ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the ways that the right to the city – as theory and praxis – may be reinterpreted, renewed, or reimagined post-Grenfell in such a way that better supports ‘those who think and work and survive on front lines’. It considers the questions posed by the Grenfell fire in relation to both the right to the city and the ‘political economy of urban safety’. An important concept in critical criminology that is useful in this respect – one which, according to many, was misappropriated by the New Labour government – is that of ‘community safety’. The chapter considers the relationship between politics and aesthetics in a reimagined demand for the right to the city. Community safety was developed among leftish policy circles during the late 1980s as a critique of the government’s prioritising of street crime over and above the other harms that blighted the lives of the urban working-classes.
