ABSTRACT
Recently urban space is increasingly becoming a controlled environment populated by individuals who are asked to be predictable and safe. In this context, a conceptualisation of crime as deviation from predictability and safety of bodies and space is analysed. These tenets have serious consequences in the urban realm: in particular, the chapter refers to regeneration interventions brought about by moral and causally linear narratives on crime and disorder, or to spaces whose atmospherics is engineered by security policies to guarantee control. While engaging with these tenets, the chapter draws on poststructuralism (Deleuze, Guattari, and Simondon) and advances an ethical reading of space based upon a conceptualisation of information as the affective and ontogenetic key to interpret bodies and space movements. Information is material, and propagates through (ethically) good and bad affects, which shape bodies and space by nonlinearly piling up on them over time. In this sense, if predictable bodies and space, and the deviation from predictability (crime), can be shaped by information generated by security policies, information remains nonlinear, and is bound to bring about unexpected consequences in the urban realm. Ethnographic and autoethnographic fieldwork on criminal spaces in London is employed as the empirical basis of the research.
