1 Incivilities, harm and social control in urban space
Nina Peršak and Anna Di Ronco
Introduction
Many accounts of urban criminology or criminology of the urban phenomena begin with paying dues to the Chicago school of criminology and its important contributions to the study of crime and place (e.g. Cressey 1932, Shaw 1930, Shaw and McKay 1942). The pattern of offending they found in Chicago, where the highest offender rate areas were located in an inner-city zone and faded out towards the periphery of the city, was explained using the concept of ‘social disorganisation’, according to which social bonds which discouraged deviant behaviour were lacking in populations that newly migrated into the city and moved to city centres that offered the cheapest available housing for the new immigrants. As they settled and began to develop more stable normative structures, they moved out of these areas and were replaced by new immigrants to the city, repeating the cycle. Despite important critique pointing out, for example, that the Chicago theory of social disorganisation was over-predictive of crime (Matza 1964) or that deviant conduct may instead be the result of highly organised but alternative values (Whyte 1943) and that morally disapproved does not necessarily mean socially disorganised (Becker 1963), the concept of social disorganisation survived, as well as the importance of the Chicago school’s mixed-methods methodological approach, e.g. combining statistical distributions of offending with ethnographic work (Bottoms and Wiles 1992).
The findings of Chicago school are still relevant today – and not only for the ‘neo-Chicagoan’ scholarly tradition of researchers working in the field of ‘socio-spatial criminology’ (see Bottoms [2012] for an illustrative overview of the various scholarly traditions and developments in this field). The trend of urbanisation reveals that people are increasingly moving into cities and away from the countryside, which is why urban space, its peculiarities, expectations, experiences and sensibilities that city residents have around it deserve special attention. Progressive urbanisation not only influences people’s living conditions, their well-being and their health but may also generate social conflict and consequently fuel disorder and crime. Furthermore, as contemporary urban orders are increasingly governed through space (Merry 2004), urban policing, social control and disciplining in the city merit closer inspection, as well as do normative issues, such as normative signals that various harms and incivilities, and punitive social responses thereto, send to the affected urban communities. The management of incivilities through city planning, concretely through zoning or ‘banishment’ from specific zones ‘that makes it a crime for some people simply to be in certain places’ (Beckett and Herbert 2009, p. 57), through housing policy (e.g. Flint 2006, Atkinson and Millington 2018) and specific – hostile – architecture announces a new dawn of urban social control, which redefines the landscape of social control, as well as informs about the normative standards of acceptability in the city.
Although crime and disorder are not solely urban concerns, as, for example, increased research on rural criminology emphasises (e.g. Hollis and Hankhouse 2019), many do see it as predominantly urban phenomena, particularly incivilities. The prevailing (romantic) image of a village or a small town paints them as idyllic, homogenous places with proper community or Gemeinschaft (Tönnies 1887), well-integrated members who display ‘mechanical solidarity’ (Durkheim 1984), know each other by names, greet each other every day and are certainly not alienated from each other. The prevailing image of the city, by contrast, is often one of doom and gloom, an image of a place more interesting and richer than the countryside but also more chaotic and dangerous – because of which the Aesop’s Country Mouse rather quickly decided to leave his friend, the Town Mouse, concluding: ‘Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear’. The notion of the city as doomed is ‘one of the common tropes of urban representation’ (Thrift 2005, p. 133, see also Davis 2002).
Still, urban space represents and means so much more to its inhabitants. On the one hand, the vastness of it and the density of the population does seem to invite bigger deviations, including criminal and disorderly ones, from the ‘norm’ than the ones on the countryside. Urban landscape has also been charged with being ‘implicated in structural oppression and marginalization, in particular those based on class, gender, race and ethnicity’ and therefore promoting social and cultural inequality (Stevenson 2003, p. 5), which has repercussions for deviant behaviour. Disorder, for example, has been found to be inextricably linked to structural disadvantage (Sampson and Raudenbush 1999). On the other hand, the city is also more capable of assimilating deviations from the norm, being more conducive to diversity and accepting of otherness. Urban life itself has many positive aspects. Hayward (2004, p. 17) rightly claims that ‘[m]uch of what constitutes modern social life is the product of the city and of the “urban experience” ’. Cities often play an important role in promoting environmental sustainability, civility and tolerance. They frequently offer a refuge to the homeless, immigrants, dissidents and similar ‘Other’. The city is also a hub of creativity, a site of diversity, open-mindedness and other positive aspects of various urban expressions, which are often insufficiently acknowledged or even repressively dealt with on the part of municipal authorities and other contemporary social control agents, e.g. landlords (Hunter 2006).
