| Popis: |
While criminology has always enjoyed a highly productive relationship with the city, generating many innovative empirical and theoretical studies, this dissertation asserts that, too often, the conceptualization of urban crime that stems from these varied accounts is somewhat limited. Most significantly, these accounts have left us with a very lopsided interpretation of the crime-city nexus that frequently distils human experience, social diversity and the inherently pluralistic fabric of city life, to leave only the discourse of demographics, statistics, environmental multi-factorialism and rationality. In an effort to address this shortcoming, this work begins by bringing together research from both within and outside of the mainstream criminological enterprise - most notably, social theory, urban studies, architectural theory and research into urban consumption practices - in a bid to present a more rounded account of the contemporary `urban experience', and, importantly, its relationship to urban crime. Central to the thesis is the argument that the late modern urban experience is increasingly constituted around the new and distinct social and cultural practices associated with a fast-paced consumer society. It is asserted that not only is consumer culture bringing about changes in the physical and structural nature of urban space, but it is also precipitating and engendering within individuals new and distinctly 'postmodern' forms of concomitant subjectivity that, in many cases, find expression through crime. Drawing on various insights of the `new cultural criminology' - most notably the work of Jack Katz (1988) - the thesis sets out to identify and explore the overlapping theoretical terrain that now exists between the categories of urban experience, consumerism and crime - the express intention being to formulate these insights into a tentative conceptual framework for thinking about certain forms of criminality under the unique conditions of late modernity. |
