Towards a criminology of atmospheres: Law, affect and the codes of the street

Abstract

The street has a long and distinguished pedigree in criminology as a site of human sociability, transgression and spontaneity. Recent scholarship in legal studies has, however, explored the role that non-human actors play in the normative ordering of urban life. These interventions suggest the need for criminologists of the street to take seriously not only the experiential foreground of crime but also its background. In this article, we seek to bring these traditions into dialogue through engagement with the concept of ‘atmosphere’ – a place-based mood or spatialised feeling that blends human and non-human elements, and has the capacity to act in a quasi-agentic manner. Drawing on an experiment in ‘atmospheric methods’ conducted during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, in which some of the city’s central streets were occupied for 79 days, we seek to demonstrate that the analytics of ‘atmosphere’ offers a unique conceptual approach to urban life and street crime in the contemporary age.

The Limits of the City: Atmospheres of Lockdown

“…Relations of connection between places and senses play a crucial role in the generation of meaning and value ( Kindynis 2019 ; Millie 2019 ), including the construction of ‘atmosphere’—what Fraser and Matthews define as a ‘spatialized feeling’ ( Fraser and Matthews 2019 : 2). Campbell writes of the need for criminologists to examine the significance of an ‘embodied experience of place’ ( Campbell 2013 : 35) and an engagement with atmospheres assists our understanding of how the sensory components of a place, event or experience may be both engineered for human subjects and can also constitute emotional attachments for the human subjects within them ( Anderson 2009 ; Adey 2013 ; Kindynis 2019 ; Young 2019b ).…”

NFTs: Digital things and their criminal lives

“…Within cultural criminology we look in particular to the ‘agentic object’ arguments encapsulated in the emerging literature on affect in criminology (e.g. Fraser and Matthews, 2019; Young, 2021a) which, as is the case with cultural criminology generally, corresponds and converses with similar themes in wider literature.…”

Architecture as affective law enforcement: Theorising the Japanese Koban

“…A common theme since Hayward’s (2012) plea for ‘alternative, even imaginative, new ways of thinking about space and crime that might help extend the boundaries of current spatial/geographic criminology’ (2012: 442) has been the significance of affect in how we think about – and experience – spaces. From conceptualisations of criminal events as an ‘embodied experience of place’ (Campbell, 2013: 35) in which social actors generate performative conduits for affective responses to criminal conduct, to the theorisation of the atmosphere of particular urban locations as a ‘spatialised feeling’ (Fraser and Matthews, 2019: 2), the affective dimension of place is increasingly viewed as crucial for analysis and understanding of how we make sense of crime, criminal justice and the city.…”