ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the sixth part of this book. The sixth part of the book explores how geographies of difference and exclusion are crucial to understanding how problem places are constructed. Indeed, the popular view that a causal relationship exists between different settlement types and the quality of life in them can be traced back to antiquity, but took on a compelling mythologizing force during the Industrial Revolution. The relationships that obtain between crime and place have long been the focus of the criminological imagination. Many commentators have found in Los Angeles a paradigm of the postmodern metropolis: disorganized around a collage of many suburban nuclei; defined by the increasing militarization of urban space and the defence of luxury lifestyles through private policing, state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and the destruction of public space. This can be contrasted with Chicago as the epitome of the modern city organized around a single centre.
