Introduction

Urban space has long haunted the penal and criminological imagination; as a site of crime and disorder, where ‘respectable fears’ (Pearson, 1983) about overcrowding, mixing and safety co-exist with political ideologies and government policies that treat urban social life as a spatial, moral and socio-political problem to be monitored, regulated and controlled. In fact, the relationship between crime and the urban realm goes to the heart of criminology, as an academic discipline that is marked by an ‘urban bias’ (Donnermeyer, 2016: 1) due to its emphasis on studying crime as a quintessentially urban social phenomenon. Perceptions of ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘deviance’ and ‘conflict’, therefore, cease to exist in the abstract. They become designed into, associated with and represented by urban geography – as metaphors for physical locations and social spaces where hierarchies of power, social relations and social structures take shape.

Nowhere is this more evident than the areas of the city that are imagined, researched, sensationalised, suspected and policed as pockets of ‘criminality’ where ‘incivility’, violence and danger are thought to fester uncontrollably. Targeted, surveilled, securitised, walled, barb-wired and patrolled as ‘no-go areas’, ‘urban wastelands’ or ‘crime-infested ghettoes’, such ‘dangerous’ places denote more than physical space. They feature as ‘symbolic locations’ where what is symbolised is the physical and cultural presence of those who are perceived and policed as socially and politically out of place, through processes of state-sanctioned, racial(ised) criminalisation (see, for example, Fatsis, 2021a, 2021b). The colonial ‘plantation archipelago’ (Wynter, nd: 372), the Jewish quarter in medieval and Nazi Europe and the contemporary urban ghetto (Duneier, 2016), stand as symbols of such ‘territorial stigmatisation’ (Hancock and Mooney, 2013) as vividly as they illustrate the ‘multi-racist’ (Keith, 1993) ideologies, politics and law enforcement that establish and police the inner city as a ‘zone of racial enclosure’ (Hartman, 2021: 94).