Close-up Vigilance: “Once You Have Crossed the Border, What Are You Afraid Of?”

These words belong to an activist of the Pan-Africanism movement in Spain, uttered to me during an interview in 2014 regarding the political mobilization of illegalized people.¹ The activist referred to the rise of necropolitical borders (Mbembe 2019) and the control of people's mobility through death. Our discussion turned to forms of restraining migrants’ movement inside the state, where a new and persistent practice of vigilance is multiplying the functionality of the state's political border. In this system of vigilance over migrants, social and psychological violence is no longer an exception but a continuity of “a surveilling equipment wrapped around the task of keeping away” (Bauman and Lyon 2013: 58).

With the global rise of “cultures of fear” (Linke and Smith 2009), vigilance inside the state has become extensive and prolific, a practice and a method to produce a social order (Ball et al. 2012; Huysmans 2006; Lyon 2003, 2006) with a continuous capacity to metamorphosize. From remote to close-up, from institutional to private, from physical to psychosocial, vigilance has become a ubiquitous presence, and a social practice in itself. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon (2013) referred in this sense to a “liquid surveillance” as an omnipresent practice, highlighting how the surveillance targets everyone, questioning “the lived realities of invisibility” (Lyon 2010) produced by it.

Instead of focusing on a more vertical, confined form of vigilance, I follow the concept of the post-panopticon, referring to this ubiquitous, close-up vigilance that aims to surveil not only the present—what is happening already—but also the dynamics of life itself. As Bauman and Lyon (2013: 59) put it, the goal is to “monitor what will happen, not to escape to a design of things.” This ever-present vigilance produces perceptions of insecurity and risk within the state among citizens who, in turn, ask for protection and safety. Fears about safety inside cities have become not only related to physical borders but also pitted “against territorial contamination and transgression,” becoming a way of using a territory to establish moral and social imaginaries, a “securocratic war of public safety” (Feldman 2006: 330).

Drawing on literature analyzing forms of vigilance conducted by citizen patrols and institutional agents, facilitated by racist discourses and practices (Dematteo 2008; Ivasiuc 2015, 2020), this article attempts to shed light on a new form of psychosocial, close-up vigilance executed by civic patrols of state institutions surveilling illegalized and racialized people in the city of Barcelona.

Urban vigilance has involved institutional or private agents using methods ranging from neighborhood patrols in Italy—ronde controlling and “cleaning” the urban space (Ivasiuc 2018)—and citizen self-surveillance WhatsApp groups in the Netherlands (van Steden and Mehlbaum 2021) to forms of vigilance related to police forces based on an “imagination of war” (Fassin 2013) in urban spaces in France, or longer and hybrid forms of vigilance in the US (Abrahams 1998; Feldman 2001). In Spain, several studies explore the vigilance of racialized street vendors in Barcelona (Moffette 2018), people without residency permits using the street to sell products and make a living, since they are denied the right to work, according to the Law on Foreigners. These studies focus especially on their criminalization under a “zero tolerance” policy (Galdon-Clavell 2016; Lundsteen and Fernández González 2020). When the security discourse dominates in migration, vigilance practices transform the urban space into a whole “social control zone,” producing a “normal space and a pathologized one” (Feldman 2001: 59).

I understand vigilance practices in Barcelona as an example of how the border moved internally to a city level. Through this institutional vigilance of migrants, states “successfully abstract (the territory) as state space” (Sharma 2020: 8), imposing a division between people related to the territory and others who are considered to not belong, who are “made into people out of place” (10) and consequently put under vigilance, establishing the barrier between citizens and noncitizens (Anderson and Hughes 2015; Khosravi 2010). Control and deterrence are reproduced inside the state, where vigilance multiplies the same logic of “keeping out,” even if people are physically inside, and erases the fantasy of an “inside” where the control of people on the move will cease. If border practices push back people and make them disappear at the border of the nation-state, these forms of vigilance make people disappear at a social level within the city, since they are and feel under a vigilance functioning as a “low-intensity incarceration” (Feldman 2001:74); this fact does not allow them to take root in the place they live, condemning to invisibility their own social relationships and lives. I explain how this new psychosocial vigilance establishes geographies of removal, a map going from social disappearance to the physical removal of people. I examine the consequences of this vigilance in terms of what vigilance produces—that is, a geography of social disappearance built on three different aspects analyzed in this article: the creation of a safe/unsafe territory, conflict, and the concept of “risky” people. This “proximity” vigilance not only is exercised at a collective level but also affects each person subjected to it, becoming collective and individual at the same time due to its effects. I focus specifically on how this institutional vigilance produces insecurity through anticipated conflicts and constant surveillance, and a social and moral order through ways of seeing, especially through a pathologizing gaze. I argue that at an individual level, this vigilance isolates people from the city and from themselves, producing their alienation.

