ABSTRACT
In the often melancholic subtext of urban social theory, a nostalgia for the permissive public spaces of old persists alongside critiques of the putatively inauthentic or repressive public spaces of the contemporary shopping mall, the themed urban experience, or the dystopian streets of our surveillance society. Following the pioneering but immensely influential work of Ulrich Beck the spaces of the city become a plane of variable risk.1 The mapping of this world by the institutions and agencies of the state and its proxies becomes the subject (and rapidly a technocratic language in its own right) of something that increasingly is referred to as community safety. Community safety consequently mediates specific cartographies of the urban. Its maps are themselves technologies through which some cosmopolitan subjects are made visible and others are not. The city itself both conspires with such technologies and simultaneously resists their will to map and to know.
