Fear, Space and Urban Planning, A Critical Perspective from Southern Europe.

Abstract

Western citizens live in the safest societies ever, and yet are more concerned with crime and violence than ever. What are the relationships between recent socio-spatial phenomena and the growing relevance of discussions about security/safety? Is urban fear an unavoidable consequence of contemporary urban life? Or does some political use of it exist? Are discourses of fear used as instruments of power in urban policy? And how can planning practice act to counter fear? In order to answer these ques- tions, the book explores urban fear, (misinformative) discourses of fear and their relations with space and the practice of urban planning—focussing on Southern European cities and using empirical data from Palermo and Lisbon. The book has two objectives: to set out a comprehensive, critical, exploratory theory of fear, space and urban planning, unravelling the paradoxes of their mutual relations; and to contribute to recent studies about urban geopolitics, taking them from the space of global cities and enriching them from the perspective of ordinary cities. In short, the book debates whether, and to what extent, the production of ‘fearscapes’, the con- temporary landscapes of fear, constitutes an (emergent) urban political economy. To do so, it explores the (re)production of urban fear around: (global) misinformation about, and paradoxes of, security (Chap. 2); the role of otherness, together with its political construction (Chap. 3); the spatialisation of fear in urban space (Chap. 4); and the way urban planning, as a practice and a discipline, is informed by, and has been shaping in turn, urban fear (Chap. 5). In conclusion (Chap. 6) the book adopts a forward thinking approach, envisaging how two radically different (if not opposite) futures are embedded in the present: a dystopian city in which the political econo- mies of fear have become dominant; and some seeds for a practice of urban planning/action capable of facing the political economies of fear.