Cross-cultural nuances of the sources and consequences of subjective feelings of unsafety: A qualitative analysis in four cities

Abstract

The research aims at analyzing the fear of crime and its consequences on social cohesion and informal social control. The study is based on data collected through a triangulation of qualitative techniques (in-depth interviews, participant observation, and semi-structured focus groups) throughout eight neighborhoods of four European cities. Challenging the initial expectations, the results obtained show that, under certain circumstances, the fear of crime might foster genuine forms of social involvement and problem-solving participation. Nevertheless, the general trend indicates that crime-related anxieties are fueling the emergence of nostalgic, passive-aggressive, and violent forms of identity, which might promote potentially dangerous types of collective action.

Keywords

Collective efficacy fear of crime fear of disorder social disorganization unsafety

Introduction

This study aims to deal with some of the limitations of current research on fear of crime by offering a cross-cultural account of this phenomenon in four cities (Barcelona, Budapest, Paris, and London). Our approach is based on qualitative data studying actual and perceived insecurities in urban settings, how these endow social disorganization processes and their impact on collective action. Drawing on the previous literature, two contrasting outcomes might be foreseen. On one hand, the fear of crime may nurture social disorganization and act as a deterrent to public involvement. Bursik (1998) considered, for instance, that high levels of fear of crime cause a progressive withdrawal from community life, thus preventing any effective form of collective action. Similarly, Skogan (1990) posited that fear of crime decreases residents’ ability to exert control over events and/or groups perceived as threatening (see also Abdullah et al., 2015; Gibson et al., 2006). On the other hand, some authors consider that fear of crime might push residents to adopt proactive behaviors in an attempt to implement problem-solving measures (Taylor, 1996; Woldoff, 2002). Correspondingly, Jackson and Gray (2010) stressed the functional role of fears that could “help people be resilient in the face of actual threat and danger” (p. 15). Yet, the relationship between fears, social disorganization, and collective efficacy remains controversial. The present research provides an example of how these phenomena cause an impact in socio-historical contexts.

Fear of crime, social disorganization, and collective efficacy

In their pioneering work, Ferraro and LaGrange (1987) explained that fear of crime “refers to the negative emotional reactions generated by crime or symbols associated with crime” (p. 73). This definition directly fits the research presented here since it establishes a difference between emotional reactions to actual crime and the symbolic dimension associated with what people interpret as criminal behaviors, even when in fact they are not from a strictly legal point of view. Therefore, following the conclusions of Ousey (2017), it is possible to assume that being the victim of a crime is just one factor that could affect people’s subjective feelings of unsafety.

In fact, prior research emphasized that fear of crime is more widespread than actual crime. Valera and Guàrdia (2014) show, for instance, that people may feel unsafe even without experiencing any form of victimization. Similarly, recent quantitative analysis (Ceobanu, 2010; Delhey et al., 2017; Gray et al., 2008; Steenvoorden and van der Meer, 2017) indicates that the apparently paradoxical mismatch between actual crime and levels of perceived insecurity that characterizes contemporary Europe might be explained by a misperception between particular concerns resulting from specific threats (such as victimization) and more general and socially constructed anxieties. In this regard, Innes (2005) argues that fear of crime is usually confused with fear of disorder. This author formulated the hypothesis that the perception of living in a neighborhood affected by visual signs of physical disorder (vandalized properties and urban furniture, lack of services, dirty streets, graffiti, etc.) and social disorder (drug and/or alcohol consumption in public spaces, excessive noise, intimidation, abusive language, offensive behavior, etc.) could in turn be interpreted as an indicator of a risk to the quality of life. A consistent branch of the literature reaches similar conclusions about the negative impact of perceived disorder on people’s feelings of safety (Brunton-Smith and Sturgis, 2011; Swatt et al., 2013).

All things being equal, the effect of fear and perceived insecurity seems to increase when people live in socially deprived environments. Pan Ké Shon (2012) showed, for example, that residents of deprived neighborhoods are more likely to feel unsafe, even after controlling for individual characteristics. Winton (2004) found that “in situations of widespread and severe inequality, the urban poor are undervalued and marginalized, and their daily living conditions heighten the potential for the emergence of conflict, crime or violence” (p. 166). Accordingly, previous research in this field indicates that context-based characteristics are crucial to fully understanding why people feel unsafe and suggests that concentrated disadvantages coupled with high levels of perceived disorder could be a better predictor of neighbors’ insecurity than crime itself (Kohm, 2009).

Ecological analyses gathered evidence on the importance of neighborhood characteristics when it comes to explaining variations in terms of fear of crime (Van Ham et al., 2012). Studies focusing on the relationship between fear and urban settings date back to the pioneering work of Shaw and McKay (1942) and their theory of “social disorganization,” which can be considered the first systematic approach to the relationship between place, subjectivity, and the production of deviance. Nowadays, a renewed interest in analyzing this relationship can be portrayed in the literature, especially in the field of urban studies. Cities are affected by a profound reshaping of their morphological and social structures, with traditional social glues based on local belonging and shared identity entering into crisis and, as a consequence, citizens are forced to redefine their relationship with the urban environment. The combination of an increasingly individualized lifestyle coupled with the specific characteristics of the urban milieu (e.g. high population density and social heterogeneity) stimulates the sensation of being randomly exposed to threats in public spaces and, in turn, engenders a claim for the establishment of clear boundaries between licit and illicit behaviors.