I focus on the “negative potentiality” (Vigh 2011: 94) of a psychosocial vigilance, understood as undermining future social relationships between those recognized as citizens and the undocumented migrants, constructing the latter as a suspicious subject and offering to the recognized citizen a punishing agency, as vigilant, in a participatory form of vigilance. This negative social relation is established paradoxically to safeguard a convivencia, the declared goal of social patrols activity. Thus, vigilance produces social and racial orders that change people's lives and their perceptions of the place that they inhabit. In this way, vigilance is put in practice as a method for “governing inside social security” (Walters 2015: 287) and reassuring citizens that a safe, satisfying place exists (see also Lewis, this issue).

In the case of Barcelona, different state institutional patrols control the streets to map all sorts of fears. First, there are three police corps: Policía Nacional (national), Mossos (regional), and Guàrdia Urbana (local). In addition, there are municipal institutional civil patrols (educador social de calle) employed by the municipal departments for Immigration and Social Integration. These teams, dressed in plain clothes, comb the city neighborhoods to reinforce what the municipal authorities call convivencia, a vague and broad concept including contradictory meanings and practices such as togetherness and public order.

My research focuses on this institutional vigilance applied by these street educators, not the police corps, even though members of these patrols affirmed during interviews that they collaborate with the police by sharing their findings. Importantly, this form of psychosocial vigilance differs from proximity policing, since the agents involved watch, talk to, and report on migrants but are not involved in direct acts of removal or identification of people as police agents are. As a result, they transcend the modus operandi of the physical control or the visibility of violence. Their collaboration with police bodies is limited to sharing information about what goes on in the field but does not involve working together. As such, these troops could act as informants for future police interventions. Within the local police or Guàrdia Urbana, there are indeed departments of proximity police that intervene in neighborhoods but do not overlap with social patrols.

In this article, I first clarify the understanding of the relationship between vigilance, intimacy, and convivencia, the tortuous concept facilitating these vigilance practices. I proceed with an ethnography of safe/unsafe negotiations, observing how the illegalized people's presence is negotiated, what insecurity and conflict mean, and how the rules of convivencia are implemented daily. I further explore how this vigilance acts on the individual level, producing disruptions of intimacy, and ultimately the exclusion of the watched from urban space.

I draw on ethnographic notes from a nine-month discontinuous fieldwork period that took place between 2017 and 2020, during which I followed these encounters between the patrols and illegalized and racialized people (mostly from Romania, Morocco, and Senegal) who live unhoused in several abandoned spaces throughout Barcelona. I conducted semi-structured interviews with current or former patrol members and with people affected by the vigilance practices. I recognize at the same time the limitations of this article due to the difficulty of access to the institutions, an aspect studied in literature (Kalir et al. 2019). In this regard, I draw on hierarchical contacts and, finally, was fortune to have been granted access to some institutions. I highlight that these social teams differentiate themselves from police forces through their own declarations, stressing that their interventions are practiced precisely to avoid police presence and ensure a convivencia (togetherness) in urban space, recognizing at the same time their controlling role. It was this fieldwork that provided me with insight into the contradictions and subtlety of their interventions.

Imagining Convivencia: Vigilance and Intimacy

In the past few decades, Barcelona has been considered by the local authorities to be a center of a fast-growing economic structure, a welcoming city, a tourist attraction, and a smart city. These are only some of the labels that have reconfigured the city and the relationships between its inhabitants. The positive lens Barcelona is imagined through is based not only on its inhabitants’ social perceptions but also on how safety and unsafety are understood and recognized by the people inhabiting the city. This imaginary implies the practice of new forms of vigilance that “are now rebranded as essential components of the smart city package in order to increase the cleanliness and order of the city” (Pali and Schuilenburg 2020). In parallel, the way in which the city is imagined affects not only how urban space is seen but also how this territory comes into life—that is, which citizens inhabit the territory, producing a “social sorting” (Lyon 2003) and forms of bordering practices within the state.

