ABSTRACT
The city has long been a space of industry, commerce, pleasure and connection. Cities are also places that require defence, their territories vulnerable to outsiders; and a city was declared ‘open’ when its defenders conceded it for occupation by enemy attackers. Contemporary societies still fear the ‘open city’, less as a result of enemy incursion than as the effect of unstable social relations within the city. Criminology attempts to understand how crime takes place in the ‘open city’, but has been unsure whether crime is a symptom, cause, or indicator of the precariousness of urban relations. This chapter investigates ways in which anxieties about the vulnerability of the open city dominate social, legal and political responses to crime, with walls and boundaries the means by which citizens can be identified, protected and contained. By walking through the changing neighbourhoods of the city, it proposes ways in which we can encounter crime in urban environments as citizens, criminologists and wayfarers, and argues for a more complex understanding of openness in the contemporary city.