Closely related to social disorganization is the idea of collective efficacy, which “draws together two fundamental mechanisms—social cohesion [. . .] and shared expectations for control” (Sampson, 2012: 152). This theory supports the idea that neighborhoods that exhibit higher levels of collective efficacy also have lower levels of crime. However, neighbors do not need to share strong ties to deploy their collective efficacy; instead what really matters is a shared understanding of control and the perception that one can rely on one’s neighbors. This implicitly means that residents in big cities, where dense social relations are rather sporadic, might nevertheless implement collective problem-solving strategies to prevent unlawful behaviors in their neighborhoods. For this reason, collective efficacy might be a potential deterrent for unlawful and disorderly behaviors although, at the same time, “prior violence can reduce later expectations for control and undermine trust” (Sampson, 2012: 369).

Scholars focusing their attention on collective efficacy (Mazerolle et al., 2010; Wickes et al., 2017; Wickes and Hipp, 2018) provide a comprehensive framework to analyze the complex relationship between actual and perceived crime, social disorganization, and collective problem-solving strategies. Until now, however, less attention has been paid to the impact of the subjective dimension related to fear of crime on residents’ ability to exert control over the space where they live. Previous literature indicated that higher levels of fear of crime lead to a decrease in people’s confidence in the ability to solve problems (Pitner et al., 2012; Scarborough et al., 2010) and push people to restrict their personal routine as a way to avoid situations and/or social groups that they perceive as threatening (Rader and Haynes, 2014; Wilcox et al., 2006). However, although fear of crime increases residents’ concerns about neighborhood deterioration, the social consequences for neighbors’ willingness to address problematic situations are not always immediate. Swatt et al. (2013), for instance, found no conclusive evidence about the relationship between fear and collective efficacy, and the results of Yuan and McNeeley (2017) are not conclusive either. Similarly, Woldoff (2002) claims that “the common assumption that local stressors trigger community detachment is imprecise and overstated” (p. 88). In fact, her study in Nashville (Tennessee) revealed that while social disorder reduces attachment, victimization, and crime perception might increase neighbors’ commitment.

Objective

The research aims to carry out an analysis of the causes of fear of crime in four European cities, and explore its consequences on individual lifestyles and collective forms of social interactions. The specific goals were to study anxiety-provoking situations (actual crime, fear of crime, social and physical disorder, personal vulnerability, etc.) and how these affect social cohesion and shared expectations for control, that is, the “two fundamental mechanisms” of collective efficacy depicted by Sampson (2012). The comparative research helped to sharpen the strategies that people implement to cope with fear of crime depending on the environmental features of the place where they live or their background in terms of prior experiences, social status, and social networks in the neighborhood.

Method

The following section provides an overview of the process undertaken to select the sample of neighborhoods for the comparative analysis and a comprehensive account of the qualitative data collection, which was based on a methodological triangulation (Denzin, 1978) including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and focus groups. Each instrument of data collection was designed to reach specific objectives. The interviews were intended to gather information about the neighborhoods and identify the main factors affecting the perception of insecurity among the residents of a selected area. The main objectives of the participant observation were to observe the interaction between people and spaces at different times of the day and to study residents’ behavioral habits, as well as potential disagreement and/or conflicts (intergenerational, class, ethnic, religious, etc.) that could be generated by a contested use of public space. Finally, the focus groups aimed to discuss and (ideally) agree on solutions that might abridge fear of crime.

Sample neighborhoods and research sites

The study focuses on eight areas across four cities (Barcelona, Budapest, Paris, and London). During the first phase of the research, three domains were used to select a sample of two neighborhoods in each city: (1) the incidence rate of residential burglary and/or offenses against personal integrity as the measures for crime-related issues within the neighborhood, (2) educational attainment (i.e. the share of the population with university degree) as a proxy measure for fear of crime (Baudains et al., 2016), and (3) an ad hoc measure of environmental deprivation in each city to address the effects from living in a particular area on people’s feelings of unsafety, specifically: the index of multiple deprivation in London, the household income index in Barcelona, the average property price in Budapest, and the poverty rate in Paris.

Standardized scores (z-scores) were calculated for each of the three domains and each of the neighborhoods in the four cities as z = (x–mu)/sigma, where x represents the variable associated with a domain for a particular neighborhood, mu is its mean across the city, and sigma is the standard deviation of this variable across the same city. The sign of the value of z for a particular neighborhood (i.e. positive or negative) determined whether that neighborhood falls either above or below the mean value in the city for a particular domain. A cut-off value of at least 1 standard deviation either above or below the mean in all the domains was initially established as the criterion for a neighborhood to be selected. When this was not the case, we instead selected neighborhoods that were as extreme as possible in the expected direction in each of the three domains. Two neighborhoods in each city were selected, both with high levels of crime but with opposite characteristics in terms of educational levels and socio-geographic deprivation. Therefore, the high level of crime was deemed to be a control variable to enable comparing fear of crime between areas with different demographic, social, and environmental characteristics. For the sake of simplicity, these neighborhoods were, respectively, labeled as “affluent” (e.g. high crime, high levels of educational attainment, and low socio-geographic deprivation) and “deprived” (e.g. high crime, low levels of educational attainment, and high socio-geographic deprivation). Table 1 presents the z-scores in each domain for the eight neighborhoods selected.

Table 1.

Standardized scores (z-scores) for each domain in the selected neighborhoods.

City	Neighborhoods	Crime	Educational attainment	Environmental deprivation
Barcelona	Marina del Prat Vermell	5.09	−3.06	1.18
Barcelona	Vila Olímpica del Poblenou	3.52	1.21	−1.36
Budapest	Laposdűlő	0.69	−0.93	0.92
Budapest	Országút	0.82	1.99	−1.76
London	Harlesden	1.61	−1.15	1.64
London	Primrose Hill	1.63	2.21	−1.09
Paris	Danube–Solidarité	0.55	−2.42	2.13
Paris	Europe	2.50	0.76	−0.98

A brief description of the research settings is provided below:

1. Víla Olímpica del Poblenou (Barcelona) is a maritime neighborhood close to the former industrial area of Poblenou. It was reconstructed for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games, which took place in Barcelona. Today, the area is a vibrant tourist destination with the seaside, the port, and its summer nightlife as its main attractions.