I use “close-up vigilance” to refer to this practice of ordering and, above all, remaking people and urban space by municipal institutions through their interventions. This “proximity” vigilance (servicios de proximidad) is related not only to different sorts of fear and perception of safety/unsafety but also with different ways of seeing the people and the space they inhabit. The ways in which people are made visible has consequences for those affected, since vigilance can “operate in the absence of ‘security words’” (Vuori and Saugmann 2018: 16) through ways of seeing (see also Bhattacharyya, this issue). Thus, the patrols impose a range on what deserves to be made visible, what is kept invisible, and vice versa, since there is an increased demand for “spectacles of security” (45). These security interventions themselves produce realities and symbols of safety/unsafety “that become shared by all the community” (Altheide 2009: 56).

These patrols of institutional vigilance have been created to secure a form of convivencia (coexistence) based on “civility”: a white, middle-class social construct assembled around notions of ownership, social behavior, moral orders, the right to belong to a place, and installing boundaries between “civil” and “uncivil” kinds of people.

Convivencia is related to the idea of the relationship between citizens—an abstract concept that gives meaning to how space is created, perceived, and inhabited in the city. The term appears recurrently in Catalan media after being legitimized by the Directive on Civility's issuance at the end of 2005. The concept of convivencia is different from ciudadanismo (Delgado 2016), which refers to a more regulated form of behavioral citizenship, an abstract model citizen. Convivencia relates more to people's everyday practices of living together and how they recognize each other, meaning both togetherness and public order. It refers to how social relationships should be practiced within the public space in keeping with the law and social norms. It also refers to the difference between civil and uncivil behavior, and it is applied to penalizing behaviors that are considered uncivil. The Directive on Civility says: “Loyal to the Barcelonese social model, the Directive aims to be an effective tool to face the new situations and circumstances which may affect such convivencia or alter it.” The goal is “to minimize uncivil behavior.” These so-called uncivil activities include selling in the street without authorization, collecting metal and paper, sleeping on a public bench, and any other behavior that threatens citizens’ morality. In consequence, convivencia means a reciprocal shared code of morality by the citizen, and, above all, a code to guard against possible danger.

Simultaneously, what is considered civil or uncivil behavior is influenced by “social and cultural norms of aesthetic acceptability” (Millie 2008: 379) of citizens’ behavior. In this sense, convivencia points to an urban space where a behavior can be punished or accepted depending on its visibility and how the ones recognized as citizens view this behavior. In this regard, while managing convivencia, perception (381) and visibility/invisibility play important roles in defining conflict, safe/unsafe spaces, and “risky” people. In other words, convivencia in the name of being together has become a concept that facilitates the surveillance of the ways in which people use public space and relate to each other in order to avoid a possible conflict (Fernández Bessa and Di Masso Tarditti 2018). The aim of this institutional vigilance is precisely to detect these threats or their possibility, reinforcing a moral order that sustains this imagined “togetherness” as one that is, as I will explain, a social and racial order. In this sense, the figure of the “stranger as a political enemy” (Balibar 2009), imposed by the national borders’ rationality, translates into a “security identity, … a civil process of elaboration of differences” (Balibar 2009: 202) within the city, which in Barcelona's case can be interpreted as the dichotomies of civil/uncivil behavior, a division included in the institutional understanding of convivencia itself.

This proximity vigilance in the name of convivencia produces a range of effects on individuals too, particularly invalidating people's intimacy, facilitating their social isolation and invisibility. I define intimacy as the relationship between people inhabiting a specific space, a form of complicity made through their spontaneous connection among them beyond the moral codes of civility imposed by vigilance practices. Following Lauren Berlant, I consider intimacy to be “forms of affective togetherness” (2001: 685) in opposition to a regulated and imagined togetherness, since intimacy is concerned with “collective atmospheres” (1998: 281). Sara Ahmed (1997) also argues that intimacy, analyzed at a collective level, is about “getting close enough” in order to “be together.” This intimacy involves not only one-on-one relationships “but also the natural possibility of a human bond” and is opposed to the togetherness designed by the moral orders of convivencia. I understand intimacy not only as something restricted to the sphere of private life; rather, it applies at another level, where intersections between the public, the exterior and the private occur. The vigilance system was set up precisely to control this intimacy and interrupt the spontaneous relationships of people. I will describe how insecurity is produced by the presence of the patrols, whose prime goal is to guarantee and maintain this convivencia by surveilling illegalized people.

