Urban Criminology

The City, Disorder, Harm and Social Control

Rowland Atkinson, Gareth Millington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134708703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Urban Criminology offers an accessible analysis of our urban condition, viewed through the prism of crime, disorder and social harm. This book gathers cutting-edge treatments, research field reports and critical examinations of crime and harm in cities, from the disciplines of urban studies and criminology. The social, economic and political composition of cities and the various inequalities that mark out and drive the problem of crime in many cities today are foregrounded. Readers follow a series of thematic engagements, generating a deeper understanding of a range of key areas that include problems of violence, social and spatial divisions, housing, policing and the role of the urban economy in issues of financial crime.

This book comes at a time of rising crime in many cities and complex responses by city administrations and communities. It presents a critical, political thesis – that crime in cities must be understood with reference to the varying social structures, political forces and economic opportunities of cities. These influences intersect to produce dramatic variations in victimisation and attempts at social control, often felt most strongly around class and gender divisions. To understand crime, we must better understand the life of the city. Urban Criminology seeks to present an integrated framework that brings to life these key issues and seeks to enthuse students of our urban condition – to locate the harms within it and to identify ways of reducing the risk of crime.

This book is ideal reading for all students with an interest in cities, crime, community life, urban sociology and urban cultures.

Chapter 1

UNDERSTAND CRIME, UNDERSTAND THE CITY

Introduction

To understand crime has been in many ways to understand the city. Space has always been integral to our understanding of crime and harm. The city is a primary site of crime and deviance, a key locus for disorder and social unrest, and either host to, or productive of, a complex array of harms. While forms of interpersonal violence, homicide, robbery and domestic violence lie at the forefront of our sense of the worst that cities have to offer, the reality is more complex. In this book we try not only to capture the intensity of aggression and scale of violence present in urban life, but also to understand how this and other harms – such as white-collar fraud and economic malpractice, environmental harms, hate crime, sexual harassment, as well as the ‘injuries’ of stigma and social exclusion – are structured and driven by urban systems.

Our thinking must take in not only the mainstays of analysis, such as the police, judiciary and other systems of control, but also the scale and variable patterning of material inequality, social geographies shaped by housing systems, and the economic conditions of life prevailing in particular cities as well as their political life. In short, to understand crime, its context must be foregrounded even to the extent that the ‘object’ – crime – may occasionally drift in and out of focus. In this book we seek to offer a critical approach that digs beneath moral, alarmist and conventional descriptive approaches while engaging with the extent of violence and human harm that damages many people in cities today. In doing so we highlight the need to grapple with the intersection of social structures, varying economic conditions (which fluctuate between and, critically, within cities) and the political cultures and ideas used to define and shape responses to crime.

In talking of cities we are, of course, concerned with urban life in general, but also with differences between cities and the relation of their complex social mosaics and ordered scattering of social groups into particular neighbourhoods. Why do some cities have higher rates of violence than others? Why do harms cluster in particular neighbourhoods? The predisposition to do damage to others does not vary according to place of birth. Should we believe that most aggressive people have come to live in a neighbourhood with higher rates of crime, or should we more plausibly understand how social inequalities, neighbourhood conditions and opportunities for meaningful labour and social participation can generate cultures and hardened dispositions that result in such problems?

The relationship between cities and crime can be conceived in a variety of ways, many of which may appear contradictory. On the one hand, we know that people and communities in cities around the globe experience harm, or are impaired or damaged by homicide, domestic violence, robbery and burglary, alongside other manifestations of aggressive behaviour. As critical students of this urban condition we should recognise the existence of such harms, the deeper structures of social life that fuel crime, and the kinds of progressive responses that would lead to more sustainable declines in harm against humans in urban settings – crime predominantly affects the lives of the poor and most vulnerable. On the other hand, cities are also the territories in and over which national governments, judicial systems and other institutions relating to law and social control are predominantly located. In this sense cities are symbolic sites of authority and the exercise of will and indeed force by elites, but they are also places of contestation in which protest, dissent and occasional insurrection against such authority have been historical features. Despite this the urban context, its inherent social diversity and public spaces represent a place in which possibilities for participation and opportunity remain alive. In addition, as is well documented, an elite group of cities across the planet comprise the ‘command and control’ centres of the global economy, demonstrating how, still, cities are viewed as the engines for economic growth and prosperity. Cities are full of such paradoxes.

