Order and Conflict in Public Space

Mattias De Backer is a researcher and teaching assistant at the Criminology Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Lucas Melgaço is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Criminology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Georgiana Varna is a Research Fellow at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Francesca Menichelli is a researcher at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities based at the University of Cambridge, UK.

"Public space is constantly contested. Wherever conflicts escalate, control and order are the foremost responses. This book offers a fresh alternative to this austere approach. A group of endowed scholars from all around the world discuss public urban space, expanding critical social geography into a multidisciplinary view. The book provides a timely critique of contemporary rigid policing and ubiquitous surveillance. It shows how increasing regulation and normalization contribute in increasing social exclusion and polarization. The voices of marginal groups are clearly heard, and the global approach becomes tangible with several everyday examples."Hille Koskela, Professor of Geography, University of Turku, Finland"Ranging around the globe and across academic disciplines, Order and Conflict in Public Space delves into the dangerous dialectic by which urban public space is made and remade. As the book’s provocative case studies point out, forces of privatization, surveillance and exclusion now pervade contemporary public space to the point that its very viability seems increasingly uncertain. At the same time, the sort of sharp, engaged analysis found in these pages offers hope of something better than an obituary."Jeff Ferrell, Visiting Professor of Criminology, University of Kent, UK

• 1. Editorial preface (Mattias De Backer, Lucas Melgaço, Georgiana Varna, Francesca, Menichelli)Section I: Spaces of control 2. Normalising exceptional public space security: The spatial fix of the Olympic Carceral (Jon Coaffee)3. Securitization and urban space: a study from a skyscraper in Mexico City (Nelson Arteaga Botello)4. The residential normalization of public spaces. Towards a post-punitive regulation?" (Antonin Margier)5. Avoiding encounters with poverty: aesthetics, politics and economics in a privileged neighbourhood of Cape Town, South Africa (Nick Schuermans and Manfred Spocter) 6. Caution, control and consumption: Defining acceptable behaviour in the semi-public space of Czech shopping malls (Pavel Pospech) Section II: Spaces of Transgression 7. Reclaiming civility in urban nightlife districts (Ilse Van Liempt)8. Dwelling without a home: Denver's splintered public spaces (Sig Langegger and Stephen Koester) 9. Boy Racer Culture and Class Conflict: Urban Regeneration, Social Exclusion and the Rights of the Road (Karen Lumsden) 10. Rethinking spaces, sites and encounters of conflict in 21st century Britain: The case of abortion protest in public space (Lucy Jackson and Gill Valentine) Epilogue: Chaos/order and the future of public space research 11. The future of (spatial) criminology and research about public space (Keith Hayward) 12. Diss & Ditch. What to do with public space? (Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch)