Splintering Spheres of Security: Peter Sloterdijk and the Contemporary Fortress City

The paper brings together Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘theory of spheres’ with urban studies literature on security and surveillance. The paper conceptualises security strategies not only as spatially articulated measures of surveillance and separation but also as sphere-creating forces in their own right. Emphasis is placed on Sloterdijk's conceptualisation of `foam', thus elucidating the contemporary fortress city as a highly fragmented, polyspherical patchwork of more or less enclosed and purified security spheres.