Governing safety through the politics of community?: A governmentality analysis of the practice of 'safety walks' in three Swedish cities

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Governing safety through the politics of

community? A governmentality analysis of the practice of ‘safety walks’ in three Swedish cities

Jennie Brandén & Linda Sandberg

To cite this article: Jennie Brandén & Linda Sandberg (2021): Governing safety through the politics of community? A governmentality analysis of the practice of ‘safety walks’ in three Swedish cities, Space and Polity, DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2021.1894916

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2021.1894916

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Published online: 05 Mar 2021.

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Governing safety through the politics of community? A governmentality analysis of the practice of ‘safety walks’ in three Swedish cities

Jennie Brandén

and Linda Sandberg

a

Department of Political Science, Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden;

Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

ABSTRACT

In Sweden, ‘safety walks’ are a well-established planning practice for improving safety. They involve citizens and local authorities evaluating public spaces in terms of safety. Building on observations, interviews and policy materials, this paper examines safety walks from a governmentality perspective. Our analysis shows that, through the governing techniques employed in the walks, safety problems are rendered technical, auditable and governable, while becoming disconnected from the social and political. Furthermore, the participatory rationale of the walks serves to produce self-governing communities, who are responsible for managing their own safety, while risking the reinforcement of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the imagined ‘safe community’.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 25 November 2019 Accepted 21 February 2021 KEYWORDS

safety walks; safety audits;

governmentality; planning

Introduction

Safety walks are a method for getting all the di fferent actors, residents and other users in the area to meet with a knowledgeable organiser, and talk about how the area could become safer and more comfortable. The purpose is a mutual exchange of thoughts and views and an opportunity to disseminate information and discuss constructive ideas. The dialogue between citizens and local authorities is just as important as the physical changes that the walk can result in. (Brå et al., 2010, p. 5, all Brå quotes have been translated by the authors) In Sweden, local planning practices around safety have become almost synonymous with the implementation of safety walks

and the subsequent alteration of places that partici- pants have identified as unsafe. As illustrated in the quote above from the national manual for safety walks in Sweden, dialogue and participation are described as essential elements of these walks. Based primarily on these participatory dimensions, safety walks in Sweden have been presented as an almost all-encompassing response, not only to public safety, but also to the broader aims of gender equality (as a tool for addressing women ’s unsafety in particular), democratic inclusion and civic engagement (Brå

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

CONTACT Jennie Brandén jennie.branden@umu.se Department of Political Science, Umeå Centre for Gender

Studies, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden

et al., 2010; Skr.2007/08:39, 2008; Skr.2016/17:126, 2017). Drawing inspiration from the work on urban safety from a gender perspective in Toronto in the late 1980s (Listerborn, 2015), safety walks were first introduced in Sweden by the local crime prevention council in Gothenburg in 2001. Since then, a range of guidelines, manuals, strategies and check- lists have been developed. Safety walks are presented by the authorities as an efficient method and the national manual is ‘designed to be applicable in different environments and parts of the country ’ (Brå et al., 2010, p. 6). More recently, safety walks have also been linked to crime prevention policy, described as useful for ‘deepening the democratic dia- logue between citizens and public representatives ’ (Skr.2016/17:126, 2017, p. 44), and for the police authorities to work with civil dialogue and learn about local experiences of crime and safety (Brå, 2020).

Similarly, safety walks have become an indisputable tool for safety worldwide. As Leslie Kern points out: ‘safety audits are used in cities around the world now, with the goal of empowering community members to generate specific recommendations for change ’ ( 2020, p. 156). In an evaluation of the ‘effectiveness’ of women’s safety audits in different parts of the world, Whitzman et al. define them as a community-based prac- tice, functioning as ‘a local governance tool, as an urban planning tool and as an expression of knowledge based in practice’ (2009, p. 206). Safety walks can thus be under- stood as a widespread form of governing safety through the inclusion of community members, often those who are considered particularly unsafe, who are actively taking part in the resolution of local safety problems (Kern, 2020, p. 156). In that sense, the walks are also illustrative of what has been called the ‘communicative’ or ‘deliberative’

turn, under which planning practices are increasingly carried out through participation and dialogue (Healey, 1997; Hobson, 2009; Huxley, 2013; Listerborn, 2007). These modes of participatory governing build on ideals of deliberation, consensus and unity (Healey, 1997), and are often put forward as democratic tools. At the same time, participatory and deliberative approaches have also been criticized as ‘de-politicising’ (Mouffe, 1999; 2005) and ‘post-political’ (Swyngedouw, 2005; 2014), because these inclusive and consensual modes of governance risk obscuring dimensions of power, responsibility, exclusion and conflict. Along the same lines, we can see that the feminist critique of planning prac- tices for safety often highlight an extensive focus on problems in the physical environ- ment at the expense of being attentive to the gendered, social and power-related dimensions of safety (Koskela & Pain, 2000; Whitzman, 2007).

Safety walks are thus presented as a response to a variety of societal problems, and the

expectations for what they can accomplish are high. Yet, previous research points to the

limits of participatory modes of governing, such as safety walks, and outlines their de-

politicizing risks. Starting from this potential tension, this study sets out to explore

how the issue of (un)safety is problematized and given meaning through the implemen-

tation of safety walks. How is the problem of (un)safety understood, addressed and dealt

with through the walks? How is the meeting set up and what does participation and dia-

logue around (un)safety mean in practice? By analysing observations, interviews and

policy materials connected to safety walks in three Swedish cities, our aim is to

examine the specific governing techniques that are employed through safety walks,

shaping their organization and conduct. This approach enables us to tease out the

micro-practices through which power operates and the governing of safety takes form

in practical conduct. Through this focus, we also seek to make visible the forms of

knowledge and relations of power that shape and inform safety walks, as one of the main strategies used for improving safety in Sweden today.

