Agoraphobia in Mexico and France: Urban Fear and Privatized Lives

Abstract

Recent years in Mexico and France have been marked by the increasing of chaos and instrumented insecurity. Public spaces, under marketing influences, show a strong tendency to the privatization of the city and building walls. Agoraphobia, seen as the fear to a “public space” that threatens human life, becomes one of the most useful mechanisms for social regulations. What is intimate is promoted on the enclosed solitude of private space; and fear, that used to reinforce community networks capable of imagining alternatives, is immunized today by police systems which, to ensure life safety, attempt against the principles of citizenship. This paper aims to confront, as found in critical theory, the mechanisms resulting from the social production of fear in Mexico and France, focusing on a comparative exercise of the recent official initiatives against violence, criminality, and the global processes of privatization of public space. In Mexico, there is a constant decrease of sensibility when facing the horror of dead people. In France, violence increased due to repressive actions and the police is concentrating the symbolic power. As a response, the privatization processes are highly promoted as a life warranty and each individual is conceived as the responsible of their own safety.