ABSTRACT
This chapter unveils the role of moral principles in planning and public policies. A meta-reading of security policies can bring forth moral definitions of what is good/bad that are taken for granted and easily applied to the urban realm. What the chapter suggests instead is an amoral ethics of space based upon the Spinozan and Deleuzian definition of good and bad affect: the former is what increases bodies’ capacity of acting and being acted upon; the latter is what diminishes or harms them. Information, which materially becomes part of the body through affect and a process that Simondon calls ‘transduction,’ is actively produced by security measures and policies, signals of dangers on the streets, as well as the overload of news about crime and security that we constantly read on line. This affective information modifies the process of becoming of individuals. It can, for example, harm them, if the overload of ‘scary news’ increases their fear of crime. At the end of the chapter it is suggested, through examples drawn upon an ethnographic fieldwork in social housing estates in London, that policymaking and planning, whose desire (conatus) is to perpetuate themselves as temples of security and order, could at least start engaging with a less stigmatising, moral and dichotomous language, so as to lessen negative affections on bodies and reduce urban regeneration interventions based upon black and white judgements.