Analysing safety walks from a governmentality perspective

Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as a way to understand how

‘reality’ is made governable through the ‘conduct of conducts’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 341), we conceptualize safety walks as a practice of governing, to be studied at the level of the programmes, techniques and subjectivities shaping it and giving it form (Walters, 2012). Compared to other approaches to analysing urban governance, the analytical focus thus shifts from the authoritative power of governments to the everyday prac- tices through which governing takes form and conduct is shaped (Rosol, 2014). A gov- ernmentality analysis focuses on what is seen as an inseparable relationship between knowledge and power in the practice of government, based on an understanding that governing relies on particular ideas about what is being governed, by whom, through what means and to what ends (Dean, 2010; Li, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008;

Walters, 2012). In our analysis, we therefore seek to make visible the particular tech- niques of governing safety through safety walks, to show how they are motivated, and how they are linked to certain knowledges, problematizations and rationalities (Dean, 2010; Miller & Rose, 2008).

We position the paper within the broad field of governmentality studies, which has shown how neoliberal forms of governing increasingly operate at a distance and in an indirect manner, through freedom and autonomy, rather than through direct control and sovereign means (see Dean, 2010; Li, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2005). In consequence, subjects and communities have become more involved in governing themselves, not least through participatory and collaborative planning practices such as safety walks (Bla- keley, 2010), and are often encouraged to take responsibility and act on behalf of what is best for the community, as ‘good citizens’ (Ahmed, 2000a; Rosol, 2015). From this per- spective, safety walks can be understood as a form of governing that works through neo- liberal ideas of the voluntary inclusion of free and active individuals, ideas that seek to shape the governed population into self-regulating subjects who conduct themselves in line with specific norms and towards certain ends (Dean, 2010, p. 18). While often pre- sented as democratic tools, these participatory and communicative forms of governing have, on the contrary, also been shown to involve a transfer of responsibility for dealing with social problems towards the governed subjects themselves. They have even been argued to function as a means for co-opting political resistance and contesta- tion (see, for example, Swyngedouw, 2005). Purcell, for instance, has argued that, in effect, rather than providing a space for political change and ‘counter-hegemonic struggle’, communicative and collaborative approaches risk obscuring and legitimizing the democratic deficits produced in neoliberal societies (2009, p. 158). While remaining attentive to this outlined critique, our ambition is also to make room for analysing the limits of governing and exploring the openings and counter-conducts that emerge during the realization of safety walks (Li, 2007; Rosol, 2014).

The starting point of our analysis is to identify the specific techniques or ‘technologies’

through which the governing of safety takes form, via the practice of safety walks, by

examining the measures, documentation and procedures that are played out when

safety walks are put into practice (Dean, 2010). Making the governing techniques of safety walks visible in this way will help us to understand how they are linked to certain ‘rationalities’ (Dean, 2010; Li, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008). The term rationalities here signifies the ways of thinking that make the complex issue of safety intelligible and governable (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 59). As explained by Miller and Rose (2008, p. 32), ‘if political rationalities render reality into the domain of thought […] ‘technologies of gov- ernment ’ seek to translate thought into the domain of reality’. In other words, our analy- sis is centred upon how safety is being problematized and given meaning through the identi fied governing techniques, and to make visible the forms of knowledge about safety that inform these responses (Dean, 2010; Li, 2007). The point is thus not to judge safety walks as good or bad, or to determine the intentions of their organizers, but rather to seek to understand the rationale of safety walks – what they aim to change, and the measures they apply, in order to understand their e ffects.

Inspired by Massey (1994, p. 19), we strive to ‘think the spatial in terms of social relations ’ and conceptualize the idea of (un)safety as both constituted by, and constitutive of, the spatial power relations between different subjects and objects and their connection to place. Accordingly, our analysis will be attentive towards safety walks as meaning- making processes, producing specific discursive understandings, spatial limits and orien- tations for (un)safety (cf. Ahmed, 2004).

Observing safety walks: methodological considerations

Building on a collective study design (Stake, 2006), our analysis is based on observations, interviews and policy material connected to safety walks in Sweden. This broad ethno- graphic material allowed us to focus on the situated processes and relations of governing,

‘in order to examine the ‘how’ of government and politics as practice’ (Li, 2007, p. 271) and to make visible the spatial dimensions of the governing of safety. Inspired by research conducted using mobile methods (Macpherson, 2016), and in particular Warren ’s ( 2017) work on walking interviews, we consider the spatial practice of observing safety walks to be an important methodological approach to understanding governing techniques.

