De-securitizing "City as a Laboratory" rhetoric

"In the logic of such arguments about security, ‘we’ should do something about poverty ‘outside,’ that is, about ‘global poverty,’ not because there is something morally compelling about it, not because it makes us, the comfortable classes, complicit in killing the poor... but because it will make our comfortable, ecocidical, consumerist, narcissistic, existence slightly less tolerable.”- Is Poverty a Global Security Threat? Akhil Gupta, 2014

As an institution renowned for its School of International Service, American University is a relevant point of interest for examining the rhetoric of human security and its relation to international development and poverty. AU’s general reputation as an institution that tackles global poverty, human security, and international development can certainly be critiqued for its apparent blindness to uneven development and poverty right here in DC. However, I would argue that even when institutions seek to address local poverty and local uneven development, the underlying theory of poverty being used is still problematic. I’d also like to examine how the “city as a laboratory” rhetoric, which I think is becoming more and more common throughout academia and amongst NGOs, contributes to this theory of poverty as a security threat to the privileged.

The picture above is from the University of Chicago library, where I enrolled in a course called Urban Studies: Research Methods and Policy this summer. Throughout the 7-week course, the “city as a laboratory” method, where students and faculty are encouraged to conduct their research on Chicago neighborhoods, was heavily emphasized. Though I recognize the importance and methodological significance of this idea, I also found it to be quite ironic considering the extreme degree of segregation between the university campus and its surrounding neighborhoods, which is also patrolled by the University of Chicago Police Department, one of the largest private police forces in the nation.

This positioning, of institutions and organizations publishing research on impoverished communities and implementing policies motivated by security interests, has had real impact on what sort of narratives are circulated surrounding the relationship between poverty and security. In 2012, a study published by the university’s Urban Labs found that Chicago’s youth summer jobs program reduced arrests for violent crime for those youth by 43%, invoking the popular claim that “nothing stops a bullet like a job”. However, when looking at the rest of study’s findings (which are not referenced on the Urban Labs website), arrests for property and drug offenses actually increased slightly for participants in the summer jobs program. Speaking from personal experience- providing employment opportunities for young people in Chicago is without a doubt a good idea. However, I interpret this research as evidence that the “cities as a laboratory” rhetoric is in part driven by institutional concerns over the threat that poverty poses to the privileged, and that the solutions are consequently oriented towards strategies that may or may not be effective for real poverty reduction and social justice. It would be productive for universities to explore ways to de-securitize the rhetoric surrounding poverty reduction and international development, as well as deconstruct the rhetoric of “the laboratory city,” or the “city as a laboratory,” reexamining universities as the gatekeepers of research, knowledge, and power.

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