ABSTRACT

Introduction The city has always been a flickering presence within criminology, variously the source of immediacy, concern, visibility and inspiration, yet, despite this interest, the concept of the city has rarely been fully integrated into developed analyses of crime. This tendency is even more pronounced today. The increased prevalence of so-called ‘scientific’ methodologies within our discipline has ensured that, even though the majority of criminologists tend to study urban crime (in one form or another), seldom does their work overlap with related disciplines such as urban studies or urban geography, or indeed even urban sociology. Even within contemporary criminological theory, the city is all too frequently lost in the moment of abstraction, appearing only as an afterthought, a sort of theoretical shadow or ‘sideshow’.1 Urban crime is thus torn free from its physical context – the city. Street crime, for example, exists not as in any way connected to street life (or, for that matter, the life of the street), but as an autonomous, independent act, divested of all the complexities and inequities that are such a feature of the daily urban round. Consequently, what has been lost to criminology is the great potential for understanding the relationship between urban space and urban crime signalled, for example, by Robert Park et al’s (1925) book The City – a monument to the city as a living, breathing, socio-cultural entity.