ABSTRACT
This chapter presents insights into the myriad forms of relationships that exist between the categories of urban experience, consumer culture, and crime. It focuses on Jack Katz's work. Something of the spirit of the existential approach can be found in perhaps the pivotal text in the postmodern reconstruction of aetiology –Katz's The Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. The chapter highlights what it is about human experience and social conditions today that makes the pursuit of excitement and transgression so seductive. Stephen Lyng's account focuses on extreme sports, whilst the new cultural criminology focuses on transgression. The obvious starting point for a criminological investigation into the issues surrounding consumer culture is the material analyses of R. K. Merton and his classical strain theory. The chapter aims to encourage administrative criminologists to develop what might be described as a mixed model that can be deployed in that traditional testing ground of crime prevention research, the town/city centre.