Crime is a deeply human problem; it touches and damages lives and those connected to those lives. Crime in cities damages trust and well-being in communities, and communities are affected differently by it because of its uneven spatial distribution. Perspectives that understand crime as something that can simply be stamped out or designed out will not erode the deeper social and economic influences that generate crime. Yet these ideas, such as the existence of some feral and persistent underclass, remain ascendant in the public imagination, generate electoral gains for politicians, and are deeply linked to entire industries offering the capacity to observe, control and incarcerate purportedly dangerous spaces and groups. These antisociological understandings of crime dearly cost urban society and poorer communities in particular.

The private and public prisons, police forces, surveillance systems and security personnel that are burgeoning in many urban centres today speak to us of a failure to understand crime and harm as being about more than ‘bad people’. Worse, we have tended to think of bad people only as those who come from particular places. Indeed, while our attention in this book is particularly focused on the damaged and excluded populations and neighbourhoods of much criminological research, we also seek to examine the role of elites in purposely misidentifying the sources of social danger, and the complicity of other elites in destabilising practices of fraud and extraction that give momentum to violence in cities and districts other than their own. As we write, revelations of such malpractice appear at an almost daily rate. It is increasingly clear that to understand crime in cities we need to pay significant attention to the way in which the formal economy is drawn into and facilitates forms of financial crime that are generative of other forms of harm in cities – issues we will return to later on in this book.

The city as context

The constituent parts of the city, its neighbourhoods and streets and the distinctive landscape of the built environment are the sites of varying levels of activity proscribed in law, and of other activities which, though they are not proscribed, bring to bear significant harms on urban communities and individual citizens. We adopt a critical criminological perspective in this book, one in which the legal category (and social construct) of ‘crime’ is not viewed as exhaustive of all possible harms that an individual or community may be subject to (DeKeseredy, 2011). Crime and harm are just as useful ways of telling the story of the city as are, say, the more traditional focuses of urban studies such as housing, poverty and infrastructure. Urban space not only offers the primary backdrop to much criminal and harmful human activity, but it has also been regularly identified as the implicit reason or foundation for such conduct. As will be shown in this book, the city and its distinctive spaces and social life provide an important means by which we can understand both the human condition and excessive or transgressive conduct against our fellow citizens. While the city has been crucial to our understanding of the shape and variable form of crime, it has also been a key driver of the project of the social sciences more broadly (Saunders, 1981).

As human settlements were enlarged from the late nineteenth century by processes of industrialisation and commercial expansion, an array of distinctive social, economic and political changes could be observed (Hall, 1998). The Chicago School of Sociology, which so many criminology and urban studies students are introduced to, was the result of its location in a city that had seen massive population and vertical expansion, alongside increasingly visible social problems that included violence, fraud, gangsterism and political corruption (Abbott, 1999). This book is in many ways an attempt to revisit but also rework these traditional roots, and to place the new urban condition we find ourselves in as the focal point of a new reading of crime in cities that combines the leading insights from urban studies with those of criminology. In this sense this is an interdisciplinary attempt at locating and understanding a range of distinctive harms that may be generated by, are more significant in or are concentrated in particular parts of the city. Our aim is not only to understand how and why crime, deviance and harm are linked to urban life, but also to critically evaluate the responses to such problems.