Producing “Safe” Territory and “Risky” People

How is it possible to be woken up at 7 a.m., after sleeping rough in a park, by a social worker who has come to check whether you are OK, and at 11 a.m., be approached by another social worker who asks you if you would like to accompany them to an open-air cinema, and then be approached again at 4 p.m. by a police officer inquiring about your residency permit? How it is possible that none of them sees your situation for what it is—that you are living in a park and have neither a job nor a residency permit—but instead you are perceived as merely a “risky incident” in public space? (Interview, 2018, June)

These questions were posed to me in 2018 after meeting a group of young people who lacked residency permits, income, and housing. They were destitute and had no option but to sleep in tents in Barcelona's central park. Public officials refer to them as “undocumented minors.” While only one member of the group was under 18 years old, the others had lived in child protection centers until they turned 18, at which time they became destitute. In accordance with the Law on Foreigners, once they come of age, institutions no longer care for them. This legal limbo forced most of these youths to end up on the street without a work permit or a source of income. As one interviewee told me:

You only have the street. People look at you sideways and are afraid of you. I know you must be strong, but it is very difficult. You cannot be calm. When you are in the center, you move away from everything. And when you go out at the age of 18, you find yourself in a world that you did not even imagine. (Interview, 2019, September)

What caught my attention is that young men—despite being heavily monitored by the municipal social educators (educadores sociales)—were totally left in utter destitution to live on their own.

As I mentioned, different social patrols designated to street work have been formed, each one operating with different groups of people living in the street. Their relationship with the municipal and autonomous police forces consists in passing on reports regarding what is happening in certain areas, not to intervene together. They act as informants and at the same time as vigilantes of the social dynamics in the neighborhoods. One patrol regularly visits illegalized people living in informal settlements on different abandoned plots of land in the neighborhood to surveil their daily life and inform them about the city's social facilities, while simultaneously scrutinizing their behavior in public space; another one follows unaccompanied minors. A different one, formed by “civic agents,” patrols the streets to detect uncivil behaviors. Several patrols scan the neighborhoods to detect possible conflicts: these are called “conflict management patrols.” All these social teams act on a regular basis, having been assigned an area or a group, and their presence intensifies “under demand,” that is, when the neighborhoods’ city council receives calls from citizens reporting supposed suspect activities. Although the patrols meet with the illegalized people at least once a week and monitor them, I started to observe a kind of social blinkering during the encounters that I witnessed between the institutional workers and the unhoused youths. The street educators understand the legal, economic, and social context that the young people face, including their explicit lack of access to the basic right to work or to adequate housing, which is restrained by Spain's Law on Foreigners. Nonetheless, the youths were seen and made visible primarily as “incidents,” a “risk” in public space, and a possible menace to the citizens’ convivencia. Patrols oversee the young people and make them visible to their neighbors in ways that are in accordance with the institutions’ representation of illegalized and racialized people, in this case, as a “risky” person. This blinkering is bidirectional: not only do the patrols fail to recognize the oppressive legal context that the unhoused face; they also do not perceive the harm that their vigilance produces. The youths understand that they are surveyed, which makes them feel undesired and isolated from the rest of the citizens. Paradoxically, vigilant seeing requires blinkered seeing, since they are seen as a danger disrupting the city's visual aesthetics and not as people without access to rights. So, the presence of these patrols produces an imaginary of danger associated to the youngsters that facilitates further harmful interventions against them.

This scene was repeated in 2018 when I accompanied a “territory prospection patrol” (equipo de prospección del territorio), as they label themselves, which monitors unhoused people from Romania sleeping in a park in the central neighborhood of El Raval. The patrol's goal was to map the city's “problematic areas” and deal with the neighbors’ perceptions of insecurity. They do not wear uniforms, and they state that “proximity,” understood as being close to the people they surveil, is one of their core ethical guidelines. They design lists and maps with the addresses of the small, improvised shelters in which people live. They collect lists of the settlements and the number of inhabitants, filled with racialized people: Roma families from Romania, young people from Maghreb and Senegal. They document how many new settlements there are; how many have disappeared; how many more people joined or disappeared from some places. As explained in interviews, the territory prospection teams were worried that the presence of illegalized people would create a “pull effect,” encouraging more migrants to join them, unless they were under strict monitoring.

