Urban Violence and Insecurity
(2004)Description
I have chosen this book because i do gender studies and i knew that the author of the book Caroline Moser is a gender specialist working with tools for gender analysis in development planning for past 30 years. Also Moser is a lecturer in the University of Manchester and an academic specialising in social policy and urban anthropology in gender perspective. She introduces her book explaining how important is the problem of violence in the cities now, especially if we are talking about women. This the example of Ecuador she explains that if the streets are not safe for women, the city itself limitates life opportunities for women providing their social isolation. Moser argues the not static nature of urban violence which face is rapidly changing and propose to analyze violence as a multi-layered concept. To achieve this goal she points out the necessity to make a “skeleton” of urban violence: define multiple forms of violence, identify trends and characteristics, find causes and consequences and search for different types of interventions to reduce violence on different levels. The same challenges facing all urban researchers which articles are included in the book.
I decided to concentrate on one article that treats the theme of security and fear in urban spaces in South Africa with the title «A new apartheid? The spatial implications of fear of crime in Cape Town, South Africa» by Charlotte Lemanski. The author of the article - Charlotte Lemanski - is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. She concentrate her researches on the urban realities of South Africa analyzing concepts of gentrification, security, governance, integration in the patterns of cities. Lemanski worked with children in South Africa and made her doctoral research about social integration in post-apartheid Cape Town.
The research of Charlotte Lemanski was made in the context of the statistic of an alarming increase in serious crime over recent years that decreases security in South Africa. This article focuses specifically on Cape Town. Lemanski consider that «fear of crime is spatially, socially and temporally distributed» and in this conditions the sense of protection that is needed by citizens is expressed via urban forms. Lemanski operates with the concepts of «spatial response» and «risk management» to show how the emotions (fear, in this case) change the city landscape.
In the history of urbanism fear was always presented as influencing city planning and here Lemanski shows the examples of pre-modern city constructed walls and gates, “panoptic” prison design for anonymous surveillance of prisoners and even Haussman’s Parisian reconstruction that was guided by the fear of the new revolution. Nowadays new cities are planned concerning the strategies to minimize the sense of insecurity for the citizens but citizens have their own individual response to the fear.
Lemanski argues that the urban practices in Cape Town make a kind of spiral development and come back again to residential segregation but now these changes are not race-based but a result of a constant sense of fear. The end of apartheid were seen as an end the violence in South Africa, but since 1990 a new wave of urban criminal activity is spreading into previously protected white suburbs. The statistics of 2002 indicate that although violent crime is decreasing, robbery and residential burglary are increasing. Despite reductions in some crime levels, one-third of crimes in South Africa are violent. Regarding sociospatial distribution of institutional resources not all citizens of Cape Town are protected equally: despite lower crime rates in former white areas, they host the majority of police stations, and inhabitants are more protected by infrastructure (e.g. private cars, street lighting) and better able to afford private security. In contrast, poorer blacks inhabit areas with weak “defensible space” (e.g. no street lighting or telephones, abandoned open spaces), are poorly policed and cannot afford private security. This spatial distribution of victimization and resources strongly affects fear of crime.
The fear presents as a common sense in Cape Town: in 1998 only 28% of Capetonians felt “very safe” in their daytime residential area compared to almost 60% in the nation as a whole. In the absence of urban controls citizens are responding independently on this insecurity and fear-provoked residential fortification is common to both poor and wealthy even if the practices are not equal for different social groups. To avoid crime South Africans not only use basic strategies such as dogs, window grilles and high fences but also fortifying entire neighbourhoods, closing street access, erecting electrified fences and high walls, as well as employing private security guards and CCTV to patrol and monitor their citadels. This desire for maximum security has led to numerous illegally enclosed neighbourhoods and the authorities can’t control the process so fast.
As a result enclosing neighbourhoods have had a perverse effect, leaving both public and private spaces devoid of natural surveillance and thereby less safe. The sense of insecurity in the city has divided black and white people, rich and poor by creating a «tribal territorialism» that served to increase fears and deepen segregation. Replacing public space with private space made a decline in public order while segregation encouraged the polarization of social groups in distinct universes. These enclaves deepen the segregation and reinforce fear by excluding difference and limiting social mixing, thus increasing paranoia and mistrust between groups. These enclaves deepen the segregation and reinforce fear by excluding difference and limiting social mixing promoting escapist mentalities (here author shoes good example with the frase “not in my back yard”).
Charlotte Lemanski concludes that «high walls, dogs, armed guards and enclosed neighbourhoods have not brought peace of mind but have reproduced fears (via «talk of crime»), as homogenous groups are sociospatially distanced from their «other». She claims that these fear-provoked practices are similar to urban apartheid as the apartheid encouraged all races to consider themselves separate nations with distinct physical boundaries. But now these boundaries are more than real and they make Cape Town a «city of exclusions, not inclusions». As an alternative solution she proposes the reconciliation of urban planning and citizen needs in order to embrace diversity and combat symbolic exclusionism. But for Lemanski it can happen only if we admit sociospatial nature of fear.
For me this article is interesting because it evokes the relation between the space and the sentiment. We live in the city and we use urban spaces but we have a sense of each space, an emotion with is related with every practice made in this space. In my specialization «Geography and Gender» we use the concept of «space of fear» that helps to analyze how women use urban spaces including through their feelings of space, their subjective perception of the space. Unfortunately, Charlotte Lemanski doesn’t work in gender perspective but for urban planning studying her approach can be very interesting.