Cultural criminology

Cultural criminology

Culture aspects in urban planning can for the most part be referred to the approach of cultural criminology. In a similar vein as New Urbanism, cultural criminology demurs that while culture figures prominently in theoretical and practical approaches, it entails a concept of vulnerability and resilience that are based on a type of culture that is “rooted in the material predicament of the actors concerned. It eschews both a social positivism of material conditions and a cultural positivism of stasis and of essence.”

Garland as one of the most popular proponents of the cultural criminology approach locates fear of crime as a criminological subject of study as well as a public and political concern in the context of the change of the political culture of response to crime as it took place in the Western world in the 1970ies. The decline of the ideal of rehabilitation of convicted, the emergence of new normative ideal of punitiveness and the evolution of “expressive justice” – meaning public shaming and humiliation of culprits together with overemphasizing personal feelings of the victim and public outrage over individual acts of crime – have introduced a new emotional culture into crime policy: Whereas fear of crime originally used to be investigated and politically perceived at the level of “a localized, situational anxiety, affecting the worst-off individuals and neighbourhoods”, it now became “regarded as a major social problem and a characteristic of contemporary culture.” Accordingly, fear of crime can be read as being a cultural factor – if not “cultural theme” – in itself, rather than being a dependent variable in part influenced by (other) cultural factors.

This approach fits into Garland’s theoretical tenet that citizens’ knowledge and opinion about urban insecurity is “based upon collective representations rather than actual information; upon a culturally mediated experience […], rather than the thing itself.” His sum-up argument is, however, more socially rooted: that media-mediated change in cultural practices has reduced middle-class citizens’ cognitive and emotional distance from insecurity, in particular from crime. However, Garland goes on to identify cultural and institutional practices to construct artifacts which allow a continuation of imagined middle-class separation from crime. He illustrates his argument with examples from urban planning, especially the concept of offering citizens new middle-class type privacy in private public spaces, such a commercial malls based on architectures “to separate out different ‘types’ of people” and including commercial policing by private companies. This, Garland suggests, has resulted in writing the publics’ (which is in fact economically consuming middle-class citizens’ in urban areas) fear of crime into the everyday culture and associated practices of Western societies.

As Garland also argues, the victim and its fears have become a “symbolic figure”, individual victims are taken as “Everyman” and the public opinion rests on the assumption of a constant increase in crime rates met by no efficient public response, thus reducing public confidence and reinforcing the perception of certain types of victimization as symbol of the state of public safety/security affairs in general. The approach to “designing out” crime and terrorism can be largely attributed to this symbolization tendency.

Many examples of community-enhancing constructions represent an “elitism of architectural choice” that may in the end increase societal gaps and perceptions of fear, as well as actual insecurity. Cultural criminology supports this argument from the point of view of a critique of the approach of “designing-out” (crime and terrorism) through environmental design, as for example in the case of commercial malls based on architectures “to separate out different ‘types’ of people” and related risks. Therefore, cultural criminologists are strong critics of the approach to designing out by certain choices of infrastructure and architecture.

Cultural criminology, in contrast, sets out to appropriately consider dynamic change, pluralism of values, ethnic diversity and, “in terms of method”, to “rescue the human actors”, among other things from an overly technological approach to security.