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Private Security and the Perception of Upper-Middle Class in Cairo’s Gated Communities
Abstract
Highlighting the role of private security in disciplining the social class inside gated communities, this paper analyzes the content analysis of the training manual of security guards that focuses on the protection and surveillance of subjects living in “Al-Rehab City” enclave in Cairo. In the process of “protection and surveillance,” security guards are trained on perceiving residents in different categories other than the monolithic “upper-middle” class structure. The notion of class itself is sub-divided into groups for security purposes related to residents’ political affiliation, religious identity, military status, and foreign citizenship. The data collected on residents are then mapped onto the architectural and urban layout of the gated community. This forms the basis of what the security chief of the private security, who is a retired military general, calls the “strategic security map”. Based on the collected data of residents and their projections on the map, the chief decides on the zones of interest that require more guards than others for surveillance. Class is transcended from a collective social structure into a Foucaultian project of subject control and discipline. The panopticon, however, as an optical instrument of ‘fixed’ surveillance is transformed into an animated map with active updates and correlated feedback loops of security calculations. In addition to analyzing the process of “protection and surveillance” that deconstructs the collective class into sub-categories for scrutiny, in this paper I use ethnographic research from 2010 to 2012, to analyze two disputes between residents and the private security unit on issues related to drinking alcohol and allowing visitors into the gated community. This aims at showing how security is practiced on the ground and its moral basis of interpretive judgment of residents’ class (inspired by the militarized security training), when it comes to the everyday interaction. Many urban scholars wrote on Cairo’s gated communities, how they drive the neoliberal forces and the social segregation within the city, analyzing their residents as a homogenous group that belonged to the upper-middle class – but little has been said on the social class dynamics and their heterogeneity from within. This paper fills in this gap using a materially grounded analysis by first looking at the contours of the upper-middle class from the viewpoint of a private security unit in one of Cairo’s gated communities, and secondly showing how security – as a practice and mapping – is dynamically shaped by the intersections of class and identity politics.
Discipline
Architecture & Urban Planning
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
None