BERND BELINA - Designing crime and fear of crime in urban spaces?
Place. Anthropology of space
Can crime we really be "designed out"? Is changing the built environment and driving out undesirables from public spaces really the way to go? The speaker critically examines such approach. The talk will give examples from the US and from Germany of the human costs of such strategies and analyze the deeply anti-social logic behind such attempts to make cities safer by de-humanizing and brutalizing social control and policing.
Bernd Belina is professor for Human Geography at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. His main areas of research include geographies of crime and policing, urban geography, and political geography, especially border studies. His work on the way in which urban policing in both the USA and Germany has changed in recent decades by applying explicitly spatial strategies were published in German and English language journals of urban studies, geography and criminology.
David Harvey, probably the most influential urban scholar of recent decades, makes two related point: the current crisis of capitalism has urban origins – and its root causes must be addressed starting from the concrete urban realm. This is a timely book for troublesome times.
