Everyday Nationalism and the Politics of Public Space—How National Security Policies Create Zones of In(Security) in Vienna

Abstract

While cities have always embodied difference, with their diverse inhabitants contributing to urban culture and economy, the underlying legitimation of belonging in the democratic nation-state continues to be based on an essentialized national identity. This study sheds light on the ways in which diverse cities, and specifically public spaces as spaces of encounter, are produced discursively on the level of the nation-state. The study employs Critical Frame Analysis (CFA) to examine the Austrian Security Police Act amendments between 2005 and 2018. This analysis focuses on how policy-making processes on the level of national legislation have discursively shaped public spaces in Vienna as zones of (in)security. The analysis reveals that national governments in Austria have increasingly framed urban public spaces as areas of insecurity. This framing aligns with broader nationalist agendas that seek to delineate who belongs within the nation, thereby exacerbating tensions between local multicultural practices and national discourses. The study highlights a significant gap between everyday multicultural encounters in urban spaces and national policies that reinforce exclusionary, homogeneous identities. These findings underscore the role of public space as a battleground for broader ideological conflicts over national identity and belonging.

1. Public Spaces Between Everyday Cosmopolitanism and a Return of Nationalism

Living in cities shaped by cultural and economic globalization, in the public spaces we share, we are confronted with difference, people differing from ourselves in terms of class, wealth, ethnicity, religion or culture every day. This experience has been reflected in an ethics of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in cities based on the multiple contact points with various cultures, religions, ethnicities, or lifestyles in public space [1,2,3]. Accounts of “Everyday Cosmopolitanism” [4], “Everyday Multiculturalism”, or “Street-level Cosmopolitanism” [5] have dealt with citizens’ everyday practice of living together in contemporary urban societies. Reflecting on the “contact hypothesis” from social psychology, Gill Valentine’s empirical research on the geographies of encounter [6] sheds light on the ambivalences of encountering difference in everyday life. She finds a gap between the urban ethics of cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism and citizens’ practices.

How can we understand this gap? The everyday experience of difference still stands in stark contrast to an “endemic national condition” [7] that holds on to an alleged foundation in a homogeneous people. While cities have always embodied difference, with their diverse inhabitants contributing to urban culture and the economy, the underlying legitimation of belonging in the democratic nation-state continues to be based on an essentialized national identity as if “[T]he more traditional, tangible community structures decrease in the modern globalized world, the more important the demarcation from the ‘outside’ to define the ‘inside’ becomes. Hobsbawm speaks of a ‘dialectical relationship between globalization, national identity and xenophobia’.” [8] (p. 61, translation by author).

Nationalism seems to resurface once and again, with xenophobia as a unifying program of populist movements across Europe. Against the so-called “paternalistic” EU, various member-states, among them Austria, demand more national sovereignty, with the UK having been the first state to have left the Union in 2020. There is still no agreement on a joint rescue and integration of refugees whose lives remain threatened and whose future is uncertain in overcrowded border camps. For years, the topic of migration has dominated populist politics across Europe, and the far-right has continuously gained influence in both national and EU elections. The nationalism of these populist movements delineates narrowly, who belongs and who doesn’t, with the two-fold goal of reinventing democracy and popular sovereignty while holding on to the idea of the people as a community of biological descent [9] (pp. 6–7). This nationalism achieves to tie transnational relations and, in its strictly ethnocentric ideology, crosses the given national borders quite easily [9] (p. 7).

The cited writings highlight the tensions between everyday encounters and local initiatives embracing difference, and the dominant discourses on the national level, which uphold homogeneity and want to safeguard an assumed national culture.

The aim of this contribution is to shed light on the ways in which diverse cities, and specifically public spaces as spaces of encounter, are produced discursively on the level of the nation-state. If the friendly everyday encounters in public space produce a basic level of democracy to be cultivated [6] (p. 324), how does the democratic nation-state foster or hamper such capacities through interventions in public spaces? What impact do regulatory interventions in public spaces through policy have on their design and architecture?

