Security as infrastructure: controlling the rhythms and spacetimes of the city

This chapter proposes that security can be understood as an urban infrastructure inseparable from the capitalist-driven production of space. It functions to preserve a certain social order, and becomes a property of the city to keep the city’s rich and poor apart and yet close enough to provide labour. The chapter engages this reading of security as infrastructure with Lefebvre’s idea of rhythmanalysis. Security infrastructure implements and regulates rhythms. Lefebvre sees in the harmonious alignment of rhythms an eurythmia, a mark of social health. The chapter questions that optimistic reading, wondering if it is not rather a cause for concern if this alignment is enforced by a security infrastructure that is growing increasingly pervasive. On the contrary, where Lefebvre sees concern in arrhythmia, in the misalignment of rhythms, the authors wonder if the medical metaphor is not misplaced and if arrhythmia does not open possibilities for another order to emerge. Finally, the chapter brings these propositions to the case study of Delhi and proposes a reading of its security infrastructure.