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The new urban social order depends on a complex combination of systems of punishment, discipline, and security. Scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of the art and rationality of governance, or governmentality, have explored how urban social orders are increasingly based on the governance of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offenses. The new urban social order is characterized by privatized security systems and consumer-policed spaces such as malls. Gender violence interventions represent another deployment of spatial forms of governmentality. Over the last two decades, punishment of batterers has been augmented by disciplinary systems that teach batterers new forms of masculinity and by security systems for women based on spatial separation. In the postmodern city, spatial governmentality is integrally connected with punishment and discipline. These new forms of governance circulate globally along with neoliberal ideas of the diminished state. [gender violence, governmentality, urban society, globalization, law]
Although modern penality is largely structured around the process of retraining the soul rather than corporal punishment, as Foucault argued in his study of the emergence of the prison (1979), recent scholarship has highlighted another regime of governance: control through the management of space. New forms of spatially organized crime control characterize contemporary cities, from the explosion of gated communities (Caldeira 1999) to "prostitution free zones" as a regulatory strategy for the sex trade (Perry and Sanchez 1998; Sanchez 1997a, 1997b) to "violence free zones" as a way of diminishing communal conflict in India. Spatialized strategies have been applied to the control of alcohol consumption (Valverde 1998) and the regulation of smoking. In the 1970s, concerns about fear of crime in the United States expanded from a focus on catching offenders to removing "incivilities" in public spaces (Merry 1981; Wilson and Kelling 1982). This meant creating spaces that appeared safe to urbanites by removing people who looked dangerous or activities that seemed to reveal social disorder such as homeless people or abandoned trash. New community-policing strategies toward youths emphasize moving potentially criminal youths to other areas rather than prosecuting them (Ericson and Haggerty 1999:168).
These are all examples of new regulatory mechanisms that target spaces rather than persons. They exclude offensive behavior from specified places rather than attempting to correct or reform offenders....