This duality of the city – on the one hand, as a producer of civilisation and driver of public sociability and, on the other hand, as a generator of incivility and antipathy – is why cities ‘have always been recognised as Janus-faced: they inculcate the highest standards of urban refinement and achievements of citizenship, whilst simultaneously possessing qualities that threaten chaos and the breakdown of social order’ (Bannister and Flint 2017, p. 523). The increased securitisation of contemporary cities, deemed ‘smart’ due to the heightened surveillance and reliance on technology and control, presents, however, new challenges to these high standards of urban refinement and achievements of citizenship. These challenges arise when the control complex with its repressive, disciplinary overreach begins to shrink the free enjoyment of urban public places (including its benefits of providing certain anonymity) and excludes important, yet powerless, segments of urban population from their ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1968). As Mitchell (2003, p. 229) puts it,
[w]hen all is controlled, there can simply be no right to the city, unless, of course it is for you – for your desires, for your interests, maybe even for your needs – that the city is controlled in the first place.
In the book, we concentrate on some specific themes engaging harms and disorder in the urban space with their social control, focusing specifically on their sensory, emotive, power and structural dimensions. In this enterprise, our contributors draw on a number of other relevant fields, which relate to concerns and debates we wished to address, such as, for example, urban geography, sociology, legal anthropology, urban studies, social psychology, philosophy and law. In addition to investigating urban harms and incivilities, the book critically examines repressive city approaches to urban phenomena labelled as such. Law as well as space, as Blomley (1994) reminds us, are not fixed, objective categories but rather tools that structure social life and direct the deployment of power. Urban space is understood as a multidimensional object: a place, deeply shaped by history and the prevailing socio-economic power structures, where crime and disorder and their control are exercised, a site of creative resistance and protest, a cultural phenomenon, and a sensory and affective landscape.
The role of senses, perception and emotion could not be neglected in this story, as, for example, the perception of disorder is heavily influenced not only by history, demographic characteristics, cultural symbols and normative signals but also by values and emotions (e.g. Innes 2004, Mackenzie et al. 2010, Bottoms 2012, Peršak and Di Ronco 2018). Flint and Powell (2014, p. 45), for example, observe that the belief that thresholds of decency have changed is ‘linked to nostalgia for previous times of civility and the need for a polite ethos’, while Waiton (2008) believes that our concern with declining politeness is rather a reflection of our anxiety about our own isolation and alienation from others in today’s asocial society. Carrabine (2018, p. 448) also reminds us that, moving through landscape, our bodies experience ‘feelings and sensations embedding us in the landscape as we move through it’. Emotions are, however, often mediated by our senses, making the role of senses in the perception and formation of emotions rather crucial. Smell, for example, not only co-constructs our sense of place but also evokes emotions and may trigger emotional attachments (Henshaw 2014). However, the influence travels both ways; ‘a person’s sensitivity to a particular smell or a category of smells is … related to their physiological and psychological (emotional) response to them, whether it is positive, negative or neutral, rather than their actual detection of an odour’ (Henshaw 2014, p. 40).
Motivation for this book and its aims
In the previous work of one of us, we highlighted the ways in which space matters to all types of petty offences and their regulation (Peršak 2017a). Modern cities, characterised by gentrification of city centres, tackle various (potentially nuisance) conduct accompanying the night-time economy by designating special locations where certain activities – e.g. sex work, gambling, entertainment – may take place (Hayward 2004). In addition to such ‘geography of anti-social behaviour’ (Atkinson 2006), street architecture is often employed as well, as physical characteristics of certain areas can stimulate or hinder the occurrence of crime and disorder, and influence their law enforcement. Such urban social control measures can classify the same act, committed in one part of the city, as incivility, while considering it acceptable behaviour in another part of the city (Peršak 2017b).
