Scary cities: urban geographies of fear, difference and belonging

The London 2012 Olympics: The cultural politics of urban regeneration

“…This may well be London's post-Olympic reality: the 'legacies' of hosting the Games may well resemble Lockdown London (Graham 2012) in which a range of new punitive measures, the extension of the penal code, potentially invasive laws which legitimise the use of force, new surveillance technologies, methods of dealing with protest, and precedents of joint army, municipal and private security action become 'normalised' (Gibbons & Wolffb 2012: 441) within the QEOP and the communities with which it buffers. These new geographies of fear may well serve to maintain the fluid boundaries between deviance and belonging, order and disorder, that are instrumental to the ways in which cities are planned, built, lived, and experienced (England & Simon 2010). This is likely to be especially the case the further one ventures from the phantasmagorical locus of Olympic consumption, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, with "omniscient surveillance" (Graham 2012: 446) further deepening the city's existing inequalities, the social and spatial fragmentation of London's poor, and exacerbate the multiple industrial, ethnic, education and religious planes of division within the city's socio-economic groups (Davidson & Wyly 2012).…”

Liquid London: Sporting Spectacle, Britishness & Ban-optic Surveillance

“…Such processes contribute to a social and cultural urban apartheid through spatially concentrated regenerative investment characterised by selective belonging, displacement, urban neglect and the disrepair of built environments, 'rights to citizenship' through participation or exclusion from collective human experiences. 6 The uneasy juxtaposition between those served by 'capital space' (Harvey 2001) and those either servile to, or shunned by, its over-determining consumerist logics, suggests that London 2012 contributed to on-going processes through which urban populations, spaces, and national citizenship became bifurcated in 'scary cities' (England and Simon 2010;Kern 2010), comprising the generatively affluent-both native to London and transient populations-and the degenerative poor; the private consumer and the public recipient; the civic stimulant and the civic detriment; the socially valorised and the socially pathologised (see also Davidson and Wyly 2012;Graham 2012).…”

“…That is, such material and discursive actions serve to 'justify' authoritarian modes of control sustained through urban geographies of fear (see England and Simon 2010), suspicion, draconian forms of policing and scrutiny, the suspension of rights, and the promotion of an atmosphere of perpetual emergence and panic (Back et al 2012) in 'actually existing spaces of neoliberalism' (Brenner and Theodore 2002). This may well be our post-Olympic reality: the 'legacies' and longer term liberty-costs (Raco 2012) of hosting the Games may well resemble lockdown London (Graham 2012) as opposed to Landmark London, where a range of new punitive measures and potentially invasive laws legitimise the use of force, new surveillance technologies, methods of dealing with protest, and joint army, municipal and private security action become 'normalised' (Gibbons and Wolff 2012: 441).…”

“…This brings with it a quiet accretion of restriction that will likely have a harsher and longer lasting legacy on minorities and the poor, involving a massive police presence for Black and Asian youth in the surrounding communities, new policing techniques such as stop and search, the further stigmatisation of working-class communities in policy discourse, and the familiar security architecture of airports and international borders characterised by scanners, checkpoints, ID cards, cordons, security zones that have been rolled out in the heart of the city (Gibbons and Wolff 2012;Graham 2012;Lindsay 2013;Paton et al 2012). These new geographies of fear may well serve to maintain the fluid boundaries between deviance, belonging, order and disorder, that are instrumental to the ways in which cities are planned, built, lived, experienced (England and Simon 2010), and most crucially controlled. Poor and minority multi-ethnic bodies who border the space of the post-Olympic Park, and who are simply excluded through a range of discursive and material techniques from these spaces and the Ikea and Tesco towns which rub against it, are likely be identified as a 'threat' or an unwanted 'other' subject to increased regulation, surveillance, policing, displacement or 'civilising' (Bosworth and Guild 2008;Gibbons and Wolff 2012;Mottin 2012;Paton et al 2012).…”

Redundant? Resurgent? Relevant? Social Geography inSocial & Cultural Geography

“…Yet since that time, crime has hardly figured in social geography, with only fleeting attention devoted to crime per se in geographical accounts of the policing and social control of anti-socialities and disorder in 'scary cities' (e.g. England and Simon 2010) and little said about the social geographies of theft, burglary, malicious damage or 'white-collar' crime. Enculturating crime geography has thus encouraged a focus on the social and spatial production of fear, informed by ideas adopted from cultural criminology, but has seemingly not encouraged examination of the social geography of crime itself.…”