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English summaries edited in Numéro 83/84,
Au risque des espaces publics
Frédéric Ocqueteau
THE CHANGING FRENCH LANDSCAPE OF PUBLIC SAFETY
The spatial fragmentation of cities has made it impossible for people to provide for their safety. The general feeling of insecurity associated with the integration difficulties of some young people has multiplied policing and surveillance activities, particularly through private initiatives. How can the police authority retain its role as the main co-ordinator in this coproduction of safety ?
Dominique Monjardet
REINVENTING THE URBAN POLICE
The centralization of the law enforcement authority under the 1941 Vichy regime discredited municipal police forces over the long term and alienated the French police from the grassroots level. With the development of the telephone, radio and motor car, the direct contact of police officers with the population has been minimized just at a time when law and order requires greater local presence side by side with a large number of institutions and associations. To cope with juvenile delinquency, the mayors of big cities are calling for local police forces to be brought back but this reform is encountering heavy resistance.
Jean-Luc Laffont
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD POLICEMAN
At the centre of the police organization of cities
in ancient France
Municipal police forces have existed in
French cities since the Middle Ages. The
« dizeniers » in Toulouse or the « street
constables » in Bordeaux were recruited
from among local inhabitants, in the
upper layers of the working classes.
These officers, locally omnipresent, were
at one and the same time informers to
the government and its armed forces
and, above all, arbitrators in everyday
disputes. Although community police
forces were phased out after the Revolution,
they survived in some cities, such
as the dizeniers or municipal magistrates
in Toulouse up until 1934.
Simon Holdaway
POLICE OFFICERS AND ETHNIC MINORITIES IN ENGLISH POLICE STATIONS
In Great Britain, the police are addressing the racial issue by recruiting ethnic minorities as police officers. But the stereotype- based police culture is steeped in racial prejudice. The active presence and teamwork of black and Asian officers in the life of the police station should defeat this prejudice which is still afflicting the precursors today.
Elkana Joseph-Affandi
SAFETY AND PREVENTION IN KOUROU
Kourou, the overseas territory spaceflight base, is a nucleus of strong social and cultural contrasts. The sudden urbanization of this new city has been experienced as a military space- and statusbased distribution totally at odds with local customs. The regional immigration that resulted from the development of the Ariane rocket has become the scapegoat of worsening urban aggression. Safety measures, in the form of a coercive, armed, electronic response which is recommended by some authorities, are liable to aggravate the situation by deepening ethnic and social cleavages.
Didier Lapeyronnie
VIOLENCE, URBAN VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL VOID
As in the theatrical work of Bernard- Marie Koltès, excess urban violence reflects the exclusion of individuals obsessed by signs of mobility. With their remoteness from the political scene comes aggression which builds a social identity strengthened by repression. Their aim is to make themselves heard and express their frustrated aspiration for human fellowship.
Eric Macé
« URBAN » VIOLENCE AND THE CITY
The expression « urban violence », through its geographical connotation, downplays conflicts of social domination, which are the cause of violent acts in everyday life. This euphemism doubtless reflects the depoliticization of domestic violence that can find no public outlet other than the gratuitous or ostentatious act. The day-to-day problems of urban life, particularly in its segregative aspects, can form a basis for the expression of conflicts.
Eric Macé
VIOLENT CRIMINALITY AND PUBLIC ORDER
Since the 1970s, a new kind of illegal activity has emerged in Brazil, characterized by the increasingly violent control of urban areas in relation with drug trafficking. Criminals no longer challenge law and order but pursue their own interests. For the moment, increased police intervention does not seem to be able to control this situation.
Roberto Kant de Lima
POLICE, JUSTICE AND SOCIETY IN BRAZIL
Unlike democratic, popular justice in the United States, justice in Brazil originates in legal theory of a higher order enforceable against grassroots situations. Police enquiries prevent the public expression of any local conflicts and the process of law bases its decisions on a more lofty principle of social harmony. This heavily hierarchized but differentiated system nonetheless includes a series of intermediaries and special mediation missions with civil society.
Anne Wyvekens
TERRITORIAL CONCERNS,
Local groups come to grips with delinquency
The judiciary sets itself up as an active
partner to address fear in large housing
estates, mainly in local delinquency
control groups invented in Seine Saint
Denis near Paris. These groups act as
mediators between delinquents, their
families and the institutions and aim to
reduce the subservience of the public
space to the law of the strongest. Longterm
actions enable people to find their
bearings, mark out limits, contend with
provocation, seek to restore respect for
others and develop dialogue with people
who are different.
Joëlle Bordet, Jean Dubost
WHAT SAFETY ? WHO FOR, WHO WITH ?
Local authority councils for the prevention of delinquency, introduced by the French government in the 1980s, are beginning to bring together previously separated partners working in the police, the judicial system, education, local authorities and local associations. A common language is emerging to define local situations. However, concrete measures are still fragmented and cannot be defined on a community basis.
