Scholars are invited to submit proposals for original papers to be presented at a main session at the 8. International Conference on Urban History to be held in Stockholm from 30th August till 2nd September 2006.
The session will explore how urban space shaped and influenced patterns of violence and crime. Cities have a strong record for breeding violence and disobedience to the law. While this is a very old story, it took a new turn during the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries: in both centuries city planning was greatly shaped by the notion that violence and crime could be fostered by the spatial lay-out of a city, especially by narrow spaces and high density both of buildings and population. In consequence, many cities were re-built and turned into new cities, designed to keep political unrest, moral decay, and crime at bay.
During the nineteenth century and also in the early twentieth-century middle class moral panic focused mostly on densely populated working-class districts in the inner cities. As a rule, in redeveloping these districts politicians opted for open spaces and the resettlement of great parts of the city’s population. Ironically, this movement for urban reform created in the longer run new hotbeds of crime and violence: new housing estates built during the 1960s and 1970s, that can be regarded as the movement’s apogee, turned quickly into areas where social problems accumulated and rates of delinquencies soared although these estates had nothing at all in common with the inner city districts that were traditionally perceived to be at the core of the problem of urban crime.
During the last decades of the twentieth-century, yet another aspect to this story came to the fore: at the one hand gated communities were built which promise to spare its inhabitants the experience of violence and crime by social cohesion and close surveillance, on the other hand the policy of ‘zero tolerance’, inspired by the ‘broken windows theory’ and devised in New York City but eventually highly influential in many Western cities, was praised both by politicians and the media for reclaiming urban space that seemed to had been surrendered to criminals. At the same time, the development of mega-cities in developing countries for example in South America created yet another close link between urban space and violence: in many of these cities various districts, invariably populated by members of a dispossessed underclass, seem to be ruled by organised crime or by violent youth gangs. These neighbourhoods can be regarded as counterparts to the gated communities created for affluent families since they are both ‘no go areas’ for specific parts of the population, cutting off access to what used to be public space.
We would like to discuss the multitudinous aspects to the close relationship between urban space, violence, and crime in a main session at the Eight International Conference on Urban History in Stockholm. Contributions can be made not only by historians but also by scholars active in Sociology, Ethnography, Criminology, Architecture, and Social Geography. ‘Violence’ and ‘Crime’ should be understood in a broad sense, ranging from minor delinquencies and acts of physical violence to collective forms of violent protest and disobedience such as foot riots, labour unrest, or protest marches and revolutionary uprisings. Contributors should be aware that urban space is not only shaped by buildings, roads, and other tactile objects but also by perceptions of various actors such as representatives of public authorities, local inhabitants, non-locals, women and men, people of different ethnic origin and from different social strata. Urban space was (and is) therefore never a given fact but always a contested notion, open for negotiation and change.
Most of all we would be interested in papers that discuss how urban space and patterns of violence/crime were influenced and changed by city planning and the redevelopment of districts, regarding urban environment and architecture as forms of social control. Also of great interest would be papers that reconstruct how the spatial lay-out of a city and the access to urban spaces influenced collective actions (their causes, internal logic, and their success) and, in return, also perceptions of the city and the ideas of urban reform movements. Other possible topics are inter alia: problems of law enforcement and state/governmental rule in inner-city areas, the mental maps of city inhabitants in relation to spatial patterns of violence, mass media representations of violent and crime ridden cities, and conflicts about social segregation inside the city (ghettos and gated communities).
While the organizers welcome proposals for case-studies on specific cities, comparative papers that look at cities in different countries are especially encouraged. All papers will be pre circulated in June 2006 and participants should be prepared to give only a five to ten minutes presentation at the conference followed by discussion.
Please send a 100-200 word abstract and a one-page CV to the following addresses by October 31, 2005. The ideal means of submission is an email attachment in the Word for Windows or in the Rich Text format. Regular postal mailings are acceptable as well:
Prof. Dr. Karl Christian Fuehrer,
Forschungsstelle fuer Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg, Schulterblatt 36, D-20357 Hamburg, Germany, fuehrer@fzh.uni-hamburg.de
Privatdozent Dr. Klaus Weinhauer,
University of Bielefeld, Faculty of History, Postbox 100131, D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany, klaus.weinhauer@uni-bielefeld.de