2. Országút (Budapest) is located in the second district of the Hungarian capital. The Széll Kálmán square represents the nerve center of the neighborhood, the city’s busiest transport network and is one of the flagships of the urban renewal of Buda.

3. Primrose Hill (London) is located in the borough of Camden. Several natural boundaries could be identified within the wider area: the green space of Primrose Hill to the south west, the canal to the east, the railway line to the north, and Regent’s Park Road and the park itself to the west and the south.

4. Europe (Paris) is a residential area in the eighth arrondissement located at the north-western part of Paris. The Saint-Lazare train station is the biggest building of the neighborhood, occupying nearly a third of it.

As for the deprived areas selected:

5. La Marina del Prat Vermell (Barcelona) is located in the south-western border of the Catalan capital. Some of its inhabitants were relocated as a consequence of the removal of a semi-slum housing area called Can Tunis in the 1990s. The area was subject to profound transformations over the last 15 years, but the economic crisis in 2008 interrupted the urban renewal projects.

6. Laposdűlő (Budapest) is located in the 10th district of the Hungarian capital. It hosts the infamous “mini-ghetto” of Hős Street made up by two old blocks with approximately 700 residents, which was built to cope with the post-WWI housing crisis.

7. Harlesden (London) is an area in the borough of Brent, comprises the streets between Church Road to the east and Brentfield Road to the west, which bisects the zone in two. According to the last UK Census in 2011, more than one-third of the population is Black Caribbean and Black African.

8. Danube–Solidarité (Paris) is located in the 19th arrondissement. The Danube area, in the west, has a polygonal form and is characterized by the diversity of its buildings. The Solidarité area, in the east, is composed of public housing buildings from the interwar period. Overall, the social housing makes up almost 90 percent of this neighborhood.

Methods and instruments

For the purpose of the in-depth interview, theoretical sampling was implemented to select at least one interviewee within each of the following profiles: residents with high level of engagement in the neighborhood (social workers, neighborhood associations, and NGOs), law enforcement, and decision-making actors (police and local government), less integrated individuals in the local community, such as disadvantaged groups (in terms of their socio-economic status) and/or vulnerable people (depending on their condition in relation to the research, such as victimized people). The recruitment strategy involved fieldworkers visiting meeting points within the neighborhoods (local community centers, schools, and other public locations) and consulting with local people who are active in or have connections to the research site. This approach enabled field researchers to gain access to at least one person within each one of the profiles of interest. These people who were invited in the first place suggested the recruitment of other subjects from among their acquaintances (snowball sampling).

The in-depth interviews involved 40 informants (18 women and 22 men, with a mean age of 38 years), equally distributed across the research settings (five in each neighborhood; Table 2). The interview included 35 questions and the average length was 1 hour and 43 minutes. They were performed face-to-face, audio–video recorded, and transcribed for subsequent analysis. The script of the interviews was structured around three thematic modules: the interviewee’s personal experience and understanding of the topic of fear of crime, the neighborhood’s history and current situation, and the residents’ involvement (if any) to handle safety issues. The interviewees were asked whether they “recall any episode where (you) felt unsafe in the neighbourhood,” if they “are personally worried about crime” and, eventually, to provide details on “what worries (you) the most.” The script also included a revisited version of the standard question about fear of crime associated to the fear of walking alone after dark: “Are there some areas of this neighbourhood that you avoid going to? [If yes] Which ones? Why? During what time of the day?” At a later stage, the interviewees expressed their views about “the main problems” and “the most pressing security issues” in the neighborhood, or “why people might sometimes feel unsafe in the neighbourhood.” As for the operationalization of collective efficacy and its two mechanisms of social cohesion and informal control, the respondents were invited to express their opinions on whether “the neighbours form a tight network or, alternatively, does everyone just look after themselves and their families” and, should any problem arises in the neighborhood, if they would “actively participate in resolving [the problems]” or not. Finally, in order to implement a qualitative Geographic Information System (Cope and Elwood, 2009) permitting the selection of smaller areas for participant observation, the interviewees were asked whether they avoided certain places because of fear of being involved in a risky situation, as well as what are the main gathering places within their respective neighborhood.

Table 2.

Total number [in squared brackets], age (in years or age ranges), sex (male or female, M/F), and role in the neighborhood of the interviewees and the participants in the focus groups.

