Crime consumerism and the urban experience

While criminology has always enjoyed a highly productive relationship with the city,generating many innovative empirical and theoretical studies, this dissertation assertsthat, too often, the conceptualization of urban crime that stems from these variedaccounts is somewhat limited. Most significantly, these accounts have left us with avery lopsided interpretation of the crime-city nexus that frequently distils humanexperience, social diversity and the inherently pluralistic fabric of city life, to leaveonly the discourse of demographics, statistics, environmental multi-factorialism andrationality. In an effort to address this shortcoming, this work begins by bringingtogether research from both within and outside of the mainstream criminologicalenterprise - most notably, social theory, urban studies, architectural theory andresearch into urban consumption practices - in a bid to present a more roundedaccount of the contemporary `urban experience', and, importantly, its relationship tourban crime. Central to the thesis is the argument that the late modern urbanexperience is increasingly constituted around the new and distinct social and culturalpractices associated with a fast-paced consumer society. It is asserted that not only isconsumer culture bringing about changes in the physical and structural nature ofurban space, but it is also precipitating and engendering within individuals new anddistinctly 'postmodern' forms of concomitant subjectivity that, in many cases, findexpression through crime. Drawing on various insights of the `new culturalcriminology' - most notably the work of Jack Katz (1988) - the thesis sets out toidentify and explore the overlapping theoretical terrain that now exists between thecategories of urban experience, consumerism and crime - the express intention beingto formulate these insights into a tentative conceptual framework for thinking aboutcertain forms of criminality under the unique conditions of late modernity.