Zones of Friction

If a "sublimated state of war" marks everyday life in the globalized megacity, the European city cannot be excluded from this, especially since its normative model simply blocks out structures that exist in its very shadow. Thus, Berlin's "Polenmarkt" (polish market) and refugee housing, gated communities in the vicinity of the French banlieues, dirty civil wars like those in Belfast, or the protectorate rule in the cities of the former Yugoslavia make up an entirely different kind of "European city."

Interestingly, the URBAN 21 congress I mentioned at the start officially breaks with the West's demonization of the megacities of the South. While it does this without taking the historical perspective, their report at least explores current global interconnections: The model of the European city, founded on a welfare state regulated by government authorities, has, they argued, now come to an end. Furthermore, they suggest, the megacities of the South show how informal and self-organized forms of self-help can compensated for welfare state services. In this neoliberal perspective, the once bemoaned "ungovernability" of the megacity is considered an expression of the dynamism of self-helping residents. This is certainly a new perspective, but one with an old, as it were, neo-colonial function: to instrumentalize these structures again to increase the wealth of the West.

"Informality in the sense of the lacking bindingness of rules", write Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf (2002), is an essential element of neoliberal politics that has as its goal the "deregulation of formal political institutions and the privatization of public property". (264) In states without efficient markets or a legitimate monopoly on violence, this provokes extralegal structures with privatized power structures and a dissolving rule of law. In contrast to the shadow economy, in neoliberalism the state system of rules is not avoided but instrumentalized for economic interests. Already the neoliberal pioneer Milton Friedman assumes "the maintenance of law and order" as a basis for exchange (Ibid., 265). Ever since governmental structures in the Western sense have begun to decay in many areas of the world, "the global ordering power", according to Altvater/Mahnkopf, has become the agent of the neoliberal law and order principle on the global stage, attempting to re-establish by military means what "has been destroyed in the course of the neoliberal transformations driven by the same ordering power". On the local level of non-legalized slums or favelas, informal economies by no means mean the absence of state power. "At least the police is always there", as Julia Eckert notes for the example of Mumbai. Altvater and Mahnkopf distinguish between a "proper" (complementing formal structures) and an "improper" informalization that is ultimately destructive. At least when it comes to urban orders of violence, this makes sense only in a limited way. Whether orderly or disorderly, informal "parapolicing" (Rigakos 2002) or privatized forms of "justice" are always based on arbitrary notions of belonging and subject groups defined as alien to special rules; in the age of neoliberalism, private security forces are taking over the control of urban territories from a state that is increasingly withdrawing-and not only in African or Asian cities. Such "civilian corporations" (Shearing 1997) have also established themselves in the Western metropolis as private forms of governance, that in the Foucauldian sense are to effectively arrange "things" to promote security and decrease risky forms of behaviour. This includes contractual arrangements like gated communities or business improvement districts, where businesspeople are allowed to raise "taxes" and carry out local police power, just as citizen's defence teams or crime prevention councils that are established as public private partnerships to "prevent" crime, and in so doing establish selective rules for the use of public space.

It seems that the neoliberal order of violence is dividing up the city on a global level into a feudalistic world of islands of control. On these individual islands, various rights, duties, rules, and patterns of belonging exist that determine who can feel secure at which point in time. Often, cooperating powers overlap and produce a complex pattern of rules. In the zones of friction on the margins and between theses islands, competing powers clash, and at least in the megacities of the South also produce open violence. Often conforming to the market or themselves engaged in the informal economy, state authorities like the police and military are deeply implicated in this-be it as the authority of public order or occupation, as a party in conflict, or as a client of paramilitary private security services. The lacking legitimacy of the state is an essential moment in the shattering power structures. In Africa and Asia, this reaches back to the time of colonial rule and a decolonization dominated by corrupt elites, but it is also a result of a neoliberal world order that destroys public structures or denies them the necessary resources, while at the same time trying to establish "law and order" by military means.

In the workshop "Beyond Good Governance," we discussed these issues. Most importantly, we focused on the question of how cities are produced, governed, and appropriated in the course of the dirty processes of globalization lying in the shadows. In our view, this becomes most manifest in the points of conflict and fissure, the "friction zones" in urban everyday life: where state, parastate, and civil patterns of organization intersect to assist certain interests, where local, nationally, and globally produced ideologies clash, sometimes violently, where the structure of the global world market collides with the equally violent economic, social, or political processes of assertion of marginalized groups. At issue here were violent micro-conflicts or "new conflicts" (Kaldor 1999), exploitative capitalism, the drug trade, or trafficking in human cargo, privatized security forces, terrorism and the fight against it, state repression as well as religiously/ideologically connoted local uprisings. When in compensation for an absent state violent nationalists or even the drug mafia offer social infrastructures or at least emergency assistance, when private militias are less corrupt than the police, and European corporations are implicated in the apparatus of repression of warlords and military dictatorships, the purportedly clear dividing lines between state and civil society, common good and criminality, civilization and barbarism begin to blur. In addition to the way in which these relations of violence leave their mark on urban everyday life, the perspective should also be focused on economies, their political regulation, international causes and implications, as well as the concrete social situation and the motives of participating parties. Important to us here was to examine the supposedly so foreign and different in descriptions of Mumbai, Kampala, Lagos, Luanda, Medellín, or Sarajevo as invisible and suppressed aspects of our own urban environment.

But besides critical analysis, we sought in "Beyond Good Governance" also to discuss a normative question: What criteria can be set in the context of existing urban orders of violence in the face of the dominant ideological concept of "good governance", to search for forms of state intervention on an urban level, to regulate markets and competition, for emancipative practices of both urban everyday life and international campaigns (see on this Jung or Zelik in this volume). What perspectives can be opened beyond the European neoliberal understanding of Civitas?

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