In order to gain an overview of the overarching national policies promoting and

guiding the work with safety walks in Swedish municipalities, which are connected to

both urban planning and the politics of crime and justice (Sjöberg & Giritli Nygren,

2020), we started by analysing the national manual for safety walks (Brå et al., 2010),

and the Swedish government’s crime prevention programme (Skr.2016/17:126, 2017),

in which safety walks are described as an important tool for community-based crime pre-

vention. Our main empirical focus, however, is the local implementation of safety walks

in three Swedish municipalities (A, B and C), anonymized to maintain interviewee confi-

dentiality. These municipalities were selected on the basis of their varying size, socio-

economic structure and geographical location and because they have implemented

safety walks in their local safety work. Organizers in these municipalities described

how they carry out a certain number of safety walks each year, shifting between

different areas or in response to local safety surveys, incidents or requests. Commonly,

the walks were conducted in the evening and in a public outdoor space, often a

neighbourhood.

We also gathered a variety of documents connected to safety walks in the municipa- lities: manuals, checklists, invitations, PowerPoint presentations, maps of routes and pro- tocols. Following our governmentality framework, the analysis of these documents focused on identifying the problematizations and forms of knowledge about safety that inform the walks, what they are assumed to change and how. In order to comprehend the meaning and organization of participation in the walks, author 1 conducted partici- patory observations of five safety walks between October 2017 and May 2018. During and after the observations, careful notes were taken documenting places, objects, encounters, conversations, procedures and the researcher ’s own reflections. In the analysis, selected moments from the observations were used to situate the central analytical themes. When possible, author 1 conducted focus group interviews (FGIs) following the observed safety walks, with a total of three groups. Individual follow-up interviews were also conducted with: safety coordinator (City C), police o fficer (City A) and security coordinator, police officer, field assistant and resident (City B). The interviews were semi-structured and largely functioned as re flective conversations after the safety walks, focusing mainly on participation, aims, opportunities, challenges, background and structure. As two of the walks did not involve residents, the FGIs mainly included organizers and representatives of the authorities, while the observations involved more of the residents’ perspectives and interactions between participants, and with non-participants. All quotes were translated into English by the authors.

Setting the scene

In Sweden, safety has become a top issue on the agenda of both public politics (Olsson &

Rönnblom, 2020) and urban planning (Boverket, 2019). In public policies, (un)safety is commonly defined as a feeling or experience, which is connected to, but distinct from, security (Boverket, 2019, p. 10; Brå et al., 2010). Feelings of (un)safety have thus come to be addressed as a specific policy problem that is, for example, increasingly measured statistically and often used as a performance indicator when benchmarking municipali- ties (Persson, 2015, pp. 6–7). Safety has also become an important competitive factor for cities and municipalities, not least targeting women as consumers and visitors (Brandén

& Rönnblom, 2019; Listerborn, 2015). Furthermore, the responsibility for dealing with safety in Sweden has been argued to have increasingly shifted from the state towards local and private actors, as well as into the hands of individuals (Sjöberg & Giritli Nygren, 2020).

In Swedish planning, unsafety is seen both as a result of shortcomings in the physical environment, such as poor lighting and dark tunnels, and as linked to unequal power relations in society and in particular the issue of men’s violence against women (see Brå et al., 2010; Sandberg and Rönnblom, 2015). While the main focus of local safety work in Sweden has been on situational measures and the design of the physical environ- ment, today safety is more often linked to issues of crime and order (Skr.2016/17:126, 2017) and met with measures aimed at increasing monitoring and surveillance (Brandén et al., 2020).

The safety walks observed in this study can, overall, be described as performed within

a policy context marked by an understanding of safety as being a question of democracy

and equal accessibility to public spaces, that the design of a place affects (feelings of)

safety, that both situational and social prevention are required to achieve safety, and where the need for collaboration and community involvement is strongly emphasized (Boverket, 2019; Brå et al., 2010). We also note that in recent years safety has increasingly been articulated as a problem related to so-called ‘socially vulnerable areas’, that are more exposed to crime and report higher levels of unsafety compared to other urban areas (Brå, 2018a, 2018b). These ‘socially vulnerable areas’ are often suburbs on the outskirts of larger cities, and described by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) as ‘commonly connected with problems such as ethnic and economic segregation, high unemployment, low levels of education, unsafety and high levels of ill-health ’ (2018b, p. 14).

In the national manual for safety walks in Sweden, which functions as a general guide for municipalities and organizations, different groups’ access to, or exclusion from, certain spaces and the fact that certain groups are often portrayed as ‘unsafety problems’

are problematized (Brå et al., 2010). The manual describes having integrated a gender- equality perspective into practice and includes an analysis of the causes and consequences of unsafety, particularly for women. A broad representation of different groups in the walks is thus emphasized, and participants are encouraged to talk about ‘how and why feelings of safety and unsafety occur’ (Brå et al., 2010, p. 26). While the interviewed orga- nizers of safety walks described the manual as an important framework for the walks, most organizers develop their own structure, based on previous experience, knowledge and resources. Hence, safety walks constitute a method that largely takes form in practice, and is shaped by different organizers, participants and contexts.

In City A, two walks were observed, with subsequent FGIs. The organizers stated that it was during a period of repeated rapes and sexual attacks on a large number of women that safety walks became more frequently used, as a way of improving women’s safety in particular and to prevent rapes. The first walk was arranged by the municipal housing company and included the local safety coordinator and two police officers. As the neigh- bourhood was dominated by students and lacked a tenants’ association, no residents were invited. The other walk was on the university campus, arranged by the university’s secur- ity manager and led by a local police officer. It also involved the municipal safety coor- dinator and staff from the student health centre, the parks and traffic department and the academic housing office. Students had been invited, but none attended.

