Book Review: Security in the bubble: Navigating crime in urban South Africa

Beneath its soft, colorful cover, Christine Hentschel’s Security in the Bubble is only 123 pages long (excluding notes). At first glance, one might mistake it for an easy reading novel, but it is nothing of the sort. Although Hentschel’s style is admirably witty and articulate, her subject matter—what we might call critical criminological urban theory—is complex. Using the South African city of Durban as a case study, she aims to conceptualize and explore new spatialities and nuances of security and spatial governance in late capitalism, by offering readers a fresh language and set of concepts. For readers like me, keeping pace with Hentschel’s reasoning will be akin to mental gymnastics: requiring concentration, flexibility, and stamina. But as may follow a tough gymnastic routine, the theoretically inclined will be left feeling rewarded by what they have gained.

The book is composed of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction, Hentschel suggests that across the world, “space” and the city “surface” are viewed as criminogenic targets for intervention. As such, she proposes that the urban surface be treated as the primary site of security governance and sets out to explore this in Durban.

She uses the first chapter to introduce Durban, recounting apartheid’s attempt to build segregated cities and combining force and discipline to supervise and regulate black bodies through spatial and social sorting. This has left the city fragmented, unequal, and violent, challenges that urban planners now strive to undo through design. She suggests that the state’s failure to secure its citizens has dented its legitimacy. In the vacuum, South Africans concoct their own microinterventions in the hope of securing their individual worlds. It was this observation which motivated Hentschel to follow a range of city actors, and engage an array of texts, to explore how residents problematize crime.

In Chapter 2, Hentschel describes cities as sites, where different projects of ordering overlap and compete with one another, and proposes the imaginary of the “bubble” to best grasp these. But the bubbles Hentschel imagines are not those of privileged space alone. Rather, “all regulatory regimes of particular space-times are bubbles of governance”(p. 46). These bubbles challenge the distinction between formal and informal space, private and public, and rich and poor. They frame security spatially and temporally, as produced when danger or priority are articulated and administered. This, she argues, allows for a heterogeneity of spatial forms to be thought of as bubbles, whether they be shiny shopping malls or dingy inner city streets surveilled by unregulated car guards. She rightly suggests that such imagery allows for the identification of commonalities in logics and techniques in governance across very different spaces, which is central to the book’s contribution.

In the third chapter, Hentschel adds more concepts to her framework. “Handsome space” describes city planners’ efforts to beautify areas, imbuing them with the power to “flirt” with passersby, attracting certain people and repelling others. Such spaces shape behavior in space and time (e.g., a bar between 6 p.m. and 3 a.m.) and so aim to “outcharm” crime spatially and temporally.

“Instant space,” described in the final chapter, frames security as a situational experience informed by individuals’ spatial literacy and access to information. Hentschel’s primary example is a community network that collects and informs members about crime trends via text messages. In instant space, the goal is not to understand crime or its causes but rather to avoid what are assumed to be inevitable risks. The idea is that “everyone” should share and access information that might keep them and others safe. “[D]oing instant space” (p. 99) describes people seeking to “sharpen their skills of avoidance” making security a “mobile spatial practice” (p. 102). But only in theory can everyone be “everyones.” In practice, membership requires access to money and technology. Hentschel describes as “no airtimers” and “instant mercenaries” participants, such as domestic employees or car guards, who are not afforded equal status in shaping instant space because they can’t afford the technology required or are deemed threats themselves. The fact that these groups exist renders the universalism of everyones an illusion (p. 112).

Instant space, Hentschel argues, has no security. Rather, it is the result of continual striving and the creation of mobile, “instant bubbles” in an attempt to outsmart crime (p. 113). They are social infrastructures that people create when the infrastructure around them can’t be trusted to make them safe.

In conclusion, Hentschel explores the lessons Durban can offer other cities. She suggests that security there only exists in “temporarily and spatially defined experiences” (p. 118) brought about through striving, either by “flirting” (handsome space) or “fleeing” (instant space). These are logics obsessed with the here and now, which ignore the country’s history of oppression and injustice, and the root causes of crime. Hentschel terms citizenship in this space “survivalship” (p. 122), connoting “surviving despite and against the city.” Ironically, she suggests that the best way to escape this fragmented world is to focus on the city rather than its bubbles to see it as a place of mutuality, empathy, and care.

Security in the Bubble is a clever, ambitious book offering readers a complex but rich frame with which to explore urban security governance in the early 21st century, particularly in the Global South. Some readers will be frustrated by the complexity of the conceptual web it offers, but for others, it will offer an innovative and clear lens through which to ponder contemporary urban spaces—sites of inquiry which will only grow in importance in the decades ahead.