Since illegalized and racialized people were seen to come “with different dynamics” (patrols coordinator, 2020) compared to the rest of their neighbors, in order to achieve this imagined convivencia, the patrols considered it necessary for people living on the street to feel that they were under surveillance: “They must know that they are not on their own” (patrol member, 2018). They expect their vigilance to make people feel uneasy, and that this will make them “change their dynamics,” including abandoning the areas where they live. There is a relationship between vigilance and the emotions this vigilance produces in the watched person that is connected to a relationship between morality and harm.

While accompanying the patrols, I began to investigate the city's side roads to learn what “unsafe area” means for the patrols. The municipality saw the presence of poor and illegalized people in downtown Barcelona as a threat to the city's image and brand, producing visual disorder. The city's central areas were under a stricter monitoring regime compared to the settlements located in outlying neighborhoods. Selling in the street, sleeping in a park, or simply moving within a certain area were all seen as threats to convivencia. As I wrote in my field notes regarding a park I used to visit alone or when accompanying the patrols between 2017 and 2020:

At 7 o'clock, the local police, the cleaning services, and the street educators entered the park in El Raval. People were sleeping in hidden places in tents or on the floor. Far away, hidden from the passerby's sight, were their carts full of scrap. The local police know them and wake them up. This is the time when the park opens for local residents to use. The social workers asked about their legal status. The Romanians used to live in a flat nearby but ended up in the park when they stopped paying their rent. They asked for shelter: “You'll find a home in the graveyard,” a young woman who slept in the park said as she nodded her head and laughed. Shortly after, the street educators took a photo of the park, while saying that they would be back. (Field notes, 2018)

I asked a patrol why these people posed a “problem” and why the local residents were angry. One officer responded that these people are dangerous. From the way he spoke I interpreted danger to be synonymous with scrap or waste or noise. Indeed, they were considered “scrap traffickers,” as a patrol member referred. As he put it:

When you go to this space and do an initial analysis, you see that there is a person with a precarious profile, there are people from offices who go down there to eat, but there are some more familiar dynamics that collide with other dynamics of other precarious people. (Conflict management patrols, 2020)

Months later, one of the undocumented men living in the park obtained a place in a temporary shelter after spending two months on a waiting list. Far away from the city, in an industrial area in Barcelona's port, it took me more than an hour to reach it by bus. In this industrial area there are no flats for people to live in and no people either. There are only trucks and industrial plants, surrounded by deserted streets. The shelter is fenced. Barcelona's deportation center is in the same area, but farther away. As you enter the shelter, you are greeted with a strong smell of disinfectant and some cheerful childish drawings, even though it seems to be an adults’ center at first sight. My interlocutor was forced to leave the place during the day and come back at night and was allowed to stay there for only three months, since only sick people had the right to accommodation for a longer period. Vigilance produced the visibility of the watched as a danger and the invisibility of their precariousness and struggles to have a place on their own. Their mere presence was considered a problem for the rules of convivencia. An imagined future danger gains consistency in the present, since the vigilance of people changes their social relationships in the present, fabricating a geography of their social disappearance from the urban space.

The members of the vigilance patrols are invisible to the larger population and make their presence felt only to illegalized and racialized people, namely making them feel surveilled and thereby compelling them to behave in certain ways. Compared to the police raids, fostered on a visible violence, the “proximity” vigilance has more of a moral mission with the aim of producing a moral order, exhausting people to make them abandon certain areas. Patrols also adapt their methods of vigilance to the specific neighborhood they are working in:

The criteria applied in Gràcia are not the same as those applied in El Raval. In El Raval, shopkeepers were offended by the Romanians who were on a square there. The shopkeepers complained to the city council's officials. Many of the shopkeepers’ proposals were implemented, such as removing the park's benches, so that the homeless people could not sit on the square. As a result, they would send police officers early in the morning to remove them so that they did not get used to sleeping there at night, and shut down the water fountains, so that they could not use them. (Street social educator, 2019, July)

The local administration prioritized defending the shopkeepers’ interests over those of the people living on the street, removing people supposed to pose a “risk” to said convivencia. The institutional agents perceived extreme poverty as a danger to convivencia between neighbors, but not to the poor people themselves.