The complexity generated by urban life spawned an intellectual tradition devoted to those social problems that appeared in concentrated yet differentiated forms in the city (Sampson, 2012). When we bring to mind ‘the city’, this exercise often yields archetypal images of grand streetscapes, like those of modern Paris, Berlin or delirious and vertical New York, or imposing symbolic environments such as high-rise housing, degraded areas of public housing and slums. The ‘edginess’ of the city and its uncanny ability to unsettle us or remind us of repressed anxieties only increased the rewards of exploring it, especially on foot; the curiosity the city engendered even gave rise to schools of investigators obsessed with the concentrations of dangerous malcontents in slums or ‘rookeries’, whose malice was thought to be generated as much by their physical as social conditions. These conditions were charted in the work of pioneers like Booth (1902), Mayhew (1861), Riis (1890), Rowntree (1901) and countless other social investigators who saw the city as a space that produced conditions that were generative of crime and violence.

The contemporary urban condition is marked by violent robbery, assault, murder, war (and urbicide), financial catastrophe, air pollution, wilful neglect by the state, the presence of poverty, physical decline and other negative issues. Yet intellectual and empirical scoping of the harms linked to these conditions and outcomes requires a critical imagination. As analysts, including Merrifield (2014) and Lefebvre before him (1974), have suggested, a concern with the urban is also an interest in how changing social, political and economic relations displace, damage and dispossess those deemed to be surplus to the needs of city economies. The secondary effect of these forms of dislocation, inequality and symbolic violence often lies within those acts defined as criminal or experienced as harm. The problem of crime should drive us to locate those broader structures and processes by which criminal motivation and victimisation of various kinds are ultimately generated. Our ambition in this book is to offer a macroscopic view of city life, of its constituent institutions, social structures, economic life and the play of competing ideas over them to enable an understanding of the factors generating risks in cities today. Crime and social harm are, it seems, endemic to urban life, yet they are also a highly variable feature and a problem that primarily affects and damages the urban poor and excluded – whether these groups are found in the inner city, at its edge or in suburban areas.

If the city has been central to the development of the field of criminology, this has been largely implicit and rarely explicated:

Criminology has all too often taken space for granted, proceeding with an implicit notion of spatiality that approaches the environment simply as a geographic site and not as a product of power relations, cultural and social dynamics, or everyday rules and meanings.

(Hayward, 2012: 441)

Hayward (2004: 198) also points to how criminology has become more or less estranged from urban studies. Certainly, a glance through leading urban studies journals will reveal very little engagement from urban scholars with the topics of crime or social harm. Understandably, critical urban scholars have been wary of concerning themselves with narrow state or legal definitions of crime and disorder, or in other words, adopting social problems defined by the capitalist state as their own; but there has also been little interest from such scholars in recognising social harms in the city per se, often preferring – with some justification – to defend the city and the urban from its detractors. Criminologists have occasionally paid more than a passing interest in the city (see, e.g. Young, 2007; Wacquant, 2008) but it is still very rare indeed to see criminologists engaging with the main urban debates of the time, for example around gentrification, social housing or planetary urbanisation.

A social, physical, cultural and socio-technical space

Urban studies have increasingly sought to understand the entwining of complex actors, networks, infrastructures and events that comprise the city and urban environments more generally. The advantage of such ways of seeing the city lies in a more integrated and comprehensive understanding of how cities operate and also the deeper interests and generative inequalities produced in and through their everyday life. These entanglements of social and material forces and symbolic constructs suggest a need to be interested in the layout, planning and physical variability of cities, and the ways that these may in turn be generative of, or protective against, harms. These interests take in questions of cartography, planning, infrastructure, urban design and architecture, as well as the policing and control of urban spaces and the resistances that these may engender. This means paying heed to the nuances of what McFarlane (2011) calls ‘assemblage urbanism’, with assemblage taken to mean the kinds of complex mix of social and material forces that comprise urban systems.

