ABSTRACT
Crime, excitement and consumerism in the city spaces of late modernity Let us now turn to some of the ways in which the developments identified above are impacting on certain forms of crime within particular urban settings. My aim here is to explore the effects of various key features of late modern life – most obviously, rampant consumerism and the concomitant forms of subjectivity it engenders, and the growing use of risk-taking strategies as a means of asserting a sense of control in increasingly ontologically uncertain life worlds – on three specific areas of the contemporary city. By grounding contemporary theoretical ideas concerning excitement, risk and control within particular spatio-historical contexts, this section will address perhaps the main criticism levelled at Katz and other phenomenological criminologists: that their work lacks a fundamental engagement with urban social and spatial dynamics. While it is fair to say that much contemporary criminology (including virtually all of Katz’s analysis) deals with phenomena that take place within urban settings, typically it relies on an abstracted – and at times even stylised – concept of urban space that is often highly insensitive to the complex dynamics of urban life and the forms of subjectivity that constitute the late modern urban experience. If you like, Katz and others are guilty of privileging issues of agency over space – something of an irony given that, in previous chapters, we have seen how other commentators operating from very different epistemological perspectives (eg, Mike Davis and Ian Taylor) have done exactly the opposite and concentrated solely on issues of structure and space while virtually ignoring issues relating to agency and subjectivity. With an eye not just on the present but also to the future, this concluding section should also be seen as a final attempt to draw together, and thus make distinct, the main ideas of this book: namely, the various (and burgeoning) relationships that currently exist between consumerism and criminal activity within the late modern city.