This paper draws on research conducted as part of a doctoral dissertation project “Spatial Negotiations of National Identity—From Representation and Remembrance to Security and Policing”, which explores how public spaces in Austria are produced or utilized by various actors to negotiate national identity. Based on the amendment of the Austrian Security Police Act (SPG, Sicherheitspolizeigesetz), this paper discusses how between 2005 and 2018 national governments in Austria have discursively produced urban public spaces as zones of (in)security on the level of national legislation. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ, Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), part of these government coalitions, is one of the forerunners of employing populist strategies among the far-right in Europe. Therefore, an analysis of the way they have—through the medium of public space as investigated in this paper—contributed to an increasingly polarized discourse on migration and identity serves as an insightful precursor of other developments in Europe. Thus, while the research is situated within the specific national and local conditions of Austria and Vienna, its methodological approach and analysis is applicable to other contexts where shifts in political power structures are occurring.

The first part of the paper introduces the main theoretical concepts of everyday or banal nationalism and the linked methodological pathway to analyze the politics of public space through discourses. After a detailed description of the developed method of Critical Frame Analysis (CFA), the analysis of national urban space policy affecting public spaces in Vienna, through the propagation of different prohibitive zones in the Austrian Security Police Law, is presented. The paper discusses how the political framing of public spaces in Vienna may impact their design and reflects on it within in the wider debate on the tensions between the fundamental principles of nations and living in cities shaped by difference.

2. A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Production of Space—Theoretical Underpinnings and Methodological Pathways

To understand the tensions and relations between an everyday cosmopolitanism and banal nationalism, something that knowledge specialized in one field cannot fully account for [10] (pp. 6–7), this research uses a transdisciplinary approach. Such an approach to research naturally comes with confusion, irritation, and questioning what was thought to be given (ibid.). However, accepting these insecurities creates the opportunity “to cultivate modes of social and cultural analysis that would be both sensitive to different realities and capable of building bridges between them” [11] (p. 35). This also opens up new methodological pathways and critical approaches for the fields of architecture and urban design to analyze and understand the links between regulatory interventions and urban design.

2.1. How State’s Statements Produce Space

Based on Paula Saukko’s work on research methods in cultural studies [11] and her reflection on Edward Soja’s Thirdspace [12], a more than one-dimensional understanding of space could consist of the lived experiences, established discourses, and socio-political contexts. Following Christian Schmid’s (Ref. [13] reading of Lefebvre, such an approach shifts the perspective from the analysis of the product (of space) to the analysis of its production. Here, the process of production of space is not understood as an individual but as a social process. This contribution focuses on the discursive production of space and takes up “a careful analysis of the political nature and implications of the concepts or discourses we and other institutions use to make sense of space” [11] (p. 171), well aware of the importance of the other dimensions this contribution cannot address in full detail.

The approach builds on Mustafa Dikeç’s [14] use of concept of “state’s statements” [15] to “capture the state’s diverse practices of articulation as they relate to the spaces of urban policy-definitions, categorizations, spatial designations, namings, mappings and statistics” [14] (p. 16). Thus, the spaces of national policy are not understood as given, but the state’s (understood both as the nation-state and other government bodies such as city governments) practices of articulation produce space, or define certain orderings of spaces, the “proper place” for things and people. Understanding these contingent processes of ordering spaces is crucial for architects and planners to situate technical or aesthetic concerns in the socio-political dimensions of space and critically question the policy frameworks at the foundation of urban transformation and renewal.

2.2. Analyzing the Discursive Production of Space

For the analysis of these state’s statements, methods from both policy analysis and linguistics have been adapted to systematically analyse different texts. With the focus on nationalist assertions underlying certain discourses, an analysis of deictica can offer valuable insights into the banal ways of nationalist in- or exclusion, as Michael Billig [7] has shown in his work on Banal Nationalism. The concept of Banal Nationalism not only conceptually provides a meaningful starting point for this analysis, but also offers methodological pathways. A deixis is a form of linguistic pointing, defined as “the use of a word or phrase whose meaning depends on who is talking, who they are talking to, where they are, etc., for example, “me”, “here”, or “yesterday””. The “linguistically microscopic” [7] (p. 94) approach of analyzing deictica is put forward to identify the “routinely familiar habits of language” [7] (p. 93) which, in contrast to heroic (hi)stories of the national myth, work as banal but constant reminders of nationhood. In a critique of Fukuyama’s assumption in “The end of history” [16] of the victory of democracy and the disappearance of ideology, such as nationalism, as there “is no legitimate principle other than sovereignty of the people” [16] (p. 45), Billig contradicts this finding by identifying how easily the nationalist pointing of small but crucial words slips under the radar:

“The ‘people’ is not ‘the people’ of the whole world: it is the people of the particular democratic state. As Hall and Held (1989) have argued, in modern democratic politics ‘the people’ is a discursive formation, which is used synonymously with the nation. The world in which ‘the sovereignty of the people’ is to be politically realized, is a world of different nations: it is a world which has institutionalized ‘them’ and ‘us’.” [7] (p.94).

