Feeling Safe in the City: In Search of a Sociological Conceptualization

Abstract

The article problematizes the existence of a gap between the concepts of urban safety and the feeling of safety in the city. Urban safety is usually understood as a low crime rate and protection from other external threats. At the same time, the feeling of safety is associated with individual experiences, social identity and other social and psychological factors. The lack of a sociological understanding of the feeling of safety is a problem for further study of the phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to solve this problem. At the beginning, an overview of the developments in the study of safety in sociological theory is given, which connects the concept of safety with the concepts of risk and trust. Further, safety is considered taking into account its socio-emotional characteristics. The role of space in the emotional experiences of individuals is described. As a result, a definition of urban safety is proposed as a feeling based on the spectrum of social emotions and expressed through specific discourse and social actions.