ABSTRACT
Writing about American cities, the American scholar Eula Biss, describes the toxic mix of guilt, othering, and panic that underpins the randomised fear of crime that marks certain neighbourhoods as either 'safe' or 'unsafe' in cities across the United States. This, Biss argues, is regardless of verifiable research, in which conditions of poverty, disruption, and poor social infrastructure, rather than spaces, are shown to be the drivers of violence and criminality. In her experience of moving to Roger Park, a suburb of Chicago celebrated as 'the most diverse neighbourhood in a hyper-segregated city', Biss explores the spatialities of fear, and the consequences of gentrification, raising urban issues that are familiar to us in Johannesburg. Zygmunt Bauman's notion of liquid modernity accords on many levels with the complexities and ambiguities elaborated by Jean and John Comaroff in their dissection of accepted notions of criminality, law, and citizenship playing out on global stages, and especially in South Africa.