In City B, two safety walks were observed in a suburban neighbourhood characterized by relatively low socio-economic status and residents with many different ethnic back- grounds. In recent years, the area has been affected by social disturbances, gaining massive media coverage that framed them as ‘riots’ and protests from the suburbs.

Both walks were organized by the municipal security coordinator, who underlined

that levels of unsafety are relatively high here. The first walk was in a residential area

and included a variety of participants. The late hour at which the walk ended meant

that it was not possible to arrange a focus group, but follow-up phone interviews were

conducted with selected participants. Criticism of the lack of young participants on pre-

vious walks led to the organization of the second walk. It was conducted in the vicinity of

a school and included schoolchildren from grades 4 –5, teachers, local police representa-

tives and municipal planners. In terms of governing features, it did not significantly differ

from other walks. For ethical reasons, no FGI was conducted.

In City C, the observed safety walk was arranged by municipal planners and con- ducted in what was described as a relatively affluent neighbourhood, mixed in terms of residents and housing. Before the walk, the organizers described the neighbourhood as particularly safe, with no specific safety problems or incidents being targeted. The walk attracted many residents of different ages and backgrounds, as well as representa- tives from schools, youth centres and the local police.

Overall, the safety walks were described as largely routine-based and as a central part of Swedish municipalities’ local safety work.

The governmentalities of safety walks

The entry point of our analysis was to identify the specific governing techniques of safety walks, which we see as largely shaping not only the organization of the walks but also the meaning of safety, the problems identified and the solutions presented. The analysis is divided into two parts, structured along what we have identified as the two dominant ways of governing safety in safety walks, through the neoliberal rationalities of ‘audit’

and ‘participation’. The first analytical section focuses on how the problem of safety is made ‘auditable’ through the safety walks, and in particular how it is reduced to a matter of technical, physical details through the application of the protocol. The second part attends to how ‘participation’ is used as a technology of governing in safety walks, specifically focusing on how the meeting between different participants works both as a technology of agency and as an instrument of empowerment. By orga- nizing the analysis into these two central ‘ways of thinking about, calculating and responding to’ the problem of safety (Dean, 2010, p. 24), through safety walks, we strive to make visible the relation between knowledge and power in the practice of gov- ernment. Our analysis, building on all parts of our material: policies, interviews and observations, highlights the discursive shaping of safety as a policy problem (Li, 2007) that motivates the particular measures and interventions used in safety walks. In order to provide an insight into the realization of safety walks and to make visible the micro-practices involved in the process of governing that Li calls ‘rendering technical’

(2007, p. 7), each section begins with a brief account based on field notes from our observations.

‘We take photos of all the problems’ – rendering safety auditable

The route we are about to cover this evening builds on survey responses from tenants regarding lighting and vegetation. The targeted areas on the map that was handed out have been identified as dark by the respondents, and are described as ‘unsafe’ by the organ- isers. The main purpose of the walk is described as being to prevent hidden dangers by locat- ing spots where potential offenders could hide. The organiser explains that there were two attempts at rape in the area last year, which is described as being exactly what this safety walk aims to prevent. All participants are given a map of the area on which the route is marked, on which we can note: security flaws, opinions and suggestions. During the walk, our atten- tion is directed towards broken street lights, unlit areas, dark spaces and overgrown veg- etation, which are identi fied as unsafe and noted in a protocol. The character of the physical space is constantly discussed in relation to both feelings of discomfort and unsafety and to the potential risk of being attacked and the opportunity for perpetrators to hide.

(Field notes from safety walk, neighbourhood City A, October 2017)

As these observation notes show, the ‘specifiable limits’ (Rose, 1999, p. 33) of the problem of safety are often sketched out even before the start of the safety walk. In this case, this is achieved through a survey about vegetation and lighting, and through the outlined route following the identified ‘dark spaces’ in the area. The information assembled also tended to remain within these limits, through the orienting of unsafety towards spaces of a certain character: dark, empty, leafy, and towards certain objects – rather than social relations – in these spaces: lamps, trees, tunnels, etc. In this way, in all of the observed safety walks, certain technical features of the built environment become both the solid point of departure for discussing experiences and risks connected to safety, and also the basis for solutions. Thus, certain discursive boundaries are being drawn, and it is within these that both the problems and solutions to safety can be ima- gined through the safety walks. The seemingly ‘unsolvable’ problems of unsafety are here being represented as a number of ‘solvable’ technical problems related to the built environment. In this sense, the walks reduce (un)safety problems to technical issues in order to make them ‘governable’ (Li, 2007). The central technology at work in this process is the application of the protocol (Figure 1).