The present book follows upon this previous work and in this sense represents a sort of continuation of our exploration in this area, although it is less limited to incivilities alone and less focused on regulation. Instead, we wanted to focus on emotions, the sensory and aesthetic dimensions, for which there is a growing interest in criminology, as well as in other domains. Through interdisciplinarity and a variety of relatively fresh perspectives that engage with the sensory and affective, power and structure, we aimed to develop novel ideas and perspectives that emerge from looking at the old thing in a new light, supported by a variety of disciplines – apart from the various criminological perspectives (e.g. sensory, green, critical, cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, radical), also sociology, law, social psychology, criminal law philosophy, urban studies and ethnography. Although most contributors engage in a critical examination of urban social control and thus share a certain critical criminology orientation, this was not a primary motivation for the selection of contributors. Bringing together scholars with opposing views or approaches and different focus often engenders a kind of discomfort that is extremely fruitful for generating new ideas, as well as for crystallising one’s own assumptions and refining articulations of one’s position. However, the contributors were rather sought topic-wise; the criterion being their interest in a type of urban harm or disorder we wanted ‘covered’ due to its hidden nature or its entanglements with senses and emotions. The integration between contributions (highlighted also in our concluding chapter) or the leitmotif running throughout this edited volume are the sensory, affective, structural and power elements as they play out in the urban space where harm, disorder and social control thereof push and pull in various directions.
Despite the broad orientation and ambition, there are, however, a number of empirical, theoretical and disciplinary challenges involved in responding to such a call, and therefore certain self-limiting choices had to be made. For example, not all human senses are covered. Touch and taste as senses are only cursorily mentioned. The reason for this is mostly because they seem to be less involved in the construction of urban harm and incivilities, and considered less highly relevant in their particular social control. It is difficult to see, for example, how ‘new’ urban social harm and incivilities – that we address in this book – are caused by touch. Even though the latter can be very relevant in public health-related harms, such as the currently omnipresent COVID-19 infection, which may also spread through touch, such harms are not wrongful (the virus not being a moral agent and therefore capable of wrongdoing) and hence are excluded from those harms that can legitimately be the object of social control and punitive regulation. Similar applies to the sense of taste in relation to the harms and disorder addressed in our book and their social control – although taste may be part of control in some other settings; for example, tasteless food used as punishment in prisons (McClanahan and South 2020). The taste, not as a sense but rather as an aesthetic preference or inclination, is, however, discussed in several of our chapters, recognising, further, that taste is often intertwined with values and normative systems. Supporting social control that is based on recognised values (such as dignity, equality, etc.) is, naturally, more justified than social control based purely on tastes that lack (or may even run counter to) such values.
The book is also more or less concentrated on the European and North American context. Perspectives from Global South are therefore largely missing, although some references to relevant phenomena, such as Brazilian baile funk and its social control, are included. As the aim of this book is not primarily comparative in terms of geography, we believe that this is not a major oversight. We are aware, however, that normative issues, such as what counts as harm, uncivil behaviour or disorder, as well as social control, are also culturally dependent and that our chapters might presume certain common affective, normative and cultural backgrounds that may not exist outside of the Euro-American societies.
Rather than trying to be exhaustive on the topic, which would be an impossible task in any case, considering the relatively new perspectives being applied, our goal was to contribute to filling the gap in this area and offer further research agenda-setting reflections of the subject matter. Essentially, our aim was to complement, rather than compete with, other books addressing urban phenomena by offering an original and distinctive approach to understanding the city, its harms, disorder and social control, that connects with sensory and affective turns in other domains as well.
A note on terminology: in our book, including its title, disorder is used interchangeably with incivilities or anti-social behaviour or what some countries call nuisance (e.g. overlast in Flanders, Belgium), and encompasses social and well as physical or environmental expressions of socially undesirable conduct, i.e. conduct that violates social norms or mores. We recognise, however, that there is some variety in the usage of these terms across countries (Peršak 2017b). While in the United Kingdom (UK), ‘incivilities’ and ‘disorder’ are often used interchangeably, generally, the term ‘incivilities’ is used to refer to both physical and social phenomena, while ‘disorder’ tends to refer mostly to the social phenomena (Matthews 1992). On this view, incivilities may therefore be a broader term than disorder. Some others, however, distinguish between physical disorder (graffiti, broken windows, litter, etc.) and social disorder, linking ‘incivilities’ to the ‘visible evidence of disorder’ (Sampson and Raudenbush 1999, p. 604). From this perspective, incivilities are then a narrower term compared to disorder.
While some disorder or incivilities may be harmful (and hence legitimately criminalised), many others are merely offensive, i.e. offending the sensitivities of certain people in certain times and spaces and presenting only fleeting annoyance. Some may even involve nothing more than a simple violation of a rule (such as putting the rubbish bags out on an incorrect day), not causing any harm to one’s interests or offence. Such regulatory offences often raise questions about the legitimate use of repression to quash such behaviour – behaviour which may sometimes bear important social value; for example, in the case of street art or street music, expressing critique of societal cond...
