ABSTRACT
In the United Kingdom’s more history, marked as it has been by the inner city disturbances of 1981 and 1991, the problematic status assigned to such areas has become more acute. One key message from the empirical investigation under discussion is the central difficulty of assuming all inner city areas are the same. The two areas under investigation were less than two miles apart displayed very different ways of managing their relationship with crime. The image of the inner city as socially disorganised has remained, and some would say has been perpetuated in more years in the United Kingdom, through the importation of the underclass debate and the ideas of comunitarianism from North America. Each of these debates has had their different impact upon images of inner city communities. Walklate has mapped the contours of that debate as comprising fear of the ‘other’, fear as rational and/or irrational, fear as safety and fear as anxiety.