The protocol: a technology of performance and an instrument of accountability The protocol is described by the organizers as playing an intrinsic role in the conduct of the safety walk. In general, the organizers note the problems discussed in the protocol, take a photo, mark them on a map and suggest how they can be fixed, when and by whom. The protocol provides short descriptions of the problems and potential remedies, such as: ‘prune bushes, cut trees around street light, broken light in tunnel, graffiti,

Figure 1. Map outlining the route and geographical limits of one observed safety walk.

broken bench, dark parking lot, football field needs to be attended to, poor sight-lines on bike-path’ (Protocol, City B, November 2017). The organizers of these safety walks argue that, in order to ‘prevent’ unsafety, the focus needs to be directed towards what can be fixed:

We don ’t want anything at all to, that this should happen in our neighbourhoods because of

… poor lighting, you know. As I said, everything that we can prevent and influence, we should do. (FGI, Organiser from municipal housing company, City A, October 2017) Through the analytical lens of governmentality, we understand the use of the protocol as a ‘technology of performance’ (Dean, 2010, p. 197) that serves to produce concrete results from safety walks, which it is possible to quantify, report and follow up. Several o fficials underlined that safety is ‘hard to measure’ and that ‘it’s hard to get a receipt that we’ve succeeded’ (Police officer, FGI, City A). The protocols thus become a way to both measure and ‘solve’ safety problems. After the walk, the protocol is made available to all participants and becomes both a visible result and a programme for action. As a gov- erning tool, the protocol and the fixing of practical problems in the neighbourhood thereby also ful fil another function: to increase the sense of being listened to and able to influence their neighbourhood among the residents, which in itself is seen as poten- tially improving safety. In City C, the municipality explicitly connects the safety walks’

positive effects to the fact that ‘all the safety concerns identified during a walk are attended to and most problems are solved ’ (Municipal website, City C, 2018). From this perspective, the protocol is also used as part of an audit rationale, presented as a tech- nique of ‘restoring trust’ among participants and increasing accountability for local safety work through transparency, measurable outcomes and control (Dean, 2010). As described by one of the organizers:

They can leave their views on what they think is unsafe, where there is a need for more light- ing, or something is broken or whatever it is, and then something happens. That we rebuild, that we fix it, because then, you get the citizen perspective. The citizens notice that you basi- cally care about what they think. (Interview, Security coordinator, City B, 2017)

The protocols thus also demonstrate the will to improve, in relation to what the organi- zers can change. Following Li, we see that ‘the practices of problematization and render- ing technical are not separate [ …] that the identification of a problem is intimately linked to the availability of a solution’ (2007, p. 7). Through the protocol and its focus on the physical environment, it becomes possible to ‘solve’ the complex safety problems. ‘We can only do something about the physical environment’, the security coordinator in City B continues, providing the motivation for why this is the focus of the walks. ‘It’s not just talking’ he says, ‘we take photos of all the problems, so it’s really easy to discover if someone has done something or not’ (Interview, Security coordinator, City B, 2017).

This is a form of reasoning that clearly adheres to logics of audit – of performance, accountability and control.

Through these protocols, the safety problems and places under scrutiny are being cut

up into small fragments, rather than interpreted in their totality, and the wider, social

conditions are never introduced as a way to understand them. Safety is thus reduced

to a matter of technical, auditable, details, while excluding the social (Rose, 1996). As a

consequence, problems discussed in the interviews and observations that do not fit

into the technical format of the protocol (for example: violent attacks, rape, sexual assault, drug dealing, unemployment, homelessness and segregation) are being left out.

If included at all, they are connected to a concrete solution in the outdoor environment, which is often aimed at creating order, visibility and surveillance. While these limits to what safety walks can change were rarely reflected upon in the interviews, one safety coordinator did underline that:

It ’s perhaps not about stopping potential perpetrators who are hiding in the bushes, because it’s very rare that those types of attacks, either rapes or abuse, just happen, without provoca- tion. They occur rather inside the apartments [and] well, that ’s … harder to prevent. What happens now is that, if it’s better-lit, more people dare to go out and different types of people, both women and men, are out and that makes more people feel safe. (FGI, Safety coordinator, City A, October 2017)

As exemplified above, the physical changes often resulting from safety walks are largely based on an ‘eyes on the street’ motivation (Jacobs, 1961), aiming to attract more people, in particular women, into the streets. This builds on a notion of safety as linked to social control and directs the focus of safety measures towards the public, thereby reinforcing a common and problematic public – private divide, failing to recognize that women are more likely to suffer from violence in the home (cf. Whitzman, 2007). The safety coor- dinator also underlines what she sees as a limit to this approach, that ‘it’s hard to remove the risk of rape through changes in the built environment, it could happen in the middle of a large audience at a festival, where there are numerous people and witnesses’. Left unproblematized in the practice of safety walks is what she describe as the ‘common denominator’ of sexual violence, ‘that men are the potential perpetrators in, well yes, in most cases’ (FGI, Safety coordinator, City A, October 2017). The dilemma described here makes visible the discrepancy between the often social, gendered and power-related problems addressed in the walks, and the technical, physical measures that are presented to solve them (cf. Koskela & Pain, 2000; Sandberg & Rönnblom, 2015).

While the protocol is used as a form of accountability, demonstrating that the auth- orities are taking responsibility for improving the physical deficits connected to unsafe spaces, responsibility for handling the dimensions of safety that are left out of the proto- col is left in the hands of residents. In this manner, we can see that the process of render- ing safety auditable holds a dual meaning. On the one hand, it serves to generate physical

‘solutions’ and visible results from the safety walks and become a way to transform unsafe places into ‘calculable spaces’ (Dean, 2010, p. 197), which it is possible to quantify and rectify. On the other hand, it reflects the ability of local officials to effect change, and what types of problems they can ‘solve’ and be accountable for, which exclude the social and power-related causes of unsafety. Next, we will examine the meaning that par- ticipation is given in this context.

