City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience

Criminology has always enjoyed a highly productive relationship with the city, generating many empirical and theoretical studies. But all too often the human experience, social diversity and the inherently pluralistic fabric of city life are transformed into the discourse of demographics, statistics, environmental multi-factorialism and rationality. This book examines the crime-city nexus in a way that makes sense of criminology's past and contemporary engagements including both administrative criminology and the work of Mike Davis. Drawing on a range of disciplinary frameworks - social theory, urban studies, architectural theory and research into urban consumerism practices - the author argues for the centrality of consumption to understanding the city and urban crime.