Urban Fear Research Articles

Navigating danger through nuisance: Racialized urban fears, gentrification, and sensory enskilment in Amsterdam

AbstractIn this article, I employ the notion of sensory enskilment to investigate the embodied relations through which White Dutch middle‐class residents of the Indische Buurt, a rapidly gentrifying multicultural neighborhood in the east of Amsterdam, learn to tune in to sensory nuisance to discern safe and unsafe bodies and places in their surroundings. The analysis involves examining those institutional and interactional avenues of (unwitting) sensory learning through which habituated perceptual patterns of stigmatization that conflate the everyday sensory order of Moroccan‐Dutch youths with feelings of urban insecurity are cultivated, produced, and consolidated. Studying the ways in which sensory knowledge is implicated in the reproduction of socioeconomic exclusions in contested urban territories can shed new light on discussions around urban sensory politics and draw attention to the enrolment of the senses in revanchist urban renewal.

Fear and Architecture: Learning from Mega-Projects and Canal Istanbul as a Case

Fear has been a fundamental aspect of human existence throughout history, and its connection with architecture has evolved as cities and the built environment have changed. Mega-projects, such as Canal Istanbul, play a significant role in shaping urban fear. Considering this fact, this study explores the relationship between fear and architecture in the context of mega-projects, with a focus on the case of Canal Istanbul, to define fear, identify its different types (environmental, socio-economic, technological), and examine their common underlying factor: generating a situation of uncertainty. The research investigates the Canal Istanbul project as a case study, presenting arguments supported by theoretical sources to explore the relationship between fear, architecture, and uncertainty. In this regard, this study adopts a qualitative and interpretive research approach. It provides insights into the potential consequences of the Canal Istanbul project concerning fear and architecture by emphasizing the importance of transparency and public participation in mega-projects, highlighting the need for detailed analysis and scientific references. Overall, the research contributes to understanding the interplay between fear, architecture, and mega-projects, offering valuable insights for future urban planning and development.

Bezpańska biopolityka – Maszyna zoologiczna, zdziczałe ekologie i polityczne potencjały zwierzęcego uwspólniania

The Stray Biopolitics - The Zoological Machine, Feral Ecologies and the Political Potentials of Animal Commoning The article seeks to develop an alternative model of biopolitics based on the experience of stray dogs in the context of the transformation of the modern urban fabric. Its main goal is to show, on the one hand, that the purificatory actions of biopower in the context of street-dwelling dogs were an inalienable condition of modern urbanization in the West Atlantic variant, which made one of its pillars the multi-scalar process of spatial segregation of nonhuman animals. On the other, to offer such a look at strayness that, by violating the modern zoological machine and disarming the urban fear of animal collectivity, would open urban politics and urbanization to new possibilities emerging from the experience of the multispecies crowd. Another important task of the article will be to rethink the ontological status of stray dogs, which elude most, essentially biopolitical classifications of urban animals, revealing the political potential of the category of ferality. The article consists of five parts. In the first, I refer to existing accounts of animal biopolitics, noting their merits and the main limitation, namely, the lack of in-depth reflection on such a politics of life that would take into account the autonomy and agency of animal subjects. In the second, I develop the notion of the zoological machine (with reference to Agamben’s philosophy), having in mind the semiotic-material apparatuses responsible for the production and maintenance of species differences, as well as the concealment of related violence. The third part serves to show its workings through the example of stray dogs in Victorian cities. My focus here – following Chris Pearson – is to show the interdependent processes of canine killing and the emergence of dogopolis (i.e., new, typically Western dog-human relationships), which turn out to be a key component of modern urbanization. In part four, I analyze the potentials of “ferality”, seeing it as a field of opportunity for alternative interspecies practices that hold the promise of disarming the Western zoological machine. The fifth part and the conclusion serve to present two key cases (Moscow and Chernobyl), against the background of which I develop the aforementioned biopolitical alternative. In doing so, I use such concepts as commoning, inhabitation, and the figure of the neighbor.