‘Experiencing unsafety together’ – governing through participation

The observed safety walk in a suburban neighbourhood is organised by the municipal secur-

ity coordinator and includes a variety of actors: local politicians and police o fficers, planners

and property managers, the director of the city district, caretakers, social workers and resi-

dents from the local tenants ’ association. During the walk, the large group becomes spread

out. The organiser and protocol taker quickly start photographing and noting broken street

lights, gra ffiti, overfull rubbish bins, obscuring trees and bushes. When we pass the youth centre in the area, the district director goes inside to talk to the staff. Only one young person is present. Apparently, the youth centre is not being used. It was closed for a long period, and when it re-opened it was subjected to stone-throwing. During the walk, we encounter groups of teenage boys several times. One group is hiding and smoking outside a pre-school, and shout: ‘what do you want?’ when we make a stop in front of the building. A social field worker suggests that some of these young people should be included in the safety walks, to help them feel involved, meet the authorities and bring their perspectives on the neighbourhood ’s problems. (Field notes from safety walk, City B, November 2017)

With these observation notes, we want to make visible the meeting and the context in which participation occurs. In this second analytical section, we unpack the meaning of participation as a form of governing safety by engaging citizens and communities in solving safety problems. We show that it includes a striving to empower, activate and

‘responsibilize’ the participating residents or users (Dean, 2010, pp. 196–197). Our analy- sis also shows that, while walking together for safety opens up an opportunity to ‘experi- ence unsafety together’, as expressed by one organizer, it also includes the risk of reinforcing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion around the imagined ‘safe community’

(Figure 2).

The practice of safety walks can be said to share the strength of walking methodologies (Macpherson, 2016; Warren, 2017), offering an opportunity to generate rich insights about places. However, it also open up and close down particular avenues of

Figure 2. Photo of some of the participants during an observed safety walk.

conversation, depending on the route and how speci fic subjects (racialized, disabled, gen- dered, etc.) experience this landscape in different ways (Macpherson, 2016, p. 428). Simi- larly, conducting safety walks opens up opportunities for gathering rich and focused insights into particular places and experiences but, at the same time, we see that these insights depend upon the focus of the safety walks, as well as who participates in them. In this respect, we notice a clear discrepancy between the policy intentions set out in the national manual and implementation in practice.

While the manual calls for broad representation (Brå et al., 2010), invitations to safety walks were in general distributed through the same limited set of channels and directed towards certain organizations involving residents. Many organizers described partici- pation as homogeneous, and those we observed largely involved the same categories of residents (often white, middle-aged or elderly, organized) or no residents at all. A risk that was discussed by several participants is that certain perspectives on safety are excluded from the walks:

If the same people are engaged in these forums, then a few voices will, consciously or uncon- sciously, speak for many others, you know. It might be those who are quieter, more reserved or those who perhaps are not fully integrated into society, who don ’t, well, speak the language and those kinds of barriers, that keep them from joining. (Interview, Police o fficer, City B)

Here, we also note that speci fic technologies, such as the application of the protocol and the rendering of spaces and risks as ‘calculable’, are also shaping the meaning of partici- pation, and producing boundaries around what can be said and heard during a safety walk (Dean, 2010). For instance, the problems discussed during the stop outside the youth centre that had been subjected to stone-throwing as exemplified above, are reduced in the protocol into: ‘difficult for staff in youth centre to view the outdoor environment – dark’ (Protocol, City B, November 2017). Participation in safety walks is thus also being shaped by the rationalities of audit and conditioned by the technical reasoning and focus on performance that they bring. Next, we will further analyse the specific boundaries and forms of agency that participation entails – and show how it is connected to certain governing techniques used in ‘the meeting’.

The meeting: a technology of agency and an instrument of empowerment In invitations to participants, safety walks are described as being aimed at gaining infor- mation about what residents, or active users, think about the public spaces in the area from a safety perspective. In the national manual for safety walks, ‘the meeting and the conversation between participants in the safety walk – residents, caretakers and public officials’ are stated to be ‘the most important parts of the concept’ (Brå et al., 2010, p. 13). In this context, citizens are described as experts on their own neighbour- hood and its safety problems. The walks were described by officials as a way to gather the information that lies ‘behind the statistics’. The situated meeting between different actors thus becomes a space for sharing knowledge and experiences and a forum where ‘you get a chance to put forward your perspective, on what you consider unsafe’, says a participating resident (FGI, Resident, City C, November 2017).

The meeting is also described as having another function: to make politicians, police

officers and planners come out to the neighbourhood to gain a more nuanced impression

of the place and its potential challenges, and meet the people living there. The partici- pants are thus ‘experiencing unsafety together’, as one organizer puts it, potentially start- ing ‘a process of awareness’, particularly among the authorities and politicians. The importance of these shared unsafety experiences is frequently brought up in the interviews:

[…] for instance our city-district director who was there, she’s not normally out like this meeting people, it ’s on their home front. She gets a whole other understanding about what people’s everyday lives are like, which might make her think a bit differently. (Inter- view, Security coordinator, City B)

The meeting thus becomes a way to bring representatives with the power to allocate resources for safety into unsafe spaces, where concerns connected to these spaces can be voiced. In that sense, many participants and organizers argue that: ‘the walk in itself, especially if you are able to engage residents, makes you feel like you can make a di fference [and] you get a very powerful feeling of producing safety together’ (FGI, Safety coordinator, City A, October 2017). At the same time, the majority of participants in the safety walks we observed were public officials, and two of the walks lacked any par- ticipation by residents. During the observations, it also became clear that, regardless of who participated, the focus and structure of the walks was uniform, mainly focusing on lighting, cleanliness and visibility in the outdoor environment. We thus recognize that, in the context in which participation takes place during a walk, certain knowledges are already established, conditioning what can be said but also what can be heard (cf.

