Ecology of Fear

Definition

The ecology of fear is Mike Davis's term — adopted by Soja as the demand-side engine of the Carceral Archipelago — for the endemic condition of the postmetropolis in which "real and imagined dangers of daily life" saturate urban consciousness and drive the fortressing of the built environment. Soja introduces it through Davis (1992, 1998): "Responding to what Mike Davis… has described as an endemic ecology of fear, the postmetropolitan landscape has become filled with many different kinds of protected and fortified spaces, islands of enclosure and anticipated protection against the real and imagined dangers of daily life" (Soja 2000, p. 299). The condition feeds a security-obsessed urbanism — "a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s" (Davis, quoted p. 300) — in which "security" becomes a positional good and prestige symbol: "less to do with the degree of personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation, in residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from 'unsavory' groups and individuals, even crowds in general" (p. 301).

The concept's economy: "the market provision of 'security' generates its own paranoic demand" — the security-services industry (Westec, Bel-Air Patrol, the corporate conglomerates) profiting from the ecology of fear it feeds ("We are not a security guard company. We sell a concept of security," Westec's president, quoted p. 303). Its built products: the sadistic street environments and interdictory details (barrel benches, night sprinklers, spiked trash cages), the panopticon mall, the gated enclave, the bunker-architecture of celebrity practice (Davis's "Frank Gehry as Dirty Harry"). And its post-1992 afterlife: the fear-regime's crisis — police failing at Florence and Normandie, white nativist militias, the paramilitary Outer City (p. 403) — and Davis's apocalyptic escalation in Ecology of Fear (1998), which Soja reads as both prescient and prematurely closed: "A wide range of politically significant socio-spatial movements have emerged… these 'hybridized' movements and coalitions consciously cross racial, ethnic, class, and gender boundaries to mobilize an intercultural politics of space and place" (p. 303).

Key Thinkers

• Mike Davis (referenced, not paged — see log) — the term's author: Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control and the Ecology of Fear (1992); Ecology of Fear (1998); the "rhetoric of social warfare."
• Edward W. Soja — the discourse placement and the corrective: fear-driven urbanism as one governance mode alongside the Simcity's softer manipulations (p. 299, 324).
• Steven Flusty (referenced, not paged — see log) — Building Paranoia: the design-side elaboration.
• Steve Herbert (referenced, not paged — see log) — the police-side: the normative orders of territoriality.
• Thomas L. Dumm (referenced, not paged — see log) — the normalization reading: racism in the normalized community.

Related Concepts

• carceral-archipelago — the supply-side: the fortressing the ecology of fear demands.
• fear — the wiki's phenomenological/existential fear concept; the ecology of fear is its urban-systemic form.
• interdictory-space — the design output of the fear-economy.
• gated-community — the residential fortress.
• privatised-public-space — the public realm the fear-economy empties ("genuinely democratic space is all but extinct," Davis quoted p. 303).
• panopticon — the surveillance continuum fear legitimizes.
• Anne Troutman's Inside Fear — the wiki's dwelling-scale fear register (hidden spaces, the primal shelter), to be connected.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the endemic condition (p. 299), Fortress L.A.'s "rhetoric of social warfare" and security-as-positional-good (pp. 300–303), the RoboCop economy ("We are not a security guard company. We sell a concept of security," p. 305), the post-1992 repadded bunkers and white nativist crescent (pp. 402–403).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Davis's "ecology of fear" and Soja's "raumgeist" (the spatial spirit of the age, credited to Barbara Hooper, p. 303) — is the fear-economy a zeitgeist, a market, or a governmentality, and does the answer change what counters it?
• The ecology of fear feeds on imagined dangers as much as real ones — how does it interlock with the Simcity discourse (hyperreal fear, media-amplified threat) rather than merely with real crime rates?
• The wiki's fear page holds Troutman's dwelling-scale register (the night side of the house); the ecology of fear is its urban-scale systemic twin — should the two pages be formally cross-wired as macro/micro poles of one concept?