Book review: Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City

The modern city and the forms of population management in its space are the most immediate and concrete evidence of capitalist exploitation and domination since its emergence with the bourgeois revolutions and the Industrial Revolution. A book on urban criminology therefore far surpasses the specialist interests of urban sociology and critical criminology. Moreover, after reading the book (of broad historical and theoretical scope), it is no exaggeration to state that it is impossible to think of the modern city without considering the forms used for controlling offences and offenders within its space. Urban Criminology is an extensive book with excellent and detailed treatment of the intersection between themes, concepts, and key references to enhance the understanding of this comprehensive interdisciplinary field. The first sentence of the introduction states clearly, "[t]o understand crime has been in many ways to understand the city" (p. 2). The converse of this statement would be no exaggeration, in that to understand the city is also to understand better the networks of political, economic, social, and cultural relations of crime, and their association with the production of space as it is built and lived. This book is structured around the consequent analysis of key topics for the construction of this com

Security Journal, 2014

2013

In the beginning of the 1990s, a new trend appeared within the field of criminology, allocating a new place to the spatial study of crime. This trend considers crime as the encounter of delinquents, victims or potential targets in a situation of failing control, in a given place for a given moment. French sociologist E. Durkheim pointed out that crime was normal for that it occurs in all societies, closely tied to the facts of collective life; that crime is inevitable because no society could ever be entirely crime free; and that crime can be useful as it is indispensable to the evolution of law and morality. But crime is also a societal invention, as societies decide what constitutes a crime or not. I suggest here to study this special relationship between crime and society for a given environment: the city. Cities are a preferred environment for deviant behaviors and criminality, but what are the relations between the urban environment and criminality?

2010

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 1995

Crimes are created by the interactions of potential offenders with potential targets in settings that make doing the crime easy, safe and profitable (see, e.g., Clarke, 1992; Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993a and 1993b; Felson, 1994). Fear of crime is created by situations and settings that make people feel vulnerable to victimization (see, e.g., Fisher and Nasar, 1992a and 1992b; Nasar and Fisher, 1992 and 1993; Brantingham et al., 1995). The urban settings that create crime and fear are human constructions, the by-product of the environments we build to support the requirements of everyday life: homes and residential neighbourhoods; shops and offices; factories and warehouses; government buildings; parks and recreational sites; sports stadia and theatres; transport systems, bus stops, roadways and parking garages. The ways in which we assemble these large building blocks of routine activity into the urban backcloth can have enormous impact on our fear levels and on the quantities, types and timing of the crimes we suffer. Although criminologists have argued this point in various ways for at least a hundred years (e.g., Ferri, 1896; Burgess, 1916; Shaw and McKay, 1942; Jeffery, 1971; Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993a and 1993b) it is only recently that large multi-purpose municipal data bases, in conjunction with police information systems, have begun to make it possible to actually explore how the juxtaposition of land uses and transport networks shapes the backcloth on which crime occurs. This paper attempts to set out some of the next steps in understanding the construction of the backcloth and its effects on crime. The model that will eventually emerge should provide us with a planning tool that will

Criminological Encounters, 2020

Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal, 2002

This paper is concerned with how both housing design and management and 'active citizenship' are perceived to influence crime and 'defensible space'. It explores the way in which criminals decode the 'active citizen', common housing designs and levels of safety within the British city.

Journal of Visual Culture, 2009

This article investigates the recent proliferation of crime-mapping software applications provided by police departments in dozens of US cities. In these maps, urban space is rendered according to prevailing notions of criminality, constructing a landscape of danger that borrows from and contributes to the wider visual culture of crime. In the aesthetic rendering of illegality, place is represented with the aim of revealing information with a social purpose, and in so doing it re-imagines real space according to dominant values about the nature of crime, criminals, and urban space. While the adoption of such mapping programs is justified using the rhetoric of community empowerment, their design supports a neo-liberal agenda of individual responsibility over safety in the context of outsourced security.

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 2010