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.

How does the city’s urban fabric relate to crime and fear, and how is that fabric affected by crime and fear? Does the urban environment affect one’s decision to commit an offence? Is there a victimisation-related inequality within cities? How do crime and fear interrelate to inequality and segregation in cities of developing countries? What are the challenges to planning cities which are both safe and sustainable? This book searches for answers to these questions in the nature of the city, particularly in the social interactions that take place in urban space distinctively guided by different land uses and people’s activities. In other words, the book deals with the urban fabric of crime and fear. The novelty of the book is to place safety and security issues on the urban scale by (1) showing links between urban structure, and crime and fear, (2) illustrating how different disciplines deal with urban vulnerability to (and fear of) crime (3) including concrete examples of issues and challenges found in European and North American cities, and, without being too extensive, also in cities of the Global South.

Discusses many of the ways that New York City dropped its crime rate between the years of 1991 and 2000.

Jamie J. Fader documents the transition to adulthood for a particularly vulnerable population: young inner-city men of color who have, by the age of eighteen, already been imprisoned. How, she asks, do such precariously situated youth become adult men? What are the sources of change in their lives? Falling Back is based on over three years of ethnographic research with black and Latino males on the cusp of adulthood and incarcerated at a rural reform school designed to address “criminal thinking errors” among juvenile drug offenders. Fader observed these young men as they transitioned back to their urban Philadelphia neighborhoods, resuming their daily lives and struggling to adopt adult masculine roles. This in-depth ethnographic approach allowed her to portray the complexities of human decision-making as these men strove to “fall back,” or avoid reoffending, and become productive adults. Her work makes a unique contribution to sociological understandings of the transitions to adulthood, urban social inequality, prisoner reentry, and desistance from offending.

City Limits contributes to a growing body of work under the umbrella of 'cultural criminology', which attempts to bring an appreciation of cultural change to an understanding of crime in late modernity (Hayward and Young 2004). Hayward presents an ambitious theoretical analysis that attempts to inspire a 'cultural approach' to understanding the 'crime-city nexus' and, in particular, to re-address 'strain' and the concept of 'relative deprivation' in the context of a culture of consumption. The book incorporates an impressive array of literature from beyond the boundaries of traditional criminology - including urban studies, social theory and, most strikingly, from art and architectural criticism - illustrating a multidisciplinary approach. This provides for a challenging and enlightening read, with a particularly important emphasis on the impact of consumer culture on the lived urban experience and spatial dynamics of the city and, in turn, for an understanding of transgression and criminality. Runner-up for the British Society of Criminology Book Prize (2004).

A Southern Criminology of Violence, Youth and Policing examines public experiences of insecurity and the social impacts of security programmes that aim to address violence in Brazil. This book contributes to the emerging field of southern criminology by engaging with the perils faced by people living in 'favelas' in Brazil and critically investigating the discourse of state actors. It combines original ethnographic data with critical analysis to expand understandings of violence and control in urban and postcolonial contexts. This study challenges dominant practices and notions of security and control. Its objective is to decolonise knowledge and shed light on issues relating to policing, coercion, and the great socioeconomic, historical and spatial inequalities that shape the lives of millions of people in the Global South. The findings of this book expose the exacerbation of social problems by the expansion of the penal and crime industry, unsettling the applicability and universalism of mainstream managerial criminology. The evidence reveals that new modes of securitisation have not addressed long-standing issues of sexism, racism, classism and brutalisation in the police. Moreover, through the increasing use of methods of control and incarceration, security programmes have failed to prevent diverse forms of violence and challenge the expansion of organised crime. Instead they have exacerbated the inequalities that affect the most marginalised populations. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about the social injustices that exists in the Global South.

Policing Cities brings together international scholars from numerous disciplines to examine urban policing, securitization, and regulation in nine countries and the conceptual issues these practices raise. Chapters cover many of the world’s major cities, including New York, Beijing, Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Boston, Melbourne, and Toronto, as well as other urban areas in Britain, United States, South Africa, Germany, Australia and Georgia. The collection examines the activities and reforms of the traditional public police, but also those of emerging public and private policing agents and spaces that fall outside the public police’s purview and which previously have received little attention. It explores dramatic changes in public policing arrangements and strategies, exclusion of urban homeless people, new forms of urban surveillance and legal regulation, and securitization and militarization of urban spaces. The core argument in the volume is that cities are more than mere background for policing, securitization and regulation. Policing and the city are intimately intertwined. This collection also reveals commonalities in the empirical interests, methodological preferences, and theoretical concerns of scholars working in these various disciplines and breaks down barriers among them. This is the first collection on urban policing, regulation, and securitization with such a multi-disciplinary and international character. This collection will have a wide readership among upper level undergraduate and graduate level students in several disciplines and countries and can be used in geography/urban studies, legal and socio-legal studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and criminology courses.