The Everyday Fears of the Country of the Soviets

This review analyses Dangerous Soviet Things: Urban Legends and Fears in the USSR, a book by A. Arkhipova and A. Kirzyuk that was published by the Novoye Literaturnoye Obozrenie publishing house in 2020. The research studies Soviet urban legends from the point of view of their typologisation and the description of the nature of existence and interpretation of the plots presented. The sources of urban folklore are reports of the KGB from the Soviet republics, case investigations, letters from Soviet citizens, and information from the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. These documents reflect those events that caused the most acute social reaction: this manifested itself in the emergence and spread of folklore plots that caused changes in everyday behaviour. The authors refer to the experience of Western anthropological research and conclude that it is advisable to use a set of scholarly approaches (interpretive, memetic, and operational) that offer their own tools for working with folklore texts: this determines the methodological novelty of the work. Focusing on the definition of the genre of the “urban legend”, Arkhipova and Kirzyuk divide the collected material not only according to wider plots, but also according to the type of actualisation (the authorities’ initiative or “horizontally” spread in society) and functions (prevention, protection, agitation, propaganda). According to the reviewer, the book offers unique folklore material and universal ways to interpret such material.

The urban fabric and fear of crime: the case of the compact city of Bilbao, Spain

ABSTRACT This research examines the influence that a compact city’s urban fabric can have on fear of crime. To this end, the Spanish city of Bilbao, a compact city where the population’s fear of crime is higher than might be expected given low rates of victimization, was taken as a case study. Based on a comparative study of five of the city’s neighborhoods, the research used an inter-scalar analysis. Surveys were used to gather data about individuals’ fear of crime and places they avoided; and an observational and morphological analysis was carried out to analyze the urban characteristics of these places. The study produced two main results: first, Bilbao witnesses little fear of crime during the day and moderate fear at night, usually centered around the same spaces; second, the spaces avoided are usually related to singularities in the urban fabric, which include hermetic buildings, large green areas, urban borders, and interruptions. We concluded that some aspects of fear of crime at an environmental level are related to shortcomings in urban planning at the territorial and district levels. The study contributes to the field by providing a methodological tool addressing a gap in research connecting individual fear of crime and urban planning.

Exploring Urban Fear of Crime using Unsupervised Classification - The Case of Athens

This publication examines whether urban landscapes, exhibiting different spatial and thematic characteristics, can affect the fear local residents feel about crime. The purpose of this research is therefore to explore the correlation of the fear of crime in modern cities with urban, environmental and social characteristics. In order to verify this postulation, the Municipality of Athens was set as study area and a wide questionnaire-based survey was conducted. A dedicated web platform (http://www.fearofcrime.com/) was employed to collect, analyse and visualize crowd fear experiences and their spatial distribution. Over 900 participants have contributed relevant data to be further explored. In order to meet the above objective and facilitate the process, the respondents and their answers were grouped into clusters via unsupervised classification. The variables were formed by all respondents’ answers and the k-means algorithm was used. From this process, groupings of a certain number of clusters emerged. The distribution of each cluster was determined on the seven City Districts of the Municipality of Athens, which were used as spatial reference units, revealing the largest and smallest concentrations. Thus emerged the image of how the phenomenon of urban fear of crime is shaped in the different districts of the Municipality of Athens.

Perceived safety and fear of crime: A web-based GIS platform.

Fear of crime is a social phenomenon that mainly affects the population of urban communities and it is recognized as an issue by both the academic community and society itself. To study the phenomenon, it is necessary to collect primary data, either using traditional data collection methods or using well-established online questionnaires. This paper describes the process and architecture of developing an interactive data survey, analysis, and geovisualization web-based platform to support online questionnaires and surveys, related to the urban fear of crime. The main goal is to provide tools and utilities for researchers, journalists, groups or individuals, interested in the scientific aspect of fear of crime, to collect related data and analyze them within a common interface. The fear of crime platform utilizes a client-server Web-GIS application that gives access to a worldwide spatial database. As the fear of crime platform is a dynamic ecosystem that grows up every day, this database is also growing proportionally by individuals around the world. The project’s development is accessible at the following web address: www.fearofcrime.com