As Mattisek et al. have shown, in the field of human geography the analysis of deictica can help to understand how a place-based identity is discursively constructed. Beyond creating subjectivity and identity, deictica can also point to temporality and location [17] (p. 283). Temporal adverbs such as ‘yesterday’ or ‘back then’ and localizations such as ‘here’, ‘there’, or ‘close-by’ only make sense in the context of a specific time and location.

2.3. Critical Frame Analysis (CFA)

To operationalize the presented approach to analyze the selected state’s statements, policy analysis, specifically Mieke Verloo’s method, offers a useful framework [18]. Through CFA one can identify through which patterns urban public space is constructed as an issue of national concern and national legislation taking action. Verloo’s approach is theoretically based on Carol Bacchi’s [19] critique of the problem-solving paradigm of policies and how this paradigm finds application in higher education as well. She proposes to radically rethink government policy simply put through the question “What’s the problem represented to be?” to direct the focus of policy analysis not to the ways in which problems are solved, but to the problematizations underlying policies [20] (p. 4):

“This idea transforms the way in which we think about government policy. Commonly governments are seen to be reacting to ‘problems’ and trying to solve them. The rethinking proposed here highlights, that specific proposals (or ways of talking about a ‘problem’) impose a particular interpretation upon the issue. In this sense, governments create ‘problems’, rather than reacting to them, meaning that they create particular impressions of what the ‘problem’ is. Importantly these impressions translate into real and meaningful effects for those affected.” [20] (p. 2).

Directing the focus of policy analysis to the ways in which certain issues are problematized in government policy then offers the opportunity to, in the tradition of Foucauldian research interest, “uncover the grounding precepts or assumptions that people took for granted and did not question, the meanings that needed to be in place in order for particular proposals to make sense and to find support” [20] (p. 5).

The approach of CFA aims at making visible the implicit and explicit interpretations in, among others, policy making, and the different constructions and representations of a problem as put forward by different actors [21] (p. 31). To this aim, Goffman’s [22] understanding of a frame as an organizing principle in cognition was adopted, which allows people to categorize and interpret everyday social experiences. A policy frame then is defined as “an organizing principle that transforms fragmentary and incidental information into a structured and meaningful policy problem, in which a solution is implicitly or explicitly enclosed” [18], (p. 20). (Policy) frames commonly are understood to not be employed intentionally, but rather to originate in discursive and practical consciousness [21] (p. 32). That means that “policy frames originate in discursive consciousness, to the extent that actors using them can explain discursively why they are using them and what they mean to them, but they also originate in the practical consciousness, to the extent that they originate in routines and rules that commonly are applied in certain contexts without an awareness that these are indeed rules or routines, and that they could have been different.” [21] (ibid.). But beyond the understanding of discursive and practical consciousness, frames are indeed also applied strategically. Such a “strategic framing” can be identified especially in political discourse by “conscious and intentional selection of language and concepts to influence political debate and decision-making” [23] (p. 208). Strategic framing is also applied in architecture and planning discourses, where e.g., “Urban Resilience” has become a powerful policy frame shaping professional practice. As Mitrenova’s analysis has shown, urban resilience remains loosely defined, allowing powerful organizations to shape policies that align with their interests under the banner of a “holistic” approach, although different forms of urban knowledge are in- or excluded in these strategies [24].

CFA has been applied for the analysis of right-wing populist discourse in Austria by Ajanovic et al. [23] who looked at texts published online by different right-wing organizations and associations. Through this approach they were able to detect similar strategies of argumentation and meaning-making in right-wing populist discourse, identifying three frames of racist problematization (p. 203). They also “investigated discursive references, e.g., to norms, values, and ideology, that legitimized specific constructions of meaning” [23] (p. 208) across different authors. “Even though processes of meaning-making are never fully controlled by their authors, they strive to create political realities in ways that match their ideological assumptions and construct problems that fit preconceived solutions.” [23] (p. 208).