Ahmed, 2000b). For example, before the start of the safety walk in City C, the municipal organizers briefly presented the purpose of the walk, and the meeting, in the following way:

Why a safety walk? […] To get a common view of the area. To increase your influence over public spaces. If you can in fluence your environment, you take better care of it. (PowerPoint presentation, City C, November 2017)

As this quote exemplifies, the influence opened up for citizens through the walks was often articulated as a way to encourage them to take responsibility for their environment.

During the observations, the importance of taking care of anything broken, immediately cleaning up gra ffiti and preventing loitering was emphasized, aiming to ‘make the resi- dents feel pride and responsibility for the place, helping each other to keep it clean and nice’, as one participating police officer explained (Field notes, City B, November 2017). This ‘fixing-broken-windows’ logic, which is common in safety and crime preven- tion policies (Lidskog & Persson, 2012), builds on a view of safety as order and social control which is linked to dimensions of community ‘pride’, ‘responsibility’ and

‘influence’. The walks are thus also being used as an ‘instrument of empowerment’, aimed at governing safety through the active participation of residents (Dean, 2010).

Community participants are in a sense also being positioned as ‘targets’ of safety walks, to be taught risk management by ‘experts’, who explain their view of safety and how it can be accomplished:

For us, it’s first of all interesting to come out and listen, then it provides us with the oppor-

tunity to also explain. Because there are sometimes reasons for things to be the way they are,

but maybe you haven ’t always understood that. (FGI, Police officer, City C, November 2017, emphasis added)

From this perspective, the meeting, including its instruments for empowering and ‘giving voice’ to citizens, is being used as a ‘technology of agency’, engaging citizens in commu- nity policing and encouraging them to take control over their own safety (Dean, 2010, p. 196). While the residents are put forward as ‘experts’ on safety in their own neighbour- hood, they are simultaneously being taught self-regulatory skills. During the observed walks, for instance, participants were encouraged to: take responsibility for keeping the neighbourhood clean and in order, look for hidden dangers, point out safety pro- blems and suggest solutions that fit into the protocol, etc. Through the walks, participants are thus also being trained to become active subjects who are able to take care of the safety problems they encounter. As suggested by Dean, technologies of agency aim to transform at-risk groups into active citizens, capable of managing their own risk (2010). Our analysis shows that this agency is coupled with strict regulation and control over what can be imagined as safety problems, conditioned by technologies of performance, of producing solvable problems and measurable outcomes. Rather than becoming a space for influencing change in the neighbourhood, participation in safety walks thus risks becoming a token of ‘good citizenship’, of taking responsibility for safety within the imagined community (Ahmed, 2000a, pp. 28–30).

The observations also made it visible that, while certain subjects were positioned as safety-promoting, in particular the ‘citizen who suspects rather than is suspect’

(Ahmed, 2000a, p. 28), others were being encountered by the group and at times stopped, questioned or in other ways constituted as ‘unsafety problems’. Although unsaf- ety was seldom explicitly linked to social relations or speci fic subjects during safety walks, those who were encountered (or their specific ‘traces’, such as blankets, pillows or empty cans) and articulated as disturbing or causing unsafety, were primarily young men or boys (often non-white) in groups and homeless persons, in particular so-called ‘EU migrants ’

living in camps, whom one organizer described as one of ‘the largest [safety] problems’ right now (Field notes from safety walk, City B, May 2018). The par- ticipatory rationale of the walks, and the appeal to community, is thus intimately linked to the risk of reinforcing the boundaries between those who are constituted as part of the

‘safe community’ and those who are not (Ahmed, 2000a). Similarly to Ahmed ’s ( 2000a) analysis of neighbourhood watch groups, we see that the walks contribute to constructing a common image of the dangers and causes of unsafety as the ‘unknown’, the ‘stranger’

hiding out there, behind overgrown bushes and in dark corners. In consequence, the familiar becomes the safe: the home, the ‘we’, the comfortable and recognisable. As Ahmed (2000a) reminds us, what and whom we read as strange or deviant is built upon speci fic knowledges, located within relations of power. Previous research on fear of crime has shown that the notion of the ‘dangerous’ or ‘suspicious’ other is often stereo- typically linked to specific groups, such as young men, people racialized as non-white, those who are homeless or have a mental illness (see for example Pain, 2000, 2001).

Given that the problem of unsafety in Sweden is often linked to so-called ‘socially vulner-

able areas’, which are described as characterized by ‘ethnic segregation’ and ‘high unem-

ployment ’ (Brå, 2018a, 2018b), the practice of safety walks thus risks reinforcing a

narrative of the non-white, unfamiliar and often economically precarious subject (or

space) as unsafe. Hence, it risks (re)producing an imaginary of the white, ‘Swedish’, affluent and familiar subject (or space) as safe (cf. Sager & Mulinari, 2018).

