed against the new "dangerous classes."

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