ABSTRACT
Urban space has always been of special significance for criminology. From the viewpoint of perception and understanding of various types of crime and deviance, it is the more or less controversial site of ambiguous, even contradictory, phenomena such as order and disorder, security and danger, richness and poverty, power and resistance, freedom and coercion, virtue and vice, and so forth. In addition, the urban environment can be interpreted as an influential mirror of the dominant economic and ideological structures. This chapter thus first examines urban space as a site of ambiguous, even contradictory, phenomena and as a reflection of the dominant economic and ideological structures, particularly consumerism, fuelled by globally dominant neoliberal capitalism. It then bridges the urban-rural divide by inspecting the traditional and assumed contrasts between the city and the village, demonstrating the convergence of some of their essential elements, and exposes certain structural urban harms often neglected by mainstream criminology (particularly those related to the neoliberal labour context and its social control). In the second part, the chapter zooms in on the negative impact of the introduction of capitalism on the quality of (individual and collective) urban life and space in post-socialist societies, specifically in Slovenia.