At the same time, the civil patrols themselves are monitored. They use an app on their phones to record which areas they have patrolled during the day. When they start their journey, they mark in the app which streets have been patrolled and when, and later the movements of the illegalized people inhabiting these areas that they have seen, since they want to know “the impact on the urban space” (patrol member, 2020). This app also records their own labor activity and schedule. The patrols’ vigilance produces disciplinary measures for the unhoused people, but simultaneously, there is a surveillance of their own activity, including them in a vigilant and disciplining circuit of “securing security” (Kirsch 2019). Such vigilance produces “behavioral spaces” (Rose 1999: 136) in which the noncitizen is constantly differentiated from the citizen.

Simultaneously, the patrols offer information about what they consider “the dynamics of the territory” to the local police (Guàrdia Urbana), facilitating its interventions when these intend to remove “risky” people:

We identify where the people are located, how many there are, where they move to. And then, the surgical operation begins since the police officers already know precisely where to go. Police intervention is limited to surgical steps because they are not going to close a whole block or a neighborhood, they will only act towards a certain building where they already know that their target lies. (Street social educator, 2020, February)

The practice of street vigilance never affects all citizens. It is racialized and legitimizes “a social sorting” (Lyon 2003) and the invisibility and removal of racialized people. Next, I explain how vigilance produces a perception of conflict and reshapes the relationships of the citizens with the institutions, transforming these citizens into active vigilantes.

The X-ray of a Conflict: “I Am a Snooper, Not a Vigilante”

The patrols have different modus operandi, but what is common to all patrols is the fact that they “are acting from the perspective of a possible conflict” (conflict management patrols, interview 2020). They try to prevent and identify what is supposed to be a threat to convivencia. One question this raises is who is perceiving and defining the threat and the possible conflict. As I illustrate further, it is the vigilant presence itself that produces the perception of conflict by the neighbors. The Conflict Management Department was established 15 years ago when the Directive on Civility came into effect in 2006. The Department acts based on complaints received from neighborhood councils and residents concerning what they consider to be “a dangerous dynamic”:

We do not define a conflict … We go to see what is happening, we take an X-ray of a conflict. When we go to a square, we say nothing, we spend days watching, it is just a look, we try to go unseen. We sometimes agree with the Guàrdia Urbana and the Mossos, and they leave the place. We look at the day-to-day without sirens on. (Conflict management patrol, 2020, July)

Another case that was perceived as a possible source of conflict among neighbors, and repeatedly brought up in my interviews with members of different patrols, was the opening of centers for unaccompanied foreign minors or centers for unhoused people:

If a center for unaccompanied minors must be opened, then we work with the community there, explaining what is going to happen. We do not start with an activity that can lead to a conflict; instead, we manage a possible conflict. (Conflict management patrol, 2020)

The patrols claim to protect the citizens from an anticipated conflict, from a risk that is about to become reality, a conflict-in-waiting. The patrol is present in the neighborhood but remains unseen until it acts, and the conflict is present as a feeling but does not occur as an event. Thus, safeguarding convivencia from a possible conflict creates social relationships based on suspicion.

Paradoxically, the insecurity created by the vigilant patrol itself in name of convivencia becomes the link between the institution and the neighborhood's residents, since they feel that the institutions recognize and protect them:

When there is a complaint from the neighbors, then the fact of seeing the services there relaxes them. It does not mean that there is a conflict, but that they have been attended to. In 90 percent of the cases, we do nothing, and the perception of security has changed. The neighbors see us as a response from the institutions: “I have complained about something, and damn it, they have answered, I am more important for them than I thought.” This puts people in a different perspective concerning the institution. (Member of a conflict management patrol, 2020, July)

Simultaneously, vigilance transforms them into vigilant citizens, shaping the possibility of a new agency. Watching the other's behavior creates a new relationship with both the urban space and the institutions monitoring this space, where state institutions decide whom to watch and whom to protect. The vigilance implied by this “politics of protection” (Huysmans 2018: 2), deploying a model based on citizenship, instills divisions inside the state between people considered citizens and people considered by the institutions to pose a risk to others (see also Lewis, this issue). As I mentioned, such vigilance does not aim to control what is occurring but rather addresses the possibility that something may occur, the “uncertainty as a threat in itself” (Huysmans 2018: 15). It is precisely this moral order produced by the vigilance practices that pretends to regulate uncertainty.

