Doctoral Dissertation Research: Geographically Targeted Enforcement of Ordinances Restricting Personal Mobility and Actions

The proposed research aims to extend knowledge on socio-spatial control, namely exclusionary politics and their effects on access to urban public space. In order to situate the questions posed in this study, this research focuses on two Seattle ordinances that selectively restrict personal mobility and activities within designated zones located throughout the city. Established in response to neighborhood complaints in 1989 and 1991, respectively, the Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) and the Stay Out of Drug Areas (SODA) ordinances enable the Seattle City Council to .redline. areas ranging in size from one to several city blocks. Both ordinances create an uneven geographic enforcement of public laws in Seattle. The dissertation research seeks to examine the establishment of the zones in response to neighborhood association pressure on the Seattle City Council, looking particularly the exclusionary discourses that were mobilized in support of the ordinances; the policings of these zones by those neighborhood associations and the Seattle Police Department; and responses to the zones, which are compared across two different types of organizations found within the zones: (a) social agencies that provide services to prostitutes and drug users/traffickers, and (b) neighborhood associations composed of residents and business owners. This dissertation research, through a geographical look at literatures on the body, public space and social control, provides an empirical example of how abjection is mobilized to control, regulate, and expel those socially constructed as abject in public space, resulting in a number of contributions to these literatures. First, while there is a significant body of literature discussing abjection theory, there is little on the ways in which abjection has been mobilized as an exclusionary strategy. This research is a full length study of how abjection discourses are implemented in the control of space. Additionally, the conception of abjection with this research differs from the psychoanalytical conceptions in that it is a socially constructed notion of abjection, positing disgust and the social as mutually constitutive. Second, this research will be a comprehensive survey and analysis of how discourses surrounding citizenship produce a public space that is exclusionary to those who are not conceived as citizens by structures intact within the city. This research aims to show how not all citizens (in the legal sense) fit the socio-cultural model of citizenship. Such .abject citizens. are subject to more surveillance and policing in public space. Third, my dissertation will look at how control of space is exerted by other social groups, and not just the police. This research is significantly different than work done on crime through spatial-analytic approaches found in both geography and sociology. In particular, it highlights the discursive construction of criminality and the intense micro-politics of policing space that the designation of criminality invokes. Lastly, the proposed research will show how those who transgress the dictates of public space are disciplined by crossing the borders between self/other; public/private, citizen/non-citizen, licit/illicit, order/disorder, and healthy/diseased, contributing to literatures in urban, social, cultural, and medical geography. Broader impacts resulting from the proposed research In producing a geographical analysis of policing strategies and discourses, this research aims to show how federal, state and municipally funded agencies influence exclusionary politics in urban public space. Additionally, it will examine how local politics in the form of public policy have spatial repercussions on marginalized populations and their access to public space. Results from this research will be shared with publicly and privately funded organizations, including neighborhood associations and social service agencies; City of Seattle policy-makers; and the Seattle Police Department. From a cooperative effort with the above organizations, a comprehensive document on the discourses and mobilization of socio-spatial control will be produced.