Security in the Bubble: Navigating Crime in Urban South Africa

Description

Focusing on the South African city of Durban, "Security in the Bubble" looks at spatialized security practices, engaging with strategies and dilemmas of urban security governance in cities around the world. While apartheid was spatial governance at its most brutal, postapartheid South African cities have tried to reinvent space, using it as a "posi

Christine Hentschel is visiting professor at the Institute for Criminological Research at Hamburg University and is affiliated with the Institute of Urban Sociology at Humboldt University Berlin.

"Despite the weight of the subject matter-urban crime in a violent city-Security in the Bubble goes against the grain of critical scholarship, evoking a new language to capture the fine-grained and culturally attuned spatial practices of identity. As a consequence, novel insights and experiences reveal contemporary urbanity in all its contradictory fullness. This is vital and beautifully crafted urbanism."-Edgar Pieterse, University of Cape Town "Christine Hentschel's theoretically sharp book shows how the pursuit of security dynamically organizes-and simultaneously fragments-urban life. In a major contribution to criminology as well as to urban studies, Hentschel acknowledges the reality of violence and fear but, refreshingly, avoids dystopian cliches in a work that is as relevant for Chicago and Detroit as it is for Rio and Bogota."-Mariana Valverde, University of Toronto