City	Neighborhoods	Interviewees	Participants in focus groups
Barcelona	Marina del Prat Vermell	[5] 2 neighbors (2 M, over 75, 1 F, 41–60); 1 officer of the municipal police (M, 41–60); 1 NGO (F, 18–25)*; 1 social services (M, 26–40)	[5] 1 NGO (M, 39); 2 neighbors (both F, over 65); 1 nun (F, 45); 1 local neighborhood association (M, 50)
Barcelona	Vila Olímpica del Poblenou	[5] 1 officer of the municipal police (M, 41–60); 1 NGO (F, 61–75); 1 neighbor (M, 41–60); 1 social services (F, 26–40); 1 district government (M, 41–60)	[5] 1 neighbor (F, 60); 1 member of small commerce ass. (F, 59); 1 director of public library (F, 43); 1 director of a kindergarten (F, 35); 1 officer of the municipal police (M, 38)
Budapest	Laposdűlő	[5] 2 NGOs (2 F, 26–40); 1 neighbor (M, 26–40); 1 local administration (M, 26–40); 1 social services (41–60)	[5] 1 local municipality (M, 40); 1 Baptist church (F, 35); 1 NGO (F, 50); 1 police dpt (F, 45); 1 neighbor (F, 33)
Budapest	Országút	[5] 1 Red Cross (F, 26–40); 1 neighbor (M, 26–40); 1 Order of Malta (F, 41–50); 1 local administration (M, 41–60); 1 police officer (M, 41–60)	[5] 1 local municipality (M, 51); 1 civil guard (M, 55); 1 Red Cross (F, 38); 1 police dpt (M, 40); 1 neighbors (M, 70)
London	Harlesden	[5] 2 Brent Council (1 M and 1 F, both 41–60); 1 St Matthew’s Church (M, 26–40); 1 NGO (F, 18–25); 1 neighbor (M, 41–60)*	[8] 5 neighbors (4 M, aged 19, 20, 41, and 34; 1 F, aged 59); 1 worker of the Unity Center (M, in his early 60s); 1 volunteer in the area of human rights education for children (F, 32); 1 local entrepreneur (F, 44)
London	Primrose Hill	[5] 1 police officer (M, 26–40); 1 Camden Council (M, 41–60)*; 1 St Mark’s Church (over 60); 2 neighbors (F, aged 18–25 and 41–60)	[7] 6 neighbors (5 F and 1 M; aged 22, 35, 41, 44, 50, and over 60); 1 worker in the nursery (F, 33)
Paris	Danube–Solidarité	[5] 1 officer of the national police (M, 26–40); 1 local development team (F, 41–60); 1 Paris-Habitat (F, 41–60); 1 NGO (M, 26–40)*; 1 neighbor (F, over 60)	[5] 2 neighbors (both F, aged 53 and 64, respectively); 2 NGOs (1 F, 47 and 1 M, 44); 1 Paris-Habitat (M, 39)
Paris	Europe	[5] 2 officers of the national police (1 M and 1 F, both 41–60); 1 NGO (F, 18–25); 2 neighbors (1 M, 26–40, and 1 F, 41–60*)	[5] 1 City Hall (M, 32); 3 neighbors (2 F and 1 M, 25, 47, and 42 years old, respectively); 1 neighborhood council (M, 46)

NGO: nongovernmental organization.

Victimized people interviewed are indicated with an asterisk (*).

The participant observation took place in each research setting over 6 months (from 4 June to 16 December, 2016), for 5 days per week, covering all days and all time distributions for slots of 8 hours. The selected areas were observed for alternating periods of around 2 weeks. As such, the research team accumulated 14 weeks of observation in the affluent neighborhoods and 14 weeks in the deprived ones, which accounts for approximately 70 days and 560 hours of data collection in each area.

The final phase of the qualitative study consists of one focus group in each neighborhood. A total of 45 participants were involved (27 women and 18 men, with a mean age of 47 years), with a minimum threshold of five participants per focus group (Table 1). There were two inclusion criteria for participation in the focus groups: the participants have to live or work within the selected neighborhood, and they cannot be the were interviewed previously. In line with the theoretical sampling used for screening the interviewees, participants in the focus groups all have a tie to the same neighborhood but they were heterogeneous in terms of their social roles. The average length of the focus groups was 1 hour and 30 minutes, ranging from 68 to 105 minutes. Audio–video inputs recorded during the participant observation were used to foster a debate among the participants, encourage them to express opinions on what are the most and the least enjoyable aspects of the neighborhood, “what does it mean to live safely?” and whether they “consider the neighbourhood to be safe?” and why. The purpose was also to explore how they interpret their role and, by extension, the role of the neighbors with a view to developing strategies that could tackle the problems affecting the neighborhood.

Implementation of the fieldwork in four cities, ethical issues, and data analysis

A team of eight fieldworkers (four women and four men, two in each city, composed of pre- and post-doctoral researchers with backgrounds in sociology and criminology) was trained during a week-long face-to-face workshop (40 hours) to ensure the consistency of the data collection. In addition, the training provided them with specific guidelines on internationally recognized ethics standards, gender issues, and measures to be taken to prevent stigmatization of individuals or groups. The instruments of data collection (the script for the in-depth interviews, the template for recording field notes during the participant observation, and the script for the focus groups) were submitted to a validation process involving eight independent experts across the four scenarios entailed in the fieldwork. All of these materials were available in five languages (English, Spanish, and Catalan for the fieldwork in Barcelona, French, and Hungarian). A pilot for each technique was carried out in each city prior to the start of the data collection.

Throughout the data collection, fieldworkers completed interim reports, which were periodically shared with the scientific coordinator(s) in charge of supervising the fieldwork in the corresponding national setting. The interim reports were structured around a set of analytical categories associated with the topics of interest in the research and allowed the systematization of the collected data as the fieldwork progressed. The qualitative data analysis software NVivo was used to perform the analysis. At the end of the data collection, a final report was prepared with a detailed account of the main outcomes emerged in each research setting and the triangulation of the results obtained through the in-depth interviews, the participant observation, and the focus groups. Finally, all the fieldworkers and the scientific coordinators met during a face-to-face meeting with the objective of discussing the results and providing the basis for a comparison of the levels of the fear of crime, the social disorganization, and the collective efficacy among the neighbors across the eight research sites.

Results

The presentation of the results is structured into two sub-sections addressing cross-cutting and context-specific issues, respectively. As detailed below, the comparative analysis revealed that fear of crime and perceived disorder often overlap, with blurred lines between them. The misperception between actual crime and the (supposed) sources of disorder is consistent across all the research settings. On the other hand, there are significant differences between and within deprived and affluent areas with regards to the strategies that people need to implement in order to cope with the fear of crime. Tables 3 and 4 include a schematic overview of the main results allowing for a comparison between the research sites.

