Despite a rich body of literature dealing with suburbanization across Central and East Europe, the issues of crime and safety in residential suburbs have not been addressed. At the same time it is obvious that the existing knowledge on suburban crime derived mainly from Western experience cannot be simply transferred to the post-socialist transition context. This research investigates the issues of crime and safety in new residential neighbourhoods in the hinterland of Prague, the Czech Republic. Suburbanites' fear of crime and feeling of safety are discussed in the context of registered crime patterns in the Prague metropolitan region. The research draws on data gathered in a questionnaire survey of newcomers to suburban housing. The findings confirm the generally high feelings of safety in low-crime suburban districts. Our analysis further showed that age, previous victimization and length of residency are the main determinants of fear of crime in Prague's suburban communities.

This article reports on a new empirical study evaluating crime concentration at places in a post-socialist city. We use principles of the law of crime concentration at places and the Cambridge Crime Harm Index to measure crime count and crime harm concentration at the level of street segments. The research found differences between crime concentration in a post-socialist city and crime concentration reported by recent studies from US or UK cities. Both crime and harm concentration are consistently less spatially clustered than expected by the theory in a post-socialist city. This finding has significance for both international criminology and national policing authorities, because the success of place-based policing is highly dependent on strong spatial clustering of crime. The study underlines the importance of experimental criminology and theory testing for the transfer of crime prevention approaches from their original contexts.

Despite growing scholarly interest in residential segregation in Central and Eastern Europe, thus far insufficient attention has been paid to understanding marginalization in these postsocialist transition societies through the perceptions of stakeholders. The present article reports the findings of a qualitative study of the perceptions of urban social problems in the city center of Prague, Czechia. Semistructured interviews with the key actors involved in the city’s social development are used to understand what social phenomena they perceive as problematic, how they localize them within the urban space, and how their perceptions translate into policy attitudes. We find that stakeholders emphasize the issues of homelessness, drug addiction, and the appropriate delivery of social services in their narratives. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the repressive nature of policy interventions partly results from a lack of experience of overcoming such societal issues and partly results from weak coordination at the city level.

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