Assemblage perspectives lend themselves well to an interest in how urban environments, conceived in broad terms, may be harmful to their inhabitants, and the kinds of harm to those environments that stem from the range of actors within them. Such an approach is explicated in Graham and Marvin’s (2001) book, Splintering Urbanism, in which they focus on ‘networked infrastructures’: the array of wires, ducts, tunnels, conduits, streets, highways and technical networks that interlace and infuse cities (p. 8). The city, they argue, is the result of complex and dynamic socio-technical processes that – while generally thought of as commonplace or ordinary and which are therefore overlooked – are central to an understanding of power relations in the city, or of the accumulations and histories of capital and technical know-how invested in metropolitan regions. Such networks create and reinforce existing forms of social stratification, such as the pathways of roads, boundaries of neighbourhoods and installation of sensory monitoring and surveillance systems.

In Seeing Like a City, Amin and Thrift (2017) argue it is the agglomeration of overlapping socio-technical systems that provides cities with their power and reach. ‘Citiness’, they suggest, is the ‘summative force of many entities, networks and socio-technical networks intersecting and colliding with each other’ (p. 2). The city is comprised of the unpredictable forms of agency sparked by the ‘liveliness of various bodies, materials, symbols, and intelligences held in relation within specific networks of calculation and allocation, undergirded by diverse regimes and rituals of organization and operation’ (p. 3). The task for urban scholars is one of reconstruction: to make visible a city’s hidden infrastructures while enabling an understanding of the roles that these play in moulding harms, and reinforcing or amplifying them for different social groups. There is a political purpose to this too in that ‘each of the tramlines of infrastructure contains its own peculiar forms of cruelty […] We use the word cruelty knowingly, since we are talking here about machines that legislate who and what lives in what form’ (p. 6). These cruelties and harms should be at the heart of urban criminology. And yet, as Amin and Thrift explain, cities also rely on organised forms of cruelty to non-humans in order to maintain the momentum of human lives within them. The liveliness of urban life that is so often celebrated is only possible because cities are also death machines involving the devouring of environmental and non-human animal resources such as the 20 billion chickens that, at any one time, await consumption at the tables of urban households. As Amin and Thrift put it, in a phrase resonant for urban criminologists: ‘cities are built by optimising the selfishness of one species at the expense in blood and pain of many others’ (p. 87). This way of understanding the city is especially powerful in illuminating the broad range of issues that may fall under the remit of a critical urban criminology.

Cities are comprised of diverse and discordant groups, cultures and experiences, and by forces that are themselves disordering and unevenly experienced. These include wealth, poverty and inequality, austerity, the withdrawal of states from public responsibilities, including in some cases even the rule of law, the neglect of urban projects and infrastructures, and the churn of people and their sifting and sorting by markets and bureaucratic forces. These are all aspects of what may appear to be a rich tapestry of human life (Glaeser, 2012) or instead a damning indictment of the inability of many nations and city administrations to tackle anti-human violence, disorder and harm to the excluded of those cities. The declaration of an urban age (Burdett and Sudjic, 2007) appears as a momentous event in human history. Yet instead of simply celebrating this condition we must also acknowledge how urbanisation damages many – through the profoundly uneven rewards and unfairness of many urban economies, its production of criminality and violence, its slum housing conditions and its degradation of ecological resources that generate second-order harms (Ferrell, 2013).

To understand the relationship between cities and crime we must be aware of the spa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. UNDERSTAND CRIME, UNDERSTAND THE CITY
• 2. PLACE AND LOCALITY: NEIGHBOURHOODS AND CRIME
• 3. URBAN ECONOMIES
• 4. GOVERNANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN THE URBAN ARENA
• 5. POLICING, THE POLICE AND SOCIAL ORDER IN THE CITY
• 6. URBAN VIOLENCE
• 7. HOUSING SYSTEMS, HOUSING TENURE AND THE DIS/ORDERLY CITY
• 8. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF URBAN SAFETY
• Index