[URBANTH-L]CFP: Urban Space, Violence, and Crime (Stockholm)

[Angela Jancius]

Urban Space, Violence, and Crime in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Centuries:
Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives.

Main Session at the 8th International Conference on Urban History, Stockholm
(Sweden), August 30 - September 2, 2006

Scholars are invited to submit proposals for original papers to be presented at
a main session at the 8. International Conference on Urban History to be held in
Stockholm from 30th August till 2nd September 2006.

The session will explore how urban space shaped and influenced patterns of
violence and crime. Cities have a strong record for breeding violence and
disobedience to the law. While this is a very old story, it took a new turn
during the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries: in both centuries city planning
was greatly shaped by the notion that violence and crime could be fostered by
the spatial lay-out of a city, especially by narrow spaces and high density both
of buildings and population. In consequence, many cities were re-built and
turned into new cities, designed to keep political unrest, moral decay, and
crime at bay.

During the nineteenth century and also in the early twentieth-century middle
class moral panic focused mostly on densely populated working-class districts in
the inner cities. As a rule, in redeveloping these districts politicians opted
for open spaces and the resettlement of great parts of the city’s population.
Ironically, this movement for urban reform created in the longer run new hotbeds
of crime and violence: new housing estates built during the 1960s and 1970s,
that can be regarded as the movement’s apogee, turned quickly into areas where
social problems accumulated and rates of delinquencies soared although these
estates had nothing at all in common with the inner city districts that were
traditionally perceived to be at the core of the problem of urban crime.
During the last decades of the twentieth-century, yet another aspect to this
story came to the fore: at the one hand gated communities were built which
promise to spare its inhabitants the experience of violence and crime by social
cohesion and close surveillance, on the other hand the policy of ‘zero
tolerance’, inspired by the ‘broken windows theory’ and devised in New York City
but eventually highly influential in many Western cities, was praised both by
politicians and the media for reclaiming urban space that seemed to had been
surrendered to criminals. At the same time, the development of mega-cities in
developing countries for example in South America created yet another close link
between urban space and violence: in many of these cities various districts,
invariably populated by members of a dispossessed underclass, seem to be ruled
by organised crime or by violent youth gangs. These neighbourhoods can be
regarded as counterparts to the gated communities created for affluent families
since they are both ‘no go areas’ for specific parts of the population, cutting
off access to what used to be public space.

We would like to discuss the multitudinous aspects to the close relationship
between urban space, violence, and crime in a main session at the Eight
International Conference on Urban History in Stockholm. Contributions can be
made not only by historians but also by scholars active in Sociology,
Ethnography, Criminology, Architecture, and Social Geography. ‘Violence’ and
‘Crime’ should be understood in a broad sense, ranging from minor delinquencies
and acts of physical violence to collective forms of violent protest and
disobedience such as foot riots, labour unrest, or protest marches and
revolutionary uprisings. Contributors should be aware that urban space is not
only shaped by buildings, roads, and other tactile objects but also by
perceptions of various actors such as representatives of public authorities,
local inhabitants, non-locals, women and men, people of different ethnic origin
and from different social strata. Urban space was (and is) therefore never a
given fact but always a contested notion, open for negotiation and change.
Most of all we would be interested in papers that discuss how urban space and
patterns of violence/crime were influenced and changed by city planning and the
redevelopment of districts, regarding urban environment and architecture as
forms of social control. Also of great interest would be papers that reconstruct
how the spatial lay-out of a city and the access to urban spaces influenced
collective actions (their causes, internal logic, and their success) and, in
return, also perceptions of the city and the ideas of urban reform movements.
Other possible topics are inter alia: problems of law enforcement and
state/governmental rule in inner-city areas, the mental maps of city inhabitants
in relation to spatial patterns of violence, mass media representations of
violent and crime ridden cities, and conflicts about social segregation inside
the city (ghettos and gated communities).

While the organizers welcome proposals for case-studies on specific cities,
comparative papers that look at cities in different countries are especially
encouraged. All papers will be pre circulated in June 2006 and participants
should be prepared to give only a five to ten minutes presentation at the
conference followed by discussion.

Please send a 100-200 word abstract and a one-page CV to the following addresses
by October 31, 2005. The ideal means of submission is an email attachment in the
Word for Windows or in the Rich Text format. Regular postal mailings are
acceptable as well:

Prof. Dr. Karl Christian Fuehrer,
Forschungsstelle fuer Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg, Schulterblatt 36, D-20357
Hamburg, Germany,
fuehrer at zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de

Privatdozent Dr. Klaus Weinhauer,
University of Bielefeld, Faculty of History, Postbox 100131, D-33501 Bielefeld,
Germany,
klaus.weinhauer at uni-bielefeld.de
	Prof. Dr. Karl Christian Fuehrer,
Forschungsstelle fuer Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg, Schulterblatt 36, D-20357
Hamburg, Germany, fuehrer at zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de

Privatdozent Dr. Klaus Weinhauer,
University of Bielefeld, Faculty of History, Postbox 100131, D-33501 Bielefeld,
Germany, klaus.weinhauer at uni-bielefeld.de
Email: klaus.weinhauer at uni-bielefeld.de

----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.