Abstract
Urban security policies tend to focus on prevention or crime’s relation to safety. Crime prevention literature often suggests the importance of urban design for social control. Generally the belief is strong that control and interventions, of public or state, will reduce crime and enhance security. Yet correlations between crime rates and experienced safety are weak at best. Others emphasize the importance of governance of crime and behaviour defined as undesirable, or argue that the welfare state becomes a penal state, containing the marginalized through policing. Less common are studies of the positionality of those often hold publically responsible for crime: male urban youth in inner cities. While some of their criminalized behaviour acquires high visibility, their positions and perspectives remain invisible. How crime prevention, definitions of crime and safety and urban insecurity are experienced in the daily practices of urban youth in two estates in Berlin, Germany is the empirical focus for our attempt to theorize ‘unsafety’ discourse as symbolic violence.
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Notes
- 1.
Berlin installed these organizations in 1999 in response to administratively-statistically designed ‘problem areas’ (Lanz 2009). Aims of QMs are to further participation and ‘neighborhood cohesion’. Their developments are ‘monitored’ through Berlin’s Social Atlas. Areas qualify for QM through a status of Exklusionsgefahr, indicated by a.o. high unemployment, child poverty, welfare payments. See: www.quartiersmanagement-berlin.de.
- 2.
Over 70% of Wellington Square residents classify as ‘migration background’ (QM 2017).
- 3.
The police in Berlin defines an area as ‘crime-affected’ (kriminalitätsbelastet), when particular crime delicts (among others: robbery and drug dealing) occur above average. In such KBOs the police have further powers—for example identity checks without suspicion. For further details, see: https://www.berlin.de/polizei/polizeimeldungen/fakten-hintergruende/artikel.597950.php.
- 4.
In group interviews with more than three interview partners, we used the codes P1, P2, P3 etc. instead of pseudonyms. The abbreviation ‘Int.’ stands for interviewer.
- 5.
Kanake is a derogatory term and mostly refers to people with Turkish or Middle Eastern migration background.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Julia Thöns from Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and all advisors for cooperation, Landeskommission Berlin gegen Gewalt for funding, Lara Danyel and Julia Nott for research assistance, and all experts in the field for their generous participation, especially Die Jungs. All names are pseudonyms. All research participants at the youth clubs and in interviews gave consent to participate; casual conversations in the streets, incidentally included youth who did not know, due to the nature of fieldwork in such a setting.
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Blokland, T., Šerbedžija, V. (2020). Feeling Safe, Defining Crime and Urban Youth in Berlin’s Inner City: An Exploration of the Construction of ‘Unsafety’ and ‘Youth’ as Symbolic Violence. In: Smagacz-Poziemska, M., Gómez, M., Pereira, P., Guarino, L., Kurtenbach, S., Villalón, J. (eds) Inequality and Uncertainty. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9162-1_9
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