Fortified enclaves as process: spatial practice, class politics, and security in Karachi's urbanism

Abstract Ethnographic scholarship on fortified enclaves has explained how spatialised modalities and practices of urban security shape city life, yet it has rarely probed how everyday practices of security-provision co-produce social order within these enclaved spaces. Building on seminal work on gated communities, this article repositions enclaves as ordinary but politically charged sites of security-provision in insecure, postcolonial southern urbanisms. Through an ethnographic account of the processes of ‘enclavisation’ within a fortified enclave in Karachi, the paper brings the production of space into conversation with everyday boundary-work, affective judgments, and negotiation between guards, residents, and service-class entrants. Focusing on how routine security work is enacted and encountered at entry gates, the article reveals the temporal, processual, and relational nature of security-making in a socially stratified, postcolonial urban context marked by class division and democratic fragility. It argues that understanding enclaves as ongoing processes—rather than as static products—illuminates how subjective experiences of security are intimately tied to shifting power relations, processes of exclusion, and urban citizenship. The analysis offers new insights into the local politics of boundary-making. It shows how class, status, and postcolonial urban governance fundamentally shape the circulation, negotiation, and resistance that constitute everyday security in Karachi's urbanism.