ABSTRACT
What begins with a family photograph taken at a protest during childhood is diverted into a broader story of a city. More precisely, a story of the failures of a city, any city, in fulfilling a promise of property, home, and health to its residents. This introduction seeks to levy an argument that failed States begin at the level of failed cities. This failure lies within the provision of any modicum of basic needs, much less civil expansion and creative fulfilment of those basic needs and human rights. Space is fundamentally political, and the development of the city as the cohesive expression of State power in order to control the divisions of labour along class, gendered, and racialised lines. Failure was the point. Control of the city is the locus of struggle between State power and the power in dissent. This sets the stage for conceptualising the very functional purpose of the State through its cities as “The Geographies of Threat”: 1) the Identification of populations; 2) the identification of threats; and 3) the identification of violence. Without the spatial features and functions of a city; class, gender, Race, and State power would fail to exist as we know it.
