ABSTRACT
The notion that the inner city constitutes a problematic area is not a new one. Fraser (1997) has usefully identified a number of different ways in which ‘those inner cities’ have been discussed in contemporary terms: spatially, culturally, ethnically or (potentially) any combination of these. In some respects, these contemporary discourses about the inner city derive from the legacy of the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation of the early nineteenth century. Images of city life emerged from these processes which, not only identified parts of the city as physically dangerous (for example, from a health point of view), but also characterised the people as dangerous. Here lived the pickpockets, the prostitutes and the ‘police property’ (Lee 1981) of the nineteenth century: that section of society labelled by Marx as the ‘social scum’. Arguably, the Chicago School of sociology, exemplified in the work of Park and Burgess, added further weight to these images by focusing attention on the social disorganisation, and the concomitant social problems (including crime), to be found in the ‘zone of transition’. Thus it is possible to discern some of the ways in which presumptions concerning the socially disorganised and disorderly nature of inner-city life have become embedded in more contemporary social and political thought. Such presumptions are not only of historical interest. They have a contemporary relevance in the current concern with social exclusion (Social Exclusion Unit 1998) and community ( Policy Action Team 9 Report, Active Community Unit 1999). Moreover, these are the presumptions which have been particularly salient in understanding the impact of crime.