CFA not only allows to analyze discursive elements but also how roles are attributed in policy and who is given a voice in the process, and thus could be understood as “a middle way between discourse analysis and frame mapping” [18] (pp. 27–28). Therefore, Verloo developed so-called sensitizing questions based on Snow and Benford’s work on social movements, which cover the dimensions of Diagnosis, Attribution of Responsibility, Prognosis, and Call for Action, adding the aspect of Voice, and thus the question of in- or exclusion and power distribution [18] (p. 25).

2.4. Analysis Super-Text and Sensitizing Questions

For the analysis of my case study, the parliamentary processes of the amendment of the SPG and of the political framing of the change in policies, this method was adapted with the development of a so-called “analysis super-text” and sensitizing questions (see Appendix A), which aimed at analyzing and comparing specific positions on the dimensions of the following:

• Diagnosis of the policy problem (What’s the problem represented to be?)
• Prognosis of the policy problem (What action is proposed?)
• Roles attributed to various actors in Diagnosis and Prognosis.
• Voice given to various actors

In terms of:

• Space, urban space, or specific spaces in Vienna specifically.
• Specific urban populations or groups.
• Nationalist (racist, xenophobic, “ethnopluralist”, anti-plural) articulations (about society, space).
• Nationalist assumptions within ‘the people’, ‘society’ and other habits of familiar usage of language.
• Norms and values, world views, views on society, and specifically “Austrian society”.

The analysis super-text and sensitizing questions were applied to law texts, stenographic protocols of the parliament sessions; external reviews by The Association of Towns, Amnesty International, City of Vienna, Ministry of Defense, Association of Judges and Prosecutors; reports of the committee of internal affairs; annual security reports of the ministry of internal affairs.

3. How State’s Statements Produce Space—Critical Frame Analysis of the Amendments of the National Security Police Act

The Austrian Security Police Act (SPG, Sicherheitspolizeigesetz) [25] regulates the organization of security administration and the maintenance of public order and security in Austria and represents the legal basis for the security authorities and their bodies, i.e., the police. Both in 2005 and in 2018, the Security Police Act was amended to introduce the possibility of the security authorities zoning specific areas, in which the police are granted extended rights to control, stop and search, or even prohibit people from residing in that zone. How does this particular national policy and the process of policy-making then frame the use of public spaces as problematic, and in what ways can this impact processes of urban renewal?

The first introduction of the instrument of the protection zone (Schutzzone) to SPG passed parliament with support of the government coalition and the social democrats in 2005 after the initiative of the minister of Interior Affairs Liese Prokop. This amendment of the national law was tailor-made for a specific situation at Karlsplatz and its adjacent Resselpark, a central square and mobility hub in Vienna. Concerned about the students of a nearby school, who had reported of being talked at by drug users, parents and the school principal asked for more security in the area.

The amendment foresees that at the suggestion of principals, security agencies can declare specific zones—where children and youth are assumed to be especially threatened by crimes that might be not directed at them, e.g., through violations of narcotic substances acts—security zones. Police officers can ban persons—who “on the basis of certain facts, in particular due to previous dangerous attacks, must be presumed to commit criminal acts under the Criminal Code, the Prohibition Act or judicially punishable acts under the Narcotics Act”—from residing in the zone for up to 30 days.

The document analysis showed that the problem framing of the coalition government, consisting of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ, Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) and the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP, Österreichische Volkspartei) centered around rising drug crime in Austria and its threat to children and youth, who are said to be especially endangered in the public spaces around their kindergartens or schools. They alluded to a decrease in the sense of security in the Austrian population, and FPÖ members of parliament repeatedly framed the supposedly rising numbers in (drug) crime as a result of increased immigration and framed asylum seekers and foreigners as the perpetrators:

“[…]We have problems with organized crime—that’s what it is. We have problems with drug crimes—that’s what it is. […] And we also have problems with criminal asylum seekers” (MoP Mag. Wilhelm Molterer (ÖVP), during the 89. Parliament sitting, 9 December 2004, translated by author) [26].