Civility in the name of convivencia is imposed through an insisting watchfulness and through language. The words that patrols use during the interviews reinforce a vigilant gaze intending to fit the presence of people into categories of danger. For instance, several patrols classified groups of young people from South America as “Latin gangs.” According to this classification, the transformation of these youths killing time in a square into “organized groups,” a criminal category according to the law, suggests a greater level of threat. In parallel, the language used by the patrols has similarities to a medical register of pathologies: diagnosis, X-ray, suggesting a pathologizing gaze:

Groups of young people with particularly surprising dynamics. A diagnosis was made, and it was seen that this phenomenon required its own service, a patrol team for the organized groups. In these cases, we collaborate with Guàrdia Urbana to limit these dynamics. (Conflict management member, 2020, September)

Once an “X-ray” is done, the patrol contacts the other services intervening at a street level, be they social services, or the police, Guàrdia Urbana. In their interventions, the patrols move between two fantasies, both of which involve the identification with an ideal city: the imagined threat and the imagined dreamland territory. Next, I explain how vigilance disrupts the perception, representation, and recognition of the people in public space, producing alienation.

Being “Together”: The Vigilance of Intimacy

You like to act as bad rude guys, and I watch you and realize how you both look at each other, talk to each other, you are … wholesome and kind and yet you have forgotten this. (Social educator with minors living in the street, 2019, February)

The social educator explained how he tried to build friendship with the youth, notwithstanding the strict street protocols to which he had to adhere. He mentioned the effects that this close and long-term vigilance has on young people's self-perception and their perception of the space in which they live. The youth felt not only alienated from themselves and the neighborhood but also exposed to the patrol's questioning. He explained that young people are supervised by different professionals on the street, such as social workers and police officers, but at the same time, a combination of a lack of close relationships with the neighbors and vigilance over their behaviors and emotions affects their life:

Since they are supervised, every sadness gets medicalized or reported. You can call them whenever you want. Apart from this assault of one's personal space and intimacy, there are also additional reports about personal consumption of alcohol or drugs. These reports eventually arrive at the local administration, including the police. In this case, street educators act as part of a social police. (Educator with minors, 2019, February)

A person's body and emotions inhabit a space, and this space is built through one-on-one relationships. In this way, intimacy becomes a spontaneous and affective space created by the people inhabiting it. However, the state's institutional vigilance disrupts this spontaneous intimacy created between people. Despite the lack of access to their rights, illegalized people do manage to build their personal places by creating emotional relationships, inhabiting spaces, and bestowing different meanings upon them. They create places where one's individual presence is practiced through intimate relationships, even if the legal boundary between citizens and illegalized people persists.

On the contrary, for the patrols, being safe means identifying and agreeing on a type of visual consensus in which spaces must maintain a certain look and feel. To do so, those who are disrupting this goal must be tamed. This involves disciplining people, making them appear to not belong and disrupting their ability to live in a space so that they do not form networks that could increase their presence and power in the space, making illegalized and racialized people be and feel out of place.

Despite this, in different neighborhoods, residents formed a social network, known as the Sindicat pel Dret al Habitatge (Trade Union for Housing Rights), in support of illegalized people to influence who is affected by evictions and expulsion orders. The support that neighbors show in defending the place in which they live, regardless of their administrative or legal status, allowed illegalized residents to keep living in the neighborhood. For instance, in many cases neighbors organized protests to stop evictions of illegalized people. Institutional patrols have attempted to prevent these spontaneous relationships from being born because they are considered to destabilize the kind of order that the patrols wish to impose on the city.

