ABSTRACT
In the popular imagination, images of crime and the city are closely connected, yet the exact nature of this relationship remains enigmatic. In the 18th century the perception was of innocent rural migrants preyed upon by urban deceit; in the 19th century the picture was class-based and distinguished between the reformable and the unreformable (‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’) urban poor; by the early decades of the 20th century, especially in the United States, the theme of migration resurfaced, but this time with the immigrant cast as the potential criminal. It is to the credit of 20th century socio-criminological theories of crime that this popular image was turned around to become a claim about the particular kind of city environment that new immigrants inhabited. This book continues the long criminological tradition of unravelling the complexities of the ‘crime-city nexus’, with the specific aim of identifying the myriad forms of relationships that exist between the contemporary ‘urban experience’, certain forms of criminal behaviour, and the particular social forces and cultural dynamics that one associates with late modern consumer culture.
