Roy Coleman
A Post-Social City? Neo-liberalising Crime Control and the Reproduction of Spatial Inequality
As neoliberalising cities attempt to re-image, re-market and re-invent themselves in the context of regional, national and international inter-urban competition, a re-emphasis on the aesthetics of street life is being crafted through contemporary state forms. In this context, crime control is evolving beyond a mere technical exercise and is instead located within wider strategies to create visually pleasing and performative spaces. The prioritisation of the visual over the social (seen in the UK through the use of anti-social behaviour sweeps, byelaws and CCTV) acts to disqualify relatively powerless groups from full social acceptance, while at the same time deregulating and opening up the spaces of manoeuvre for the powerful. The shift to neoliberal forms of crime control (through partnerships) may only mean the further diminishment of social forms of control and an extension of the violence done to marginal groups in the emerging post social urban order.
Dr. Roy Coleman is lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at the School of Sociology and Social Policy of the University of Liverpool. His research interests include social control, the use of surveillance technologies, state theory and urban inequality. Publications among others in British Journal of Sociology, Critical Criminology, Surveillance and Society and Crime Media and Culture. His book Reclaiming the Streets. Surveillance, Social Control and the City (2004, Cullompton: Willan Publishing) was winner of the Hart Socio-Legal Book Price 2005.
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