Arkhipova A.; Kirzyuk A. Dangerous Soviet Things: Urban Legends and Fears in the USSR. Moscow: New Literary Review, 2020. 536 p. Reviewed by G.S. Shirokalova

Arkhipova A.; Kirzyuk A. Dangerous Soviet Things: Urban Legends and Fears in the USSR. Moscow: New Literary Review, 2020. 536 p. Reviewed by G.S. Shirokalova

Territorial expression of urban fear: the spread of gated communities in Lithuania

This article presents the analysis of the spread of gated communities in Lithuania considering the theoretical basis and the impact of ‘culture of fear’. The ‘urban fear’ is considered as a complex of anxieties that involves fear of changes, instability and disorder as well as non-acceptance of differences, diversity and the ‘others’. Those fears and the need for social control create the model of gated living, in which not only gated communities but also gated mentality plays an important role. Thus gated communities appear to be both the consequence and the reason of mental ‘gatedness’ as well as unsustainable development of modern cities, in which the demand for gating is produced by fear-creating media and real estate developers. The study was made in suburban areas of three main Lithuanian cities, identifying gated communities and other fenced (but not guarded) neighbourhoods and housing developments. The features of their physical enclosure, security measures and community building were recorded. A total of 129 suburban gated communities and nearly 390 other fenced neighbourhoods were identified. The analysis of gated communities` spread revealed changes not only in the amount and territorial distribution but also in ‘gatedness’ of gated communities in Lithuania.

Perceived Safety and Fear of Crime: Design and Implementation of an Interactive Data Survey, Analysis and Geovisualisation Web-Based Platform

Fear of crime is a social problem, usually affecting the population of urban communities. More and more people see and recognize it as a problem within and for the society. Nowadays, technology has rapidly evolved, resulting new methods for data collection like online surveys. In this paper we present the process and architecture of developing an interactive data survey, analysis and geovisualisation web-based platform to support web based online questionnaires related to the urban fear of crime. Our main goal is to provide tools and utilities for researchers and journalists, interested in the scientific aspect of fear of crime, in order to collect, spatially visualize and manipulate such data. The fear of crime platform utilizes a client-server Web-GIS application that gives to scientists and researchers access to a world – wide spatial database. As Fear of crime platform is a dynamic ecosystem that grows up every day, this database is also growing proportionally by individuals around the world.

Living in a High-Rise Apartment Building: Fears and Anxieties of Young People

The article deals with the problem of high-rise construction of residential buildings in the context of the emergence of fears of living in them. The urban environment transforms human biological fears, while simultaneously creating conditions for the emergence of new contradictions that can generate urban fears. Living in multi-apartment high-rise buildings changes the space of social interactions with neighbors and affects human satisfaction. In 2020, we conducted a sociological study, the object of which was the young residents of Yekaterinburg (Russia). Based on the results of in-depth interviews (n = 10), the article argues that traditional (life-threatening) fears of life on a high floor remain in the minds of young people. However, at the same time, the experience of living on a high floor causes the emergence of new fears, which significantly expand the repertoire of youth fears: fear of using gas stoves, difficulties in selling, mistrust of housing developers, etc. In the context of the intensification of high-rise construction, the presented public opinion of the townspeople can act as a significant factor in the design of buildings and urban space.

Rumor: Is It Harmless Folklore or?.. [Slukh: bezobidnyi fol’klor ili?..]: A Review of Dangerous Soviet Things: Urban Legends and Fears in the USSR [Opasnye sovetskie veshchi: gorodskie legendy i strakhi v SSSR], by A. Arkhipova and A. Kirziuk

Rumor: Is It Harmless Folklore or?.. [Slukh: bezobidnyi fol’klor ili?..]: A Review of Dangerous Soviet Things: Urban Legends and Fears in the USSR [Opasnye sovetskie veshchi: gorodskie legendy i strakhi v SSSR], by A. Arkhipova and A. Kirziuk

Popular geopolitics ‘beyond the screen’: Bringing Modern Warfare to the city

Popular culture – in this case military-themed videogames – has been argued to mould and shape popular understandings of the geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’. To date, most attention has been focused on the geopolitical representations of a ‘final’ popular cultural text or object. Less attention has been paid to how popular understandings of geopolitics and military violence have been constructed and commodified prior to, and ‘beyond the screen’. Empirically, the paper examines the marketing campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Through the use of experiential marketing, I show how the game’s launch night incorporated spectacular displays, performances and consumer interactions to sell the pleasures of virtual war by drawing on geopolitical fears of terrorism and military violence within major Western cities. Firstly, I demonstrate how marketing engaged with and transformed urban spaces extending the popular geopolitics of virtual war. Secondly, the paper reveals how experiential marketing targeted and encouraged connections with and between attendees’ bodies. Thirdly, I demonstrate how such events promote geopolitical encounters which extend beyond the temporal and the spatial confines of the marketing event itself. Ultimately, the paper reveals how urban fears surrounding the global ‘war on terror’ were employed to sell the pleasures and geopolitics of virtual war.

Mechanism of value capture on gated community housing by developers in Jakarta Metropolitan Area

We reviewed the state of the art on gated community development, property valuation, and value capture literature to discuss how gated housing serves as a mechanism for land value capture by developers. Land value capture, instead of measures such as urban fears and segregation, justifies developers’ action to build impenetrable walls around their residential development projects. Previous works on housing markets in JMR suggests that housing products tend to be overpriced. We found early indications that enclosing physical boundaries on housing projects were positively correlated to residential price growth in Jakarta Metropolitan Regional (JMR). We used a study case embedded design for this initial research with mixed analysis data method. Our results show and argue that the real estate developers’ motive to install walls and gates in their residential projects is to enhance the existing land value. The ratio of land value on housing inside the gated area is 1,5 up to 7 times more higher than the surrounding area outside the gate. Our study helps to develop an understanding of the motive behind the gating trends in housing development projects. All of the information is substantially useful to help public sector working on managed residential land sustainably.

Coping with Fears in Everyday Urban Mobility

The paper is focused on the interrelations between citizens’ everyday mobilities and the ways they cope with urban fears. It describes situations when people expect and experience security threats that trigger their fears, while moving in the city. To deal with fears urban citizens develop coping strategies - a set of actions that helps them to manage their emotional experiences. Coping strategies transform various elements of everyday urban mobility and, thus, rearrange and redefine it. The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with Moscow residents and digital diaries of emotions.

‘Live where the terrorists live’: Urban safety, diverse neighbourhoods and bomb blasts in Manchester and Mumbai

This article is a brief commentary on new geographies of urban fear emerging in ‘post‐blast’ cities. Most anthropologists studying the city through its blasts and bombs and exploring the aftermath of violence in areas afflicted by religious, racial and communal tensions, show how these events subsequently lead to ghettoization and segregated living, as majority communities both edge out and cordon off areas from minority inhabitants and mixed ethnic life. Using Manchester and Mumbai as ethnographic landscapes, the author shows how certain residential areas in both cities turn towards accommodating large numbers of Muslim residents – not to overtly sustain interreligious and interracial trust and communication, but as a form of safety and security in everyday urban life.

A city in liquid modernity: a sociological perspective

Abstract. Western culture grew out of conviction about the social nature of man. It is based on the assumption that man is a social being, that he is a resident of the city. The most unpleasant image for an ancient man was the prospect of living outside the city, being excluded from its borders. The city is like a way of being, an expression of our social way of existence. Aristotle spoke of human nature, that its embodiment is a polis. This community life builds human identity. Such an image of a human being, as a creature entangled in the city space, is still valid today. Until recently Hannah Arendt wrote that our human condition is to participate in public space, that human life is humanized in our community, it defines our being as human. Today, however, the concept of the city has changed and the concept of space has taken on a different meaning. The city is not something stable and unchanging, on the contrary – today it is in constant motion, its feature is its liquidity. The feature of city residents is mobility and absolute freedom of movement. Our imaginations of space and boundaries, the understanding of what is local and global have changed. The world of borders has been replaced with our idea of the transparency of the city – nowadays one can not hide anymore. Under the influence of many socio-economic changes, the emergence of new forms of communication, the city has changed not only its physical form, but – above all – our human condition. It ceased to provide us with a sense of security and the ability to identify, but threw into an area of boundless possibilities. This dynamics of changes also reflects the way of describing the city: a map that served premoderns to describe the geographical city, in the modern world it has to be a grid that imposes itself on the city plan. This physical distribution of the city is now to be subordinated and adapted to the spatial plan of the city – this is the vision of a perfect, utopian and happy modern city. Modernity, says Zygmunt Bauman, does not just want to describe what is, but to map and impose space on the map. Today, we have got rid of this utopian idea of ordering according to our own plan. Under the influence of changes, we have become residents of space without borders. Bauman, this our way of being today, describes as liquidity. Does this mean, however, that we have lost the foundations of our human lives that have defined us as people? Is this shrinkaging of the city space and the lack of a city street an embodiment of our new contemporary condition? Perhaps today's city no longer belongs to the inhabitants of polis, but to the invaders? Perhaps the city's inhabitants will be permanently accompanied by the urban fear of lack of domicile. The aim of my speech is to show what changes accompany the city and us as residents of the city as well as to present the cultural consequences of these changes.

قراءة تحليلية في عمران الخوف دراسة حالة المجتمعات المسورة بالقاهرة الکبرى Perusal on Urban Fear Case study of the Gated Communities in Greater Cairo

تعرف الأشياء بأضدادها، فلولا وجود الخوف ما کان للأمان معنى. إلا أن للعمارة رأي آخر. ترى کارين فرانک في مراجعتهالکتاب عمارة الخوف أن هناک اختلافا جوهريا بين عمارة الخوف وعمارة الأمان؛ فعمارة الخوف ترتبط بدوافع شعورية بعدم الأمانوبالتالي تستدعي موقفا دفاعي ا أما العمارة الساعية لتحقيق الأمان فتکون أقل اعتمادا على الدوافع الشعورية وترتبط أکثر بملابساتمادية ملحوظة. التصنيف الأشهر للمجتمعات المسورة يعتمد على أسباب وجود الأسوار ويصنفها إما تبعا لنوعية الحياة التي تقدمهاأو المستوي المادي لساکنيها أو مستوي الأمان. هذا البحث يهتم أکثر بتحري مدخل الخوف لفهم الممارسات المعمارية الساعيةلتحقيق الأمان، والمجتمعات المسورة هي أحد تجليات عمارة الخوف أو عمارة المخاطرة کما تسميها ايريک دينيس فهي مخاطرةحضرية بالخروج من القلب الى الحواف. يهدف البحث الى التعرض لهذه الظاهرة من خلال استکشاف بعض من تجليات الخوفوخصوصا البعد المکاني واختيار الموقع المنفصل من خلال عمران المجتمعات المسورة على أطراف القاهرة ثم قياس درجةالإحساس بالأمان لساکنيها .في ضوء غياب الإحصاءات الرسمية الدقيقة التي يمکن الاعتماد عليها لقياس درجة الأمان، تعتمد منهجية البحث على جمعالمعلومات بشکل اولي من ساکني المجتمعات المسورة. هذا الشق الميداني تم عن طريق طرح استبيان اعتمد في صياغة أسئلته علىقراءة نظرية لقضية الأمان في المجتمعات المسورة الغربية وبالاعتماد على مقاييس الأمان المعتمدة في المصادر الأجنبية. يتکونالبحث من ثلاثة محاور؛ الأول، تأسيسا نظريا يبدأ بمقدمة عن عمران الخوف وتجلياته في المجتمعات المسورة، الثاني، رؤية نقديةلمنظومة القرارات الکلية التي ساهمت في استحداث الطلب عن هذه التجمعات العمرانية والتي يستجيب لها العرض العقاري فيالنهاية أو إعادة قراءة هذه المجتمعات في ضوء نظريات العمران المکافح للجريمة، أما المحور الثالث فينتقل من النظرية الى الواقعبالتعرف على درجة تحقق الأمان في عدد من المجتمعات المسورة على أطراف القاهرة الکبرى. ويختتم البحث بانعکاسات حولثقافة الخوف والصراع الطبقي من خلال ما ترسخه وسائل الاعلام الجماهيرية من صورة ذهنية. Things are known by their antagonists; if fear did not exist, safety would have no meaning. However, this does not apply to architecture. Karen Frank - in her review of “The Architecture of Fear” book - argues that there is a fundamental difference between the architecture of fear and the architecture of safety. The first is interrelated with insecurity and thus calls for defensive action, while safety-seeking architecture is more closely interrelated with physical circumstances. The most common classification of gated communities depends on the reasons behind the gating and classify them into three categories: lifestyle, prestige, and security. This research is more concerned with investigating the fear approach to understand architectural practices seeking safety. The gated communities are considered one of the manifestations of the architecture of fear or the architecture of risk - as Eric Denis calls it - an urban risk of getting out of the heart to the edges. The research aims to uncover this phenomenon by exploring some manifestations of urban fear, especially the spatial dimension and the choice of the isolated location of gated communities on the outskirts of Cairo then measure the degree of feeling of safety for its inhabitants. Due to the absence of reliable statistics to measure the degree of safety, the research methodology relies on collecting information from residents of gated communities. This fieldwork has based a questionnaire where all questions rely on rereading theories of safety as well as safety manuals for western gated communities. The research consists of three main axes; first, the theoretical base begins with an introduction to urban fear and its manifestations in the gated communities. Second, a critical review of the system of macro-decisions that contributed to the creation of demand for these urban communities, thus responds to the real estate supply in the end. In other words, reread these communities in light of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design CPTED. Third, an empirical study to identify the degree of security achieved in several gated communities on the periphery of Greater Cairo. The research concludes with reflections on the culture of fear influenced by mass media.

Discipline and Murder: Panoptic Pedagogy and the Aesthetics of Detection in J.G. Ballard’s Running Wild

Abstract My essay proposes a reading of J.G. Ballard’s 1988 novella Running Wild as a cautionary crime story, a parable about the self-fulfilling prophecies of contemporary urban fears and about the “prisons” they create in a consumerist, technology- and media-dominated civilization. Interpreted in the light of Foucault’s concept of panopticism, Ballard’s gated community as a crime setting reveals how a disciplinary pedagogy meant to obtain “docile bodies,” masked under the socially elitist comfort of affluence and parental care, “brands” the inmate-children as potential delinquents and ultimately drives them to an act of “mass tyrannicide.” Ballard uses the murder story as a vehicle for the exploration of the paradoxical effects of a regime of total surveillance and of mediated presence, which, while expected to make “murder mystery” impossible, allows for the precession of the representation to the real (crime). The essay also highlights the way in which Ballard both cites and subverts some of the conventions of the Golden Age detective fiction, mainly by his rejection of the latter’s escapist ethos and by the liminal character of his investigator, at once part of a normalizing panoptic apparatus and eccentric to it, a “poetic figure” (Chesterton) relying on imagination and “aestheticizing” the routines of the detection process.

A(nother) geography of fear: Burmese labour migrants in George Town, Malaysia

While scholarship around urban fear has brought forward important insights around the relationship between fear, mobility and social exclusion, questions relating to legal exclusion have largely been left outside the scope of inquiry. In cities around the world there are, however, a growing number of people who are not only de facto excluded from rights to/within the city (based on their gender, class, age etc.) – but de jure excluded based on their non-citizen or ‘illegal’ status in the host country. Drawing upon field work conducted in the Malaysian city George Town this study examines how both regular and irregular Burmese migrants perceive safety and danger in the city and how this, in turn, influences how they navigate urban space. The results of the study reveal how the migrants in George Town navigate the city as a ‘borderscape’ – producing a(nother) geography of fear which does not primarily reflect a fear of crime but rather a fear of state institutional practices, such as police controls, road blocks and raids. This shows, the paper argues, the need to pay attention towards both social and legal exclusions when examining how people in cities around the world are able to access and take possession of urban space.