Catherine Delcroix
PARENTS IN CITIES : FAMILY PREVENTION OF RISKS INCURRED BY CHILDREN
When commenting on juvenile delinquency it has become common to implicate parents from working-class districts. But on closer examination, as is the case here with families of North African origin in the Toulouse suburbs, not all parents have given up on their responsibilities. Some, with the lowest incomes, are trying to attenuate their children’s frustration by not skimping on purchases of symbolic goods such as branded label clothing. Others, with higher incomes, are seeking to involve their children in educational and leisure activities. The fathers’personal investment in these strategies is key to overcoming barriers to integration.
Michael Wearing
SOCIAL MISERY AND TERRITORIAL DEFENCE AMONG THE MOST DISADVANTAGED
The Waterloo district of Sydney, Australia
The Waterloo district in Sydney concentrates
the most disadvantaged people in
the city. Fear of being assaulted in the
street, the obsession with illness, withdrawal
from community life, and a
demand for more social services are the
day-to-day subjects of discussion. The
inhabitants confide their existential difficulties
to sociologists in the hope that
their surveys will strengthen the presence
of the social services.
Mike Brogden
CRIMINALITY IN SOUTH AFRICA, LEGACY OF APARTHEID ?
Headlines in the newspapers, police reports and daily experience have placed South African criminality on the international agenda. The legacy of apartheid, variations in statistical crime figures, political liberalization, the development of an informal economy, the inadequacies of a mainly punitive police force, the congested judicial and prison system, permissiveness arising out of the expansion of human rights, and inappropriate advice from Western experts are at the centre of the debate. But social and economic inequality remains the basic cause of an alarming criminality.
Nassima Dris
URBANITY AND CULTURAL CODES IN THE CENTRE OF ALGIERS
In Algiers, urban violence results not from civil war, as in Beirut or Sarajevo, but from the accelerating deterioration of customs and public spaces. Until recently, streets in the city centre were places of liberty, but they have grown menacing under community pressure, particularly for women and for anyone outwardly non-conforming. The centre, which is the busiest part of the city, nonetheless guarantees that constraints are relaxed and established codes are transcended.
Vincenzo Ruggiero
CENTRO SOCIALI IN MILAN
In the anti-authority dynamics of the 1970s in Italy, some young people set up bases in a few buildings in the historical city centres, from which to take action against the unegalitarian consumerist society. Since that time, their continued patronage bears witness to an aspiration towards an alternative way of life resistant to the undivided domination of the open trading system. Investment in cultural undertakings is now inventing new forms of integration of urban marginality.
Julia Nevarez
LIVING AT THE FRINGES OF CENTRAL PARK AND HARLEM IN NEW YORK
Physical degradation increases the impression of risk for the newly-arrived city-dweller on the streets of Harlem in New York. Social demand for reinforced policing masks the economic and social conflict at the origin of unequal spatial treatment. The embodiment of fear in other people is undermining the enjoyment of public places such as playgrounds.
Jade Tabet
ARCHITECTURE OF CITIES AND SAFETY
Current « urban requalification » projects for large-scale public housing estates in Paris have clear safety objectives. Their principles disregard the specific architectural and urban features of each city or the social difficulties of the inhabitants. Guided by the Anglo-Saxon model of « gated communities », the sectorization concept aims to free the public space of all undesirable movements or groupings. The partners to these operations still have some doubts as to the validity and efficiency of spatial protection measures already out of date owing to the use of mobile phones.
Gerda Wekerlé
FROM THE EYES ON THE STREET TO THE SAFE CITY
For Jane Jacob, a shared feeling of safety in the urban environment was the key criterion for ideal city planning. In her view, making such spaces too accessible breeds fear among the inhabitants, particularly women. These ideas have erred through « situational prevention » methods advocating spatial and social closing off. But they are spreading and are being applied with the involvement of feminist associations in neighbourhood development, as shown by the example of Toronto.
Pascale Metzger, Robert D’Ercole, Alexis Sierra
IMPLICATIONS AND UNCERTAINTIES IN THE MANAGEMENT OF VOLCANIC
In Quito, the capital of Ecuador, the alarming activity of the Pichincha volcano overlooking the city has initiated an exceptional procedure for warning the population. The mayor has taken the matter in hand through a modern risk management policy. It now remains for him and the public authorities to make this administrative and technical innovation a long-term proposition.
Anne Tricot, Jacques Lolive
MALFUNCTIONING, CONFLICTS AND URBAN PRACTICES IN THE VICINITY OF NICE
In 1994, the exceptional floods of the River Var in Nice raised controversy as to the dramatic consequences of deficient local planning. Procedures to repair the damage have met the demand for safety more or less satisfactorily. Is the administrative jurisdiction, which controls public decisions, ushering in a new management policy of natural hazards ?
Marja Ylönen
ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME
The sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann on the relations between societal and professional subsystems in a complex society enables us to understand why disciplinary action is rarely taken against environmental impairment. But it can be considered that with the increase of interaction between these subsystems, permissiveness will decline.