Paradoxically, intimacy is undermined by two of the patrols’ practices: first, illegalized and racialized people are overexposed due to constant monitoring, while at the same time they are made overtly invisible as subjects. They are often stopped by different patrol members and made visible as a problem for the neighbors. As a result, their personal space, life, emotions, and relationships are utterly overlooked by the patrol members. This watchfulness distances them from residents who begin to consider them a threat, since they are seen as being under institutional vigilance. This subversive gaze challenges their sense of self, which continues to go ignored by the patrols. For institutions, togetherness means removing the menace to the community establishing the city's racial order, exposing a “lack of a social-affective imaginary” (Berlant and Greenwald 2012: 15). The institutional understanding of convivencia, based on moral codes and behaviors, is the opposite of intimacy as “being together” through the practice of common and spontaneous relationships and actions:

People see me properly dressed, but I am going through a painful time. I have knocked from door to door for my papers. I am tired, there is no work, no one talks to us. It is a no to everything. It does not matter, that is normal. Today I do not know where I will sleep, but I have time, it is only 4 p.m. (Interview, 2019, Octuber)

Citizens become bystanders in the face of a gaze that evaluates the other. What disrupts the visual harmony must be marked, as the patrol members mentioned when they described “dynamics that do not fit.” The expulsion of people from the city in the name of civility begins with their visual disappearance produced by vigilance, being neither seen nor recognized on their own terms. Vigilance replaces intimacy with watchfulness, induces an alienation and separation from the city among people considered “other” and makes people feel like accidents in the place where they live. “The fetishism of citizenship” (Delgado 2016) is imposed at an individual level through this patrolling practice, via hierarchies between citizens and illegalized people:

Every two years, a picture of homelessness is taken at a given moment. Awareness of public opinion is sought. But you count poor people; you become a hunter [te vuelves un cazador]. I have seen one here, another one there. (Patrol working with unhoused people, 2020)

Vigilance produces not only the social division between the watcher and the watched but also “a hunter conscience” (see also Ilieva, this issue). The patrols members see themselves as powerful agents participating in a mission to rehabilitate urban space, and the violence deployed by vigilance practices becomes invisible, since it is seen as a moral correction. At the same time, vigilance configures social relations based on suspicion and gives citizens a new role: they will be in turn informants for the social patrols, as patrols are informants for the police.

Concurrently, through this close vigilance, people see themselves through the vigilante's gaze. In the words of one member of a conflict management patrol regarding the duration and intensity of their vigilant presence:

In the short term, we intervene looking with intensity [de forma más intensa]. In the medium term we already reduce the intensity, and in the long term we disappear. Yes, we are part of social vigilance. We are on the street, and we cover as many different times of the day as possible, morning, afternoon, night, weekend, we cover everything to take this “social X-ray.” (Conflict management patrol, 2020, September)

This insisting gaze produces the alienation of the people affected, disrupting the spontaneous relationships they have formed with their neighbors: “The neighbors came to bring us water to the shelter. They saw the police, the social services here, but I always repeat to them that I am clean. The patrols are just doing their job” (interview, 2019, November).

Conclusion

In this article I have examined how constant vigilance in the name of convivencia (togetherness and public order) keeps illegalized and racialized people away from the city, multiplying border functioning within the urban space. The analyzed “close-up” vigilance forms a wide-ranging system at local level, involving different institutions and creating a “vigilant citizenry” (Larsson 2016: 95).

I have focused on the psychological vigilance tracing what vigilance produces. Comparing to the policing performed by police patrols, these municipal civil patrols act to secure a convivencia in face of a possible, future conflict or threat, not a real, present one. They surveil what could happen, according to their perceptions, not what is really happening. In this sense, vigilance produces insecurity and a particular pathologizing gaze toward the illegalized and racialized people, creating a racial, social, and moral order in the city, and making people's lives invisible, in a geography of social disappearance (“not here, not there, and not there,” as one youth put it). On an individual level, vigilance disrupts people's intimacy and spontaneous relationships, separating them from the city. Vigilance becomes a lived experience not only for its recipients but also for those who practice it, reimagining themselves in the process as surveillants and “hunters,” engaging citizens in a participatory vigilance to denounce suspicious people. This psychosocial vigilance shows how the logic of suspicion and punishing is expanding to institutions not related to the police, creating a culture of reporting on suspects (Larsson 2016) within the society. All this produces the “isolation, alienation, and instrumentalization of those physically present in a given space” (Feldman 2014: 64).

This article tries to open the door to future discussions related to social vigilance as an authoritarian practice within democratic states, underlining the social normalization of violence in urban space through these practices.