While recognizing that measures aimed at increasing visibility, order and control may improve safety for those who are securely in place within the ‘safe community’, we thus see that the estranged, suspicious or deviant subject, constructed as disturbing or unde- sirable, and often not participating in organized safety walks, risks being excluded and positioned as out of place through such measures (Ahmed, 2000a; Puwar, 2004). As Ahmed has stressed, ‘the production of safe spaces that have value or “ideal character”

also involves the expulsion of unlike and undesirable “characters”’ ( 2000a, p. 27). Our interpretation is thus that certain racialized, class-based and gendered ‘logics of inclusion and exclusion’ (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 93), are inherent in the construction of the ‘safe community’, even though they risk being obscured by the technical and performative character of the walks (cf. Crawford, 1998, p. 244).

Concluding discussion: governing safety through the politics of community?

Our analysis has shown that safety walks become part of a process by which safety pro- blems are made technical and ‘governable’ through the use of a whole set of governing techniques. These contribute to ‘defining boundaries, rendering that within them visible, assembling information about that which is included and devising techniques to mobilize the forces and entities thus revealed’ (Rose, 1999, p. 33). In this conclusion, we want to highlight that, while the practice of safety walks follows the political ambition of collaborating for safety and including community members in this work, the govern- mentality perspective makes it visible that the in fluence available to participants through the walks is being ‘inserted in a system of purposes’ (Dean, 2010, p. 196), training them to become active in the management of safety as a self-governing community. In that sense, safety walks can be understood as a way of governing safety through what Rose calls the

‘politics of community’, by which subjects become responsible for ‘the securing of secur- ity for themselves and those to whom they are or should be affiliated’ (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 93; Rose, 1996, p. 335). Here, the collective notions of community are being coupled with the individualized logics of neoliberalism. Through safety walks, citizens are presented as having: choice (participating or not), personal responsibility (keeping the area clean and in order), control (pointing out safety problems and suggesting sol- utions), self-promotion (pride and empowerment) and self-government (agency and influence) – and in this sense they become responsible for ‘their own’ safety, and hence also for safety failures (Rose, 1996, p. 335). As suggested by Miller and Rose, com- munity here is ‘not simply the territory of government, but a means of government’

(2008, p. 93).

Our interpretation is that the appeal to community, and the opportunity to participate

that is provided, thus also functions as a way to legitimize certain problematizations of

safety that firmly position the possible solutions within the local realm and the specific

community – rather than the welfare state. While put forward as a tool for ‘democratic

dialogue’, the means of participation thus serves to reinforce a hegemonic notion of

crime and safety as connected to technical and situational problems, rather than social

or political ones – thereby detaching them from redistributive or power-related causes

and the need for political intervention. Our conclusion is that the safety walks thus also involve a transfer of responsibility for the social dimensions of safety towards the gov- erned subjects and communities themselves (cf. Crawford, 1998; Swyngedouw, 2005).

This form of responsibilization through participation, we argue, risks legitimizing the democratic deficits that the walks entail (cf. Purcell, 2009; Rosol, 2015).

We also see that by rendering safety problems into technical details, the ‘bigger picture ’ is excluded from the safety walks and potential exclusions from the ‘safe commu- nity’ are obscured (Li, 2007). While previous research has shown that the issue of safety risks becoming detached from its social and power-related dimensions when addressed in practice (see for instance, Listerborn, 2015; Sandberg & Rönnblom, 2015, Whitzman, 2007), the governmentality framework used in this study has helped us to understand how this process works (and thus potentially how to manoeuvre around it). It has pro- vided the tools for teasing out how power operates in safety walks, to identify the govern- ing notions of audit and participation, and to see how they are intertwined and how they interact to shape and limit the meaning of safety as well as the opportunity and respon- sibility for change. This study also demonstrates the relevance of ethnographic methods, such as interviews and observations, for studying the micro-practices of government and the unstable, fragile ‘effects of governmental interventions’ (Li, 2007, p. 280).

To conclude, our findings indeed suggest that safety walks provide an opportunity for citizens to discuss local safety concerns with responsible politicians and representatives of the authorities, who come out to the neighbourhood and meet with residents in ways that they seldom do otherwise. The concerns raised during safety walks also result in visible improvements in the neighbourhood, generating a sense of influence and trust among participating residents and users. So, while recognizing that safety walks carry the potential to provide a platform for local democratic dialogue around situ- ated safety concerns, we claim that this opportunity is dependent upon the establishing of a space and a framework within which the social, the conflictual and thus the political (Mouffe, 1999, 2005) dimensions of safety can be outlined and addressed – in practice.

Notes

1. Internationally, the term “safety audit” is commonly used, with connotations of revision and inspection. In Sweden, “safety walk” (trygghetsvandring) is the term used, referring to the joint walk by organisers and participants through the area in focus that is included in the process.

2. In a Swedish context, the term ‘EU-migrants’ in general refers to Roma EU-citizens.

Acknowledgements

First, we want to thank all of the participants in this study who have contributed with their valuable time and interesting re flections around safety walks. We also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions. Finally, we want to thank Malin Rönnblom and Christine Hudson for helpful input on the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, which made this research possible.

Notes on contributors

Jennie Brandén is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University, and is also a ffiliated to the Graduate School of Gender Studies. Her current research focuses on the poli- tics and governing of safety in public space in Sweden, with a particular focus on how safety is addressed and given meaning through local safety practices.

Linda Sandberg is a Senior Lecturer at Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. In her research, she focuses on spaces of gendered fear of violence, and the intersections of race and gender as well as planning for safety and security in urban environments from a gender perspective.

ORCID

Jennie Brandén http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4761-4141 Linda Sandberg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8531-3748

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