The Sheet that Covers All Ghosts: Citizen Insecurity, Criminality Maps, and the Emergent Territorialities of Capitalist Power in Early-democratic Madrid

Abstract: This article charts the formation of citizen insecurity discourses in early-democratic Madrid, Spain (1982–96). It combines a historical-geographical materialist approach with the emphasis that urban cultural studies places on textual criticism to examine the hidden agenda contained in several newspaper maps depicting crime distribution trends in the Spanish capital. As historically constructed artifacts of visual culture, these criminality maps will serve to expose the hauntological relationship that exists between Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75) and the projects of neo-liberal restructuring that dramatically reshaped the socio-spatial contours of Madrid from the 1970s onwards. The power/knowledge dynamics of citizen insecurity not only played a key role in the electoral ascendency of mayor José María Álvarez del Manzano and his conservative People’s Party (1991–2003), but they also tapped into cultural geographies of race and social inequality to legitimize wider shifts in the city’s territorial structure. At the end of the twentieth century, the upward repositioning of Madrid’s north-south power model would indeed replace the outgoing center-periphery one, which had previously been dominant under the Franco Regime. This urban process was fueled by citizen insecurity discourses and the shifting accumulation circuitries of neoliberal capitalism.