Dealing with disorder Social control in the post-industrial city

Over the past two decades, municipal governments across the United States have adopted novel social control techniques including off-limits orders, parks exclusion laws, and other applications of trespass law. These new tools are used to exclude the socially marginal from contested public spaces. These new social control techniques fuse criminal and civil legal authority and are touted as ‘alternatives ’ to arrest and incarceration. Ironically, these new techniques nonetheless increase the number of behaviors and people defined as criminal and subject to formal social control. This article describes these legal innovations and considers their origins and theoretical implications. We argue that recognition of law’s constitutive effects helps to explain the origins and nature of the urban social control innovations described here. Key Words broken windows policing • neoliberalism • spatial governmentality • urban social control Recent developments in urban social control have been the subject of much commentary. Geographers, sociologists, criminologists, and others have called attention to new architectural forms of socio-spatial exclusion as well as to the popularity of ‘broken windows ’ policing and the ‘civility ’ laws that are ostensibly aimed at enhancing order and security. Although there is sig-nificant variation in the extent to which these techniques are employed, it is clear that municipal governments across the United States are implementing new legal tools aimed at cleaning up contested urban spaces (see Davis