“We already pointed out in the “Aktuelle Stunde” (current issues session in parliament, note of author), that very many asylum seekers are drug dealers.” (MoP Dr. Helene Partik-Pablé (FPÖ), during the 89. Parliament sitting, 9 December 2004, translated by author) [26].

In their argumentation they created an antagonistic relationship between natives and foreigners, who are described as the cause of rising crime numbers. Finally, the repeated use of deictica stood out: e.g., “Our” children and youth are described as the most vulnerable group that needs to be protected from drug dealers and drug abuse in public spaces:

“With this law we will create a basis for preventive measures, which Austrians have a right to, such as the protection zones. We do this so we can better protect our children, ladies and gentlemen. […] For us from the people’s party Austria will also be one of the safest countries in the future, […] we act in the interest of the security of the Austrians” (MoP Mag. Wilhelm Molterer (ÖVP), during the 89. Parliament sitting, 9 December 2004, translated by author) [26].

Once effective, the school at Karlsplatz was the first to apply for the zoning of a security zone around their premises. From 2005 until the end of the urban renewal works around the area, the temporary zoning was renewed with the exception of the periods of summer vacation.

The second introduction of security zoning in the SDG was passed in 2018, again under an ÖVP/FPÖ coalition government. The defining paragraph on security zones in the amendment of the SPG was added only after the public review law amendments went through (through ministries, federal states, civil society, organizations and associations, and experts). Only on the day of the parliamentary debate and decision on the law in July 2018 was the paragraph on “Waffenverbotszonen” (weapons ban zone) added to the proposition voted on and thus was neither discussed in the committee for Interior Affairs (Innenausschuss) preparing the law, nor discussed by external experts, which was pointed out during the parliament sitting:

“Amendments are presented which have not been reviewed, which no external body could have had a look at, which have not been reviewed by experts. […] This is in our view not right, especially in an area where such substantial infringement of personal liberty is at stake.” (MoP Maurice Androsch, Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ, Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs) during the 36. Parliamentary sitting, 5 July 2018, translated by author) [27].

The amendment in the SPG would allow the police departments to outline zones which, based on previous experiences but not specific statistics or incidents, have shown to be spaces of dangerous crimes towards life, health, or the property of others, where from then on it is forbidden to carry thrust weapons or similar objects. In these temporary zones (3 months), police can stop and search someone’s clothes, vehicles or bags if they suspect them to be carrying a weapon.

In the law text and during the parliamentary debate, so-called urban hot spots and danger zones were problematized, which were assumed to be characterized by high crime rates (again with reference only to the experience of the policemen but not to any statistics), and Vienna’s Praterstern, a regional train station and mobility hub, is already mentioned as one of those hot spots:

“We know—and here we can rely on the experiences of our policewomen and policemen—that there are places, which are again and again sites of violent assaults. Exactly for those sites it shall be possible in the future, to create a weapon ban zone, when assaults on life, health or physical integrity are to be feared. […] This order needs to be announced, e.g., with a display on site: think of Praterstern. […] We are convinced that this way we can provide for more security in such hotspots.” State Secretary Karoline Edtstadler (ÖVP) during the 36. Parliamentary sitting, 5 July 2018, translated by author) [27].

The problematization of Praterstern is not new. Based on Foucaults theory of social control, Diebäcker analyzed the links between urban renewal and public order policies at Praterstern, which was problematized as dangerous in parliamentary and public discourses between 2006 and 2010 with an emphasis on the figure of the criminal which was depicted based on categories such as origin, age, and gender, as typically non-Austrian, young, and male [28].

Both ÖVP and FPÖ Members of Parliament furthermore argued for the amendment with reference to large-scale events where participants can be searched already and the wish to expand this to certain public spaces. The arguments for the amendment put forward by the coalition government center around the existence of urban hot spots and danger zones, where they say Austrian citizens are at threat of becoming victims of a crime. The law thus should give the police the possibility to prevent such crimes and create more security in those areas, pointing to the threat of a crime as spatial. In the debate, the Ministry of Interior Affair’s annual “Sicherheitsbericht” (security report, Bundesministerium Inneres 2018) [29] is cited, which highlights the rise of crime with thrust weapons and the involvement of foreigners in such crimes. The security report is based on crime statistics as well as on the reports of the Verfassungsschutz (unit for the protection of the constitution). The report from 2017, the basis for the amendment of the SPG in 2018, was published under interior minister Herbert Kickl (FPÖ) and was permeated with statements about how, in his party’s view, immigrants and refugees pose a threat to Austria.

Again, the so-called urban hot spot of Praterstern, which was already debated as a possible area of application for the new instrument and around which much of the media discourse around unsafe urban areas revolved, became one of the first weapon ban zones in Austria. Since 2018, the temporary order has been renewed unintermittedly.

4. Discussion of Results

Though the discussed national security policies were implemented more broadly across Austria, Karlsplatz and Praterstern were the only public spaces explicitly identified in the parliamentary debates on the policy amendment. The findings reveal that these spaces were framed in national security legislation as hotspots or danger zones, implying also shifts in their design. The analysis of the policy-making process also showed that no urban experts, such as street workers or urban planners, were involved in the policy process. Existing expertise of the City of Vienna in leveraging participatory planning and social inclusion through their urban policy called “Sanfte Stadterneuerung” (Gentle Urban Renewal) was not considered. The “subjective feeling of security” is referred to widely; the assumed subjective emotional state of the (national) population thus becomes an area of responsibility of political action and police intervention [30]. A common pattern of meaning-making in the parliamentary debates is the creation of an antagonistic relationship between natives and foreigners, who are described as the cause of rising crime numbers. Such xeno-racist articulations [31] “avoid an ideological grounding of their stance against ‘others’ and are instead based on a naturalising logic of ethnicised competition” [23] (p. 7). Drawing from Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction and Laclau’s “constitutive other”, Nikolai Roskamm has put forward a reflection on antagonism for planning theory, arguing for its fundamental force in urban politics [32]. In the parliamentary debates, this antagonistic positioning of “us” vs. “them” is repeated with the use of deictica, which also points to the everyday construction of national identity.

Looking at policy and urban redesign cycles, it becomes apparent that the two public spaces of Karlsplatz and Praterstern are targeted both through national security policies and regulatory policy through infrastructure measures (“Ordnungspolitische Infrastrukturmaßnahmen”) by the City of Vienna. And lastly, there is a shift of power from elected officials and formal decision-making to administration or executive power and informal decision-making. Instead of elected bodies, police departments decide on which areas to zone without being restricted or directed by any norms or regulations, or professional expertise from social work or community planning. The results of the analysis thus imply further research to better understand how exactly national security policies and urban renewal processes align, diverge, or intersect and how this might influence the inclusivity of planning processes and their outcomes.

5. Conclusions—Framing Antagonism

The findings suggest that the amendment of the security police law and the introduction of urban security zoning through the police indeed was dominated by a public discourse around the topic of “dangerous urban hotspots” and “criminal foreigners”, which also strongly shaped the political framings in the policy-making process. Analyzing the policy-making documents showed the xeno-racist problem framings of the coalition government, as well as the banal and repetitive reference to protecting a “national people”, the Austrians, and “our citizens” from foreign threats. The policy process was at no point informed by spatial planners or other urban experts and the specific focus on a spatial ban was never informed by a socio-spatial analysis of lived space. Social workers, who have been working at the sites under increased public scrutiny, recommended to not displace the homeless or drug users [28]. Nevertheless, the City of Vienna introduced an alcohol ban pushing out certain unwanted users from Praterstern justified with security.

The turn of the nation-state to regulating and policing urban public spaces could be understood as a backlash to the experience of living with difference every day and the visibility of the migrant in the city, which stands in stark contrast to a “national condition” that still holds on to its alleged foundation in a homogeneous people. This type of essentialization of spaces, which are understood as fixed and unchanging, oversimplifies the complex, dynamic, and socially constructed nature of urban environments, often perpetuating existing power relations and social hierarchies [33].

The findings raise important concerns for the practice and research of architects and designers, who have yet to claim a stake in such critical policy-making processes which problematize and thus shape urban spaces. In the case of Vienna, engaging with the socio-political dimensions of lived space would enable practitioners to critically question, or even challenge, the strategic framing of so-called urban danger zones through xeno-racist articulations in policy-making processes.

The research highlights the urgent need for practitioners to recognize the state’s processes of regulating spaces and to critically situate their practice within these orderings.