JOHANNA ROLSHOVEN
Centre for Cultural Studies
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETHZ

The concern of my paper is the dialectic between substantialist and metaphorical notions of density in the urban context. It is about the history of ideas regarding health in the context of urban lived space.

During the demographic boost of European cities in the 19th century the term "sanitation" became an equivalent for "urban planning". It signified many things, from medical measures to decent housing and cleanness of public spaces. This link between health and aesthetics, spatial orderliness and social order was thus anchored in the urban discourse and is still at work today. Health from an epidemiological perspective refers to the governance of phenomena and effects of mass proximity, incubation and congestion, and the exertion of institutional power over space and moral.

The concrete examples of anti-social behaviour acts illustrate the discourse of how today "health" and "security" relate to the city. It is the contemporary end of the development of ideas of purification and of division into homogeneous zones, of the prevention of all kind of contact dangers, and of the containment of urban densities, both substantial and metaphorical. Nowadays the townships' police's aim is to maintain "order and security", both with respect to aesthetic categories (cleanness) and health (antiseptic). Their legislation allows to clear certain places from unwanted people and is therefore subject to controversial debate. The practise of displacement of loitering people is linked with another form of control of space, i.e. the increasing pragmatic attention for littering.

Urban dangers and the corresponding security needs lead to the question for the sense and the emic strategies in the use of urban public space, of the city as a place capable of still providing unexpected encounters. Urban cultural density proves to be not a matter of contiguous temporal or spatial order, but the result of complex and interpenetrating co-presences uneasy if not uncanny for to modernist planners and institutional urban practitioners.

Analogy and metaphor for IT security: "cleanness and order" in a Swisscom Bluewin advertisement for computer antivirus software.