Table 3.

Comparison of main results across the deprived neighborhoods in the four cities.

Neighborhoods	Fear of crime	Social disorganization features	Collective efficacy
		Social disorganization features	Social cohesion	Informal social control
Marina del Prat Vermell (Barcelona)	High. Drug-related issues and petty crimes are major issues. Avoidance behaviors during night hours, mainly reported by women	High. Economic deprivation, ethnic heterogeneity, family disruption, and the increase in the portion of older population	Moderate. Community cohesion is a vestige of the past. Nostalgic views are fomenting individualism	Low. “Militarization” of public spaces by drug dealers. Neighbors express a feeling of abandonment from public institutions
Laposdűlő (Budapest)	High. Crime incidence and socio-geographic isolation fuel the feeling of unsafety	High. Lack of basic assets and public street lighting. Family disruption and ghettoization	Low. Out-group stigmatization is frequent	Low. Defeatist attitudes predominate over genuine forms of problem-solving
Harlesden (London)	Moderate. Visual perceptions massively influence residents’ sense of security. Drug dealing, on-street prostitution, and anti-social behavior contribute to fear of crime	Moderate. Ethnic heterogeneity and residential instability as a consequence of the undergoing gentrification process	High. The demographic composition leads to predominantly ethnically based social interactions. Nevertheless, residents feel a sense of community	Moderate. The strong presence of civic associations guarantees some sort of informal control
Danube–Solidarité (Paris)	High. Assault and harassment are echoed in neighbors’ narratives. Avoidance behaviors are widespread among women	High. Concentration of (social and architectural) disadvantages foster social disorganization processes	Low. Weak social ties. However, the geographic isolation functions as identitarian glue among young people	Moderate. The growing importance of religiously based practices encourages the implementation of informal social control

Table 4.

Comparison of main results across the affluent neighborhoods in the four cities.

Neighborhoods	Fear of crime	Social disorganization features	Collective efficacy
		Social disorganization features	Social cohesion	Informal social control
Vila Olímpica del Poblenou (Barcelona)	Low. Crime incidence might be higher among nonresident (tourists)	Moderate. Affluent area where population is aging. High population density at night and during summertime	Low. Community life in public spaces is rare. Semi-public spaces are major obstacles for people gathering	Moderate. Neighbors mobilize around specific topics (e.g. speculative real estate investment)
Országút (Budapest)	Moderate. Fear of crime is decreasing. Residents report general satisfaction with the impact of the renewal project on security issues	Moderate. Population density, beggars, and passers-by engender the impression of living in a disorganized area	Moderate. Long-term residents feel as they belong to the neighborhood	Low. After the renewal urban project, formal social control (police patrolling) strategies took the lead
Primrose Hill (London)	Moderate. The expectations of crime in the area are much higher than the reality would show. Primrose Hill park is avoided after dark	Low. The local area is very well maintained, the park and streets are clean and well lit. The housing in the area is of high standard	Moderate. Although social ties between residents are week, the sense of community is satisfactory	Low. Public spaces are quite peaceful. Poor residents’ commitment
Europe (Paris)	Moderate. Although crime is not a pressing issue, feelings of unsafety increased as a result of terroristic attacks in 2015. Local residents tend to avoid crossing the station at night	Moderate. The presence of a big transport node and the occupation of public spaces by homeless support the perception of living in a disorganized area	Moderate. The population turnout prevents community cohesion. Yet, French national neighborhood qualifies the neighborhood as a “village”	Low. Problem-solving strategies have not been reported by residents or observed during the fieldwork

Concerns about disorder as a cross-cutting and cross-city issue

The analysis of the data outlined the existence of three transversal topics that were recurrent in the narratives of the residents across all eight neighborhoods and the three research techniques. These topics refer to: neighbors’ concerns about physical deterioration in the area where they live, their worries about anti-social behaviors, and the anxiety provoked by the unpredictable nature of public spaces. All of them overlay the fear of crime, thus blurring any difference between illegal practices and conflicting use of public space that is not against the law.

The first transversal topic refers to the physical degradation in the place of residence. The most common signs of degradation reported by residents of affluent neighborhoods were generally related to uncleanliness and lack of services, while residents in deprived areas were especially concerned with structural gaps affecting the urban layout of the neighborhood. As such, concerns about physical decay were much more prevalent in areas labeled as deprived rather than in affluent areas. Three out of four of the deprived areas were facing the consequences of failed urban requalification projects: Laposdűlő (Budapest), Danube–Solidarité (Paris), and La Marina del Prat Vermell (Barcelona). In all these contexts, residents mentioned the poor condition of urban infrastructure in their neighborhood. A male interviewee in his mid-40s in Hős Street explained that he feels like he is living in the “little-Chicago of Budapest.” Similarly, in Danube–Solidarité, which is characterized by its distinctive architecture popularly known as Habitation Bon Marché (literally meaning cheap housing), an elderly resident expressed concerns about the degradation of housing conditions in the neighborhood that in his opinion needed “major rehabilitation.” In the case of La Marina del Prat Vermell (Barcelona), the process of urban renewal is still ongoing and foresees the construction of 30,000 new apartments with the aim of converting this area into the “new Vila Olímpica.” Nevertheless, the urban requalification of this neighborhood was interrupted as a consequence of the economic crisis in 2008, thus frustrating the expectations of local residents and encouraging the impression of living in a “hermetic neighbourhood, with only four entrances, building in poor conditions, where besides four stores there are no leisure spaces or other attractions” (female interviewee aged 45). The fourth deprived area in our sample, Harlesden (London), is currently undergoing a gentrification process, which results in a steady growth in property prices and the construction of a symbolic frontier between long-term neighbors and new residents that “keep themselves to themselves” (in the opinion of a 39-year-old female participant in the focus group). Along the same lines, a 42-year-old male interviewee explains,

what people now want is to be like Kensal Green and Notting Hill immediately. They want the whole gentrification to have happened and then to be sitting there saying oh isn’t it lovely now it’s all been sorted out for us. And I think there’s a big groundswell of opinion amongst most people in Harlesden, myself included, that that shouldn’t really be happening.

These results suggest that, differences aside, a tight link exists between urbanization processes (failed requalification and/or ongoing gentrifications) and citizens’ perceived physical disorder across all deprived areas involved in the analysis.

The second transversal topic is linked to residents’ concerns about anti-social behaviors. The nature and intensity of these concerns varied depending on the specific characteristics of the neighborhood and the profile of the person with whom fieldworkers interacted. Yet, the perception of social disorder is more balanced between affluent and deprived areas than it was for physical disorder. The interpretation of the results of the participant observation and the focus groups suggests that in affluent areas, where crime-related issues are less of a concern, the perception of living in a socially disorganized area plays a major role in nurturing residents’ fears. In this regard, drug-related issues represent one of the more pressing concerns and, usually, they were mainly associated with young people. At the same time, it was difficult to distinguish actual unlawful practices from legal behaviors since residents often associated nothing more than seeing young people congregating in public spaces with illegal activities. As explained by a 35-year-old male neighbor living in Danube–Solidarité (Paris) during the interview: “what mainly generates insecurity among residents is undesired occupation of public space [. . .] young people in the halls and on the crowded sidewalk [. . .] The spaces become squats, they are no longer free spaces.” Similarly, according to a female resident in her mid-40s during the focus group in Primrose Hill:

young people tend to get some illicit alcohol or something, and sit up and have a drink [. . .] a quiet place where parents can’t see them smoking cigarettes or drugs [. . .] not have adults come and say what are you up to?

More generally, the neighbors exhibit strong stereotypes against vulnerable groups such as homeless people, who were frequently connected to violent begging, vandalism, and other behaviors perceived as dangerous (shouting, singing loudly while drunk, etc.). In Országút (Budapest), for instance, the presence of homeless pushes residents to develop avoidance behaviors, especially in the surroundings of Széll Kálmán Square. According to a 60-year-old male participant in the focus group: “if someone thought that the renovation of the Széll Kálmán would make the homeless disappear, I have bad news for them, they didn’t vanish at all but spread out to the streets nearby.” One of the disorder hotspots is Szász Károly street where, according to some of the residents, homeless are particularly aggressive: “they consider the underpass as their own territory, and decide who could use this space or couldn’t,” explains a 41-year-old female resident in an informal chat undertaken during the participant observation.

Finally, as for the third transversal topic, the analysis depicted the existence of a relationship between feelings of safety, fruition of public spaces, and unpredictability. The presence of overcrowded public spaces is a specific feature of the affluent neighborhoods of Vila Olímpica (Barcelona), Europe (Paris), Országút (Budapest) and, to a lesser extent, Primrose Hill (London). All of them are affected by a dramatic increase of the population density during specific periods of the day/year as a consequence of tourism massification (Vila Olímpica), the presence of big transport hubs (Saint-Lazare station in Europe, and Széll Kálmán Square in Országút) or meeting points (closeness to Camden town market in Primrose Hill), which were reported by residents as a source of unease. On the other hand, the idea of being alone in public spaces is not comforting either, particularly for women. Nearly, all female participants in the fieldwork, in all the research settings, regardless of their cultural and socio-economic background, and consistently across the three techniques of data collection, expressed concerns about being alone in the streets at certain moments of the day. “Without going into much of a cliché, being a woman more or less young in the public space, makes you feel vulnerable” (female interviewee in her mid-30s living in Europe, France); “at certain hours it is quite awkward to be alone, you make a detour or you take more care” (female interviewee aged 43 living in La Marina del Prat Vermell, Barcelona); “I don’t feel safe these days walking down the street at night, partly because I have a slight mobility problem” (28-year-old female participant in the focus group in Harlesden, London). Another woman in Paris told us during the interviews that avoiding walking alone at night is “a basic protection” for women. “This is my education,” she claims, and now that she has become mother, she tries “to teach [her child] to develop avoidance strategies” in order to get her away from threatening situations. From this perspective, the analysis provides some support to the idea that socialization plays a role in the development of differential strategies to cope with fear of crime between men and women. The fieldwork underlines how women need to implement strategies for keeping safe that ensure a balance between the “right amount of panic” (Vera-Gray, 2018) and the free use of public space. The prevalence of avoidance behaviors among women is to a greater extent a consequence of their exposure to gender-based forms of violence (unwanted touching, random sexualizing of conversations to more explicit threats of sexual violence; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2015). These accounts of sexual harassment ultimately denote a patriarchal use of urban spaces, which discriminates against women, a point that was also raised by female fieldworkers who, on several occasions, needed to deploy their social skills to avoid uncomfortable situations during the data collection.

Context-specific issues: residents’ strategies to cope with fear of crime

The interpretation of the results shows that fear of crime exerts an uneven influence on the dynamics of community cohesion and collective efficacy. In those neighborhoods where social disorganization is combined with recurrent exposure to violence, fear of crime deters participation in the community. Nevertheless, under certain circumstances (e.g. ethnic, socio-demographic, and behavioral homophily, and the belief of sharing a common history in the neighborhood), fear of crime might also function as a vector for community engagement, although the nature of such engagement is often controversial. Specifically, two main dynamics of social investment were depicted: one related to the notion of “selective solidarity” (Raudenbush, 2016) and a second evoking the theory of collective efficacy (Sampson, 2012).

Fear of crime undermines social integration and collective efficacy mostly in deprived areas. Residents of Hős street in Laposdűlő (Budapest) refer to “the urban myth that when you walk here everything is stolen from you and that you cannot go in the evening” (this opinion was expressed by a male interviewee in his mid-30s). More broadly speaking, people living in this area showed high levels of internalization of this “myth,” which, in conjunction with structural disadvantages (i.e. poverty and building deprivation) and high levels of crime (i.e. especially connected with drug use and selling), made collective action prohibitive. Not surprisingly, the discussion undertaken during the focus groups displayed the predominance of pessimistic views toward the future evolution of this area, and when asked to propose solutions they would implement to improve the current situation, participants oscillated between defeatist attitudes (“I would demolish this place totally,” one long-term female resident told us during the focus group) and the desire to move out.

Another area affected by high levels of fear of crime, social disorganization, and low collective efficacy is La Marina del Prat Vermell in Barcelona. “If you compare this neighbourhood to any other in the city, this place is the armpit of the world,” stated a middle-aged man during the participant observation. The main site under observation was Falset Square, a place with intense social activity during the day but that was “militarised” at night. One of the interviewees advised that “some groups are making intensive use of plaça Falset,” suggesting that they are linked to drug consumption and trafficking in that area. Both the fieldworkers involved in the data collection and the residents reported the occupation of this space by a group of young adults, predominantly males, who exert control over the pedestrian entrances of the square. The neighbors made reference to an alternative rule of law within the neighborhood that is perceived as unfair and arbitrary. In turn, this feeling of injustice and arbitrariness is accentuated by the perceived inattention of the police. For instance, it was not uncommon to hear neighbors sarcastically referring to the police as “La Once” (a local association devoted to the visually impaired) during informal chats in the participant observations. Under these circumstances, and also given that the population is getting increasingly older, residents feel stuck in a passive-aggressive standoff between a legal authority which they consider has abandoned them, and a parallel authority that is visible, physically present, and potentially dangerous. Against this background, nostalgia functions as a last resort and an interpersonal “glue” that holds relationships together. There is a palpable tension in La Marina del Prat Vermell between a romanticized past, a present characterized by social and physical isolation and an idealistic view toward the future that is seen with optimism but without imagining concrete forms of involvement that might benefit the neighborhood. As a consequence, when problems arise, “the best thing you can do is trying not to get involved, otherwise you might be in serious troubles,” opined an elderly female during the focus group.

Harlesden (London) is a partial exception among the deprived neighborhoods under analysis, since the feeling of abandonment is neither a reason per se for people to be unsatisfied with their life in the neighborhood nor a justification for social disinvestment. In this multicultural neighborhood, there is a lot of community action, as evidenced by the number of associations mentioned in the interviews and the focus groups. Despite the fact that communities from different ethnic backgrounds tend to meet in different places, residents have developed a feeling that “everybody [is] watching out for everybody,” as expressed by a Gambian woman aged 35. The participant observation identified the existence of shared expectations for control in Harlesden especially among people from the same ethnic group and those involved in the Catalyst Housing, the Residents Association, and the Unity Centre. The examples retrieved from the fieldwork in Harlesden evoked the concept of selective solidarity elaborated by Raudenbush (2016), which “identifies a process related to how people think about and approach exchange relationships. It is a process marked by attempts to manage life in poverty while also holding deep sentiments of distrust toward others in one’s social environment” (p. 1021). Yet, paradoxically, the research reveals that selective solidarities in Harlesden might even foster genuine forms of social commitment.

Similarly, in a context affected by high rates of school dropout as Danube–Solidarité (Paris), social support is strong among families, especially thanks to “a quite spontaneous mobilisation of mothers [. . .] who act as big brothers watching out a little for everyone.” This aspect came out during the interview with a 33-year-old male resident but was reported in two of the five interviews in this neighborhood. Conversely, young people, who are generally seen as a source of disorder, have based their group identity on the specific portion of street they occupy with their friends. A male interviewee in his early 40s defined this pattern of identification as “the territory syndrome” which leads to the emergence of avoidance behaviors that do not depend on fear but rather on socio-economic cleavages. A female social worker in her mid-30s explained during the interview:

one of the things that marked me when I first arrived in this area is that young people do not go to the Buttes–Chaumont park, which is literally 200 meters from here, because it is occupied by other socio-demographic groups of the arrondissement.

As such, even though in-group social cohesion might reach satisfactory levels in Danube–Solidarité, out-groups relationships advance “the feeling that there are two or more separate worlds” (according to the opinion of a police officer emerged during the focus group) that coexist in the neighborhood.

Selective solidarities can be activated in affluent areas as well, although more sporadically. In fact, the general trend in well-off areas is that, despite relatively satisfactory levels of social integration, neighbors are less able to organize themselves and implement problem-solving strategies. Nevertheless, during the participant observation in Vila Olímpica del Poblenou (Barcelona) sub-groups of residents involved in the local neighborhood association were proactively involved and achieved tangible results against what they conceived as a threat for their neighborhood (e.g. the construction of a new low-cost hotel that symbolizes the financial speculation and mass tourism affecting this area), thus providing an example of what Sampson (2012) defines as collective efficacy.

Conclusion and discussion

The three techniques of data collection provided unique and rich insights useful to compare residents’ assessments of security issues across four European cities. This study advances research on fear of crime by providing a micro-level look at how people conceive security issues that affect their place of resident, and how they organize themselves either to avoid threatening situations or to develop collective problem-solving strategies.

In their pioneering qualitative analysis, Farrall et al. (1997) insisted that prior quantitative research might have overestimated the incidence of the fear of crime among citizens, arguing that the understanding of this phenomenon was “a product of the way it has been researched rather than the way it is” (p. 658). Over two decades later, the present research suggests that focusing on concrete worries of becoming the victim of a crime might result in the underestimation of the social implications of the fear of crime. In fact, the analysis in the four cities of Barcelona, Budapest, London, and Paris, indicates that fearing crime encompasses a more widespread feeling of malaise fueled by the impression of living in a disordered environment and pessimistic expectations about the future. Indeed, as suggested by Innes (2005), people are increasingly confusing fear of crime for fear of disorder, which converts fear of crime into a problem of civic coexistence rather than a crime-related issue.

Concerns about physical and social disorder consistently appear in the eight neighborhoods analyzed, although they vary in nature and intensity. With regard to physical disorder, one possible explanation is that apprehension over physical decay affects residents differently, perhaps due to their different points of reference (Sampson, 2009; Wallace et al., 2015). This conclusion could be interpreted along the same lines of the relative deprivation theory developed by Runciman (1966) who considers that “the relationship between inequality and grievance only intermittently corresponds with either the extent or degree of actual inequality” and what truly matters is people’s subjective assessment of their material conditions (p. 286). Yet, physical disorder is undoubtedly more of a concern for residents in deprived areas due to the structural architectural deficit (e.g. housing deprivation, poor or lack of public spaces, and facilities) in their neighborhoods.

Looking at the social component of disorder, the results reveal that contested views over the nature of public space and its legitimate uses generate unease among neighbors who feel that they are forced to avoid behaviors and/or places in order to escape situations that are perceived as threatening (Kappes et al., 2013; Rader et al., 2007). The presence in public spaces of people that are considered hostile, visually unpleasant, outsiders, or disrespectful, erode the community’s capacity to create a meaningful interpretation of social life within the neighborhood but, at the same time, allows the neighbors to operate a sort of “reduction of complexity” (Luhmann, 1995) of the social causes of disorder. At the same time, the increasing misperception between behaviors that are considered inappropriate and criminal behaviors ends up inflating people’s understanding and perception of crime-related issues. This trend configures perceived social disorder as a socially constructed, spatially concentrated and time-dependent phenomenon, disqualifying entire social groups as responsible for disorder and pointing to the existence of no-go areas especially threatening at a certain time of day.

As for the incidence of direct experiences with crime, the fieldwork illustrated a key difference between affluent and deprived neighborhoods. In fact, despite recording a relatively high level of crime as a criterion for selection, residents in affluent areas are generally less exposed to outdoor offenses. According to our results, in three out of four affluent neighborhoods, crime incidence is higher among passers-by (Europe in Paris and Országút in Budapest) or nonresidents (Vila Olímpica in Barcelona), while in Primrose Hill (London), the most frequent offense reported by residents is burglary, which can be hypothesized to exert a higher impact at the individual rather than the community level. As such, in affluent areas where the incidence of crime is less evident, the perception of social disorder plays a major role in determining residents’ fears. Several participants suggested that at times they would rather stay at home than go out, in order to avoid the risk of trouble outside, thus reinforcing the view of home as a key site and source of ontological security (Padgett, 2007). This could explain why, despite generally feeling safer and satisfied with the life in the neighborhood, there is no guarantee that they would get involved, if the situation so requires. The examples of Europe (Paris), Primrose Hill (London), and Országút (Budapest) reinforce the arguments of Barton et al. (2017: 6), who stressed a key difference between social integration and collective efficacy, where the latter “assumed a shared sense of expectations of appropriate behaviours” that is lacking in the former. According to the results obtained during the fieldwork, it is also possible to hypothesize that lower levels of informal social control in well-off areas are counterbalanced by the presence of formal agencies of social control (e.g. the police), which might in turn be an explanation for the satisfactory levels of place attachment.

In contexts where fear of crime is widespread and collective efficacy is particularly low, people are turning toward a rose-tinted view of the neighborhood’s past, thus corroborating the hypothesis of Bauman (2017) of the emergence of a “retrotopia” that prevents any engagement toward the construction of a better future. Retrotopian views prevail in La Marina del Prat Vermell (Barcelona), for instance. Still, seeking refuge in nostalgia has different implications depending on the different socio-historical experiences, legal constructions, and composition of the populations of the cities under analysis. From this perspective, Budapest deserves particular mention. According to Sessar et al. (2007), this city was exposed by 1989 to a “modernisation shock with enormous problems of adapting to the new challenges leading to similarly profound social and personal feelings of insecurity and fear of crime in the population” (p. 108). The materials collected during the fieldwork indicate that the effects of the 2008 crisis mingled with the unprecedented arrival of migrants in present-day Hungary might have exacerbated the general life pessimism in this country, especially for those generations who lived through the post-socialist transition. As a result, the levels of crime phobia recorded in Budapest neighborhoods are largely unknown elsewhere and, ultimately, they are feeding the emergence of authoritarian views among citizens.

Finally, the results suggest that despite showing relatively high levels of fear among residents, selective solidarities might be activated to cope with existing problems. Selective solidarities function in deprived areas (Harlesden in London and Danube–Solidarité in Paris) and also among upper class residents, for instance, in Vila Olímpica del Poblenou (Barcelona), and these are activated to face the social groups that are considered as antagonists (troublemakers, newcomers, etc.). However, the nature of residents’ involvement derived from these selective solidarities remains controversial: on one hand, they foster neighbors’ commitment and possibly help them to exert some genuine form of informal social control but, on the other hand, