Book Review
The Safe City. Safety and Urban Development in European Cities
Leo van Den Berg, Peter M. J. Pol, Guiliano Mingardo & Carolien J. M. Speller (Eds) Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006, ISBN 0 7546 4723 4, 344 pp., £60
In urban development of today safety has become one of the most important issues. Not only do urban citizens fear criminals and “thugs” on the streets, but also terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Therefore it is indeed a vital issue to go behind the superficial analysis in the media to find out more about peoples’ actual fear and its relation to actual risks. As the authors of The Safe City claim, perceived fear influences urban life and economy to a large extent today. Fear and safety do have an impact on urban development. But being such an important topic put high on the politician’s agenda, applied research around it still appears to be mostly apolitical and the analysis is kept at a very instrumental level. I am afraid this book does not prove to be otherwise.
The Safe City is a collection and comparison of case studies from 11 European cities. Initiated by the mayor of Rotterdam, these cities were invited to share their experiences within the existing European URBACT SecurCity network. The network of SecurCity has since 2004 been working for “improvement and effectiveness of policies and actions to combat (perceived) insecurity in the participant cities”. In each city presented in this anthology similar research has been conducted through a model called SAP; per-ceived Security, urban Attractiveness and spatial behaviour, and Policy reactions, in relation to urban development. The study aims to provide answers to the question of the role of security in urban development in the twenty-first century and understand what the local policy implications are. It is with a special focus on fear, and the relation between fear, actual crime rates and urban attractiveness, that these studies have been carried out. The book is also intended to contribute to knowledge exchange between the cities and documented successful safety projects. Interviews with key persons in each city and analyses of policy documents are the main sources. In the different cities a special project or programme are studied around one of three themes: (1) area-based safety problems, (2) drugs and insecurity, and (3) youth crime and insecurity. The structure of the book is an introductory evaluation of some existing theories on safety and urban development, followed by 11 case studies, of which the study of Rotterdam is the major one. The book concludes with an evaluation and a synthesis of the material presented.
The case studies give a good insight in different urban “stories” and are indeed interest-ing to read. The final chapter, called “Synthesis” is also a fine attempt to really make use of the gathered knowledge.
Frankly speaking, however, the book gives an impression of a serious and deep investi-gation of safety work and their real outcomes, but under the surface of this academic approach not much new can be found. In their aim to work for “the improvement of ISSN 0965-4313 print=ISSN 1469-5944 online=07=030453 – 4 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080=09654310601079497
safety and the quality of life” (p. 265), they forsake the social and political complexity underlying this agenda. Gender, class and ethnicity divides are virtually absent from the book, a flaw that inevitably leads to the confirmation of existing social hierarchies and urban orders. The theoretical base is wide and goes back to Maslow from the 1940s and Myrdal from the 1950s, but the whole critical debate on safety and fear which has been growing since the 1980s, Mike Davis amongst others, are sidestepped (except for refer-ences to Nan Ellin).
To be fair, social inequalities are mentioned as a driving force into criminal acts, but that is nothing that is generally included or taken into further analysis. Class and ethnicity are mentioned as in high and low income groups and the need of integration of immigrants. But since power relations are excluded, a hidden norm shines through the text and reveals that the underline is the White middle-class male perspective.
For example, in the case study of Antwerp the author writes about criminal activities among specific ethnic groups, like the Jewish, Moroccan, Albanian and Russian, which “contributed to greater feelings of insecurity among the Antwerp population” (p.79). Later the author also complains (?) that it is “hardly possible to discuss the role of foreign people in urban development” or to talk about problem districts; “they are euphe-mistically indicated as ‘districts needing attention’ or ‘underprivileged neighbourhoods’” (p. 81). But recently the author sees that “taboos” have been broken down and issues like camera monitoring and the possibility of penalizing people for minor offences have become more easy (p. 81). Groups considered at risk, like youth, unemployed and ethnic minorities, needs to be better integrated to reduce crime rates, according to the author (p. 83). When the recently arrived inhabitants react to this treatment and organize themselves to control the actual activities of the police surveillances, the author writes “this might further hinder an effective police operation in Antwerp” (p. 85).
The idea of immigrants as a problem is set in the theoretical chapter where the editors argue that the
Discussions about the impact of immigration on the security of a city are often troubled by taboos. It can be argued, however, that immigrants often have a rela-tively weak position in the labour market, caused by lack of linguistic skills and lack of education and/or degrees. Without a regular job, immigrants can be inclined to find other (informal) ways to raise money, which can sometimes lead to commit-ting crimes. (p. 15)
The immigrants referred to here are probably not IT-specialists from, say, the US. Further-more the problems are given an individual character instead of put in the perspective of a society that discriminates and exclude people of certain ethnic groups. In times when xenophobia grows in political parties and local parliaments all around in Europe (“Even in Sweden” to quote Allan Pred (2000)), it is necessary to be extremely careful with feeding prejudices.
In relation to the discussion about fear of terrorists attacks, as a consequence of the 11th of September (“9th of September” in the book), nothing about the growing ethnic tensions in urban life is mentioned except why cities are interesting for terrorists to attack. Neither are any reasons behind the attacks mentioned. Consequently, the relation between the White Westerners and the immigrated non-Westerners is never to be understood from any other viewpoint then from the White Westerner.
Maybe even more astonishing is to realize that even though report after report shows that women tend to fear crime more than men, and due to fear limit their mobility to a much higher degree than men, this book does not include a gender perspective or refer to any fem-inist research on the topic. Violence and crime is given an ethnic dimension, but never a gen-dered dimension, when all statistics show that it has a strong gender dimension. Here there is a vast feminist literature to learn from, which has past these authors by without any notice. Over and over again the safety discourse proves incapable or unwilling to include a gender or ethnicity perspective. Overall the hidden norm of who is the “urban actor” shines through. In sentences like “families thus often chose to live in relatively safe areas”, “if residents move en masse out of a region because of safety reasons, in the next stage economic activities might follow”, “house owners are thus interested in a high quality of public space” (p. 19), the subject becomes clearly a wealthy and White family member.
Reading literature in this field of research, it becomes clear that there are two routes, either a societal critical approach which provides a “deep” analysis but few solutions, or a more policy-oriented approach with many concrete ideas of how to improve safety, but based on a poor theoretical societal understanding and with standard problem defi-nitions (Listerborn, 2004). This creates a problem for practitioners who are set to deal with the situation, but who want to work for a more equal society. There is not much support from academic literature.
This anthology does bring up interesting issues, even though it is unconsciously. For example the question whether safety works is a substitute for a declining welfare system, which distributes safety towards certain privileged groups? It also illuminates hidden urban conflicts between the different groups; the police, ethnic minorities, shop owners, the White middle classes, etc. The opening of European borders also lies in the background as a fear of increased immigration.
This anthology does not look into these issues, and it is not their aim to do so. At the end they come to some conclusions of how to work around safety issues; that we should focus on fear of crime, work with a multi-agency approach, with a good balance between repres-sive, preventive and proactive policies, with good information and statistics, and with a sound communication strategy. The results are neither groundbreaking nor provocative, but the discourse is heavily embedded in a positivist and individualist approach, and, as shown here, highly political even though presented as neutral and objective.
References
Listerborn, C. (2004) Safe city. Discourses on women’s fear in safer cities programmes, in: G. Cortesi, F. Cristaldi & J. Droogleever Fortuijn (Eds) Gendered Cities: Identities, Activities, Networks. A Life-course Approach, pp. 69 – 82 (Gothenburg: Chalmers University).
Pred, A. (2000) Even in Sweden. Racisms, Racialised Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press)
Carina Listerborn Department of Social and Economic Geography University of Lund, Lund, Sweden and Gender Studies, Malmo¨ University College Malmo¨, Sweden Book Review 455
