Between utopia and crisis: the meanderings of urban (in)security in the second half of the 20th century

Abstract

The transformations that marked the western world in the second half of the 20th century were determinant elements in the socio-political and academic discourses about two phenomena — crime and poverty. The two were linked in the collective social imagination, even if the statistics have not confirmed the connection between them. With a worsening of the feeling of insecurity, crime returned to the forefront of people's concerns and the spotlight was once more focused on cities. The author seeks to deconstruct the intuitive idea that poverty was a variable in criminal practice, and proposes a new reading of insecurity which situates it within a broader debate than the one that reduced it to just the relationship between fear and crime. She notes the importance that has increasingly been attached to the awareness of risk, and concludes by suggesting a number of clues that may help understand and analyse contemporary (in)security.