ABSTRACT
Cities have long been sites of concentrated danger. Yet the question of why violence is more prevalent in urban areas is a difficult one. Urban violence is witnessed in enormously varied forms between cities in, say, Europe, North America and Latin America. Looking back into history, cities were certainly places of danger but were often sheltered from the excessive bloodletting of unregulated rural areas. Yet urban life certainly foregrounds a range of social and economic forces that act on citizens in a number of ways and may raise or diminish the risk of interpersonal violence. The opportunity for meaningful work, or its absence in particular districts or for groups excluded from such opportunities, underlies long-term problems that may be translated into the production of more violent social actors. Similarly segregation and relative poverty, within cities characterised by intense social inequality, may contain certain, poorer, populations. Urban life generates cultural conditions within which physical prowess becomes celebrated or encoded into street life and becomes a durable feature of city and neighbourhood life. This chapter considers the city as a physical and economic system that sorts populations via housing and labour markets in ways that contain or generate violence. The violence of state crime through war in urban theatres is also considered in this wide-ranging chapter.
