ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we consider the importance of place and locality in urban criminology. In particular, our focus is directed towards the scale of the neighbourhood. We begin with an examination of the early urban criminologies of writers such as Mayhew, Booth, Riis and Engels. Whereas the first three of these writers covered here offered liberal perspectives on the plight of the poor and the criminal, Engels presented a radical critique, linking crime and disorder explicitly to the class conflict that is inscribed in the spaces of the industrial city. We then move on to critically consider the urban ecology perspective developed by Park, Burgess and, later, Shaw and McKay, all of the Chicago School of Sociology. We follow this with an extensive discussion of the space in the city that has the strongest connotation with crime, the North American ghetto. While pointing to the negative effects of this form of territorial stigma, our argument also suggests how we must always remember that the ghetto (and its recent incarnation as ‘hyperghetto’) is the result of the production of space under capitalist conditions. Too often, like any product in capitalism, the ghetto, especially through its representation in public and political discourse, conceals the conditions of its own production.
