ABSTRACT
The bulk of the crime and disorder that is the source of so much anxiety in market societies occurs, as a matter of personal experience or, more often in public space within cities. Drawing on his reading of the German plant ecologist Ernst Haeckel, Robert Park wrote of a process of 'invasion, succession and dominance' in which new species of human being, transplanted into a new land, struggled for a place in which to settle, survive and grow. Over the years, many thousands of students of criminology outside America will have been asked to consider the applicability of an American urban literature to the understanding of cities in their own societies. The rapid development of capitalist industry during the course of the nineteenth century effected a fundamental transformation of the map of Europe itself. In 1973, David Harvey's classic analysis elaborates how these industrial cities and regions were the sites of development of very specific sets of 'social relations'.
