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Social Control in Urban Criminology – Understanding Deviance and Public Order in Urban Space
Social Control in Urban Criminology – Understanding Deviance and Public Order in Urban Space
Tuesday, 12 July 2016: 10:45-12:15
Location: Seminar 52 (Juridicum)
RC29 Deviance and Social Control (host committee) Language: English
The past twenty years have seen an expansion of responsibility and competence amongst municipal and regional governments in addressing crime problems and implementing prevention and safety policies. The relationship between crime, insecurity and the social and physical environment has become a major theme both in criminological research and in practical crime prevention programs.
The (not so) new synthesis of crime and place has prompted control strategies like Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, Design Against Crime and Situational Crime Prevention, supported by new research methods in crime-science (space syntax analysis, geographic profiling, predictive policing).
While architects and urban planners emphasize preventive effects of spatial design, criminologists have developed a number of theories that address social conditions for the prevention of crime and delinquency (opportunity theory, routine activity theory, rational choice theory, crime pattern theory). Hence, guidelines for crime prevention in urban planning are based upon advanced techniques of crime analysis and concepts of informal social control such as “defensible space”, “social surveillance”, “broken windows” and “community crime prevention”.
However, from a sociological viewpoint, this approach of risk management is associated with a number of problems. New methods in risk assessment and new practices of “target hardening” may have unexpected consequences, e.g. the “crowding-out” of troublesome people for the benefit of order in “clean and proper” urban environments. Regarding the environment exclusively in criminogenic terms may neglect distinctive social, cultural and historical features of places.
We invite in particular experts in criminology and urban sociology to discuss crime prevention in “criminogenic places”.
Session Organizer: