Zonal banning and public order in urban Australia

In recent years, Australian governments of various ideological persuasions at local, state and territory and federal levels have introduced a range of zonal governing techniques to manage the flow of people in urban spaces. Zonal governance involves the identification and formal declaration of a specific urban geographic region to enable police and security personnel to deploy special powers and allied forms of surveillance technologies as a supplement to their conventional public order maintenance functions.

Despite the impetus towards open flows or movement within sovereign territories or larger territorial groupings, such as the European Union, considerable governmental effort has been directed towards the use of new forms of criminal law to re-territorialize urban space through new administrative, property law and regulatory measures. These low-level spatial demarcations introduce various supplementary police powers and discretionary procedures that enhance surveillance within a declared area to increase the level of contemporary urban security. Of particular concern is the legal right to ban or exclude “undesirable” individuals and groups from entering or using certain designated urban zones, to prevent antisocial or violent behavior usually associated with alcohol consumption.

To date, most discussion of the impact of banning and related surveillance measures focuses on illegal migration through ports of entry into sovereign nations and the commensurate burdens this creates for both citizens and non-citizens to authenticate their movements at national geographic borders. This logic is permeating more localized forms of regulation adopted by Australian local and mid-tier state and territory governments to control the movement of people in and out of major event sites and in the urban night-time economy.

A survey of recent reforms in the state of Victoria reveals how this new logic of mass-surveillance aims to promote greater levels of urban security while reshaping the conventional order maintenance functions of both the public and private police. This chapter describes these procedures and their impact in sanctioning the efficient screening of people to promote order in specific zones within the contemporary Australian urban environment, at the expense of more progressive and inclusive crime prevention initiatives. We focus on two exemplars of the intensification of surveillance through zonal governance techniques: ‘major events’ and ‘designated alcohol zones’.

The pursuit of exclusion through zonal banning

In recent years, a growing emphasis has been placed on the use of zonal banning to address violence and anti-social behaviour associated with alcohol consumption. While we recognise the longer historical links between territory and crime, this article focuses on recent efforts to govern territory through new zonal regulations. Recent processes in Australia involve the conflation criminal law principles with processes of managing order in and around private spaces through new administrative approaches to alcohol-related law enforcement. The article outlines the nature of sub-sovereign ‘police laws’ and the extent to which they have been used based on Victorian data. We conclude by suggesting these developments need ongoing critical scrutiny given evidence of the ongoing expansion of proprietary-based principles in the management of urban disorder, and the potential for these developments to promote the increased use of surveillance technologies to exclude undesirable populations from the nighttime economies of Australian cities.