Capital, Crime Control and Statecraft in the Entrepreneurial City

Abstract

Recent debates have drawn attention to the centrality of crime and disorder discourses within the rationale of contemporary urban entrepreneurial rule and how these have targeted ideological and political resources onto policing 'quality of life' infractions on the streets. In extending these insights, the paper focuses upon the regeneration of urban order in the UK and how this is being increasingly practised through a form of corporatised statecraft that underpins the shaping of discourses and responses to crime, harm and risk in city spaces. Attention is given to the processes by which 'regeneration' and entrepreneurialised governance are not only 'opening-up' but also 'closing-down' urban spaces as objects of surveillance and regulation. It is not only that crimes on the streets and associated hindrances to entrepreneurial rule are selected as the proper objects of power; at the same time, and through a series of integrally linked processes, other urban harms are being marginalised. The trajectory of regenerative discourse and practice, it is argued, is resulting in a stabilisation of opportunity structures for corporate crimes and harms, whilst at the same further exposing the relatively powerless to the punitive gaze of the extended surveillance capacity being developed as part of the entrepreneurial landscape.