The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity

TLDR: The Securing the City as mentioned in this paper is an important contribution to the growing field of urban studies and in/ security and would work well on the curriculum of a class on urban studies.

Abstract: together. Most articles are vividly written. They cross-reference each other where relevant and together they offer a comprehensive understanding of perceptions of urban spaces in present-day Guatemala City and beyond. As such, the book is an important contribution to the growing field of urban studies and in/ security and would work well on the curriculum of a class on urban studies. There is not much ethnographic analysis of Guatemala City in general and, as such the anthology is also important as a rare contribution to the regional literature. The focus on the urban spaces of Guatemala City is a welcoming contribution to the field of urban studies in Guatemala, a country that has been dominated by studies of the rural, predominantly Mayan, population or of the country’s violent political past and subsequent Peace Accords. Theoretically, the anthology is symptomatic of the interest in neoliberalism and spatial forms of social exclusion that characterizes North American academia in particular. Yet it provides a refreshing addition to the literature on the segregation of social lives in so-called postmodern cities. Securing the City contests persuasively that neoliberalism necessarily results in bounded urban societies, a point scholars have made about Los Angeles (Low 2003) and Sao Paolo (Caldeira 2000). This anthology differs from these studies by its emphasis on how different urban spaces as well as Guatemala City and the countryside are inextricably linked and mutually constitutive. As such, the anthology makes the important suggestion that one needs to analyze securitization as neither bounded nor unbounded. And yet, the anthology’s analytical focus on neoliberalism may also come with its own ‘blind spots’ in this regard. Having lived six years in Mexico City with the problems of ‘strong arm’ tactics against crime, many of the facets emphasized in this book are all too familiar to me, which make me wonder whether the analytical insistence that cityscapes are circumscribed by neoliberalism blinds us from analyzing more fully the cultural dynamics of circumscription that go beyond neoliberalism as well as those dynamics that are temporal rather than spatial.