CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This essay develops the concept of protective arrangements, a socio-material relationship between house architecture, objects and human practices, in order to develop a new understanding of urban social segregation. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in La Plata, Argentina, I compare protective arrangements of lower and upper middle-class residents against the background of the commonly sensed need to self-organize protection. While in gated communities for the upper middle class, walls and fences enclose an "open interior space", the members of the upper middle class who lives near downtown protect their homes with individual security systems. By contrast, members of lower classes attune their repertoires of protection to the constant threat of eviction and burglary with dogs and improvised fences and by guaranteeing the permanent presence of one of the household members. The analysis of these strategies at the house scale show an increasing process of social-spatial fragmentation in the city product of the materialization of discursive-material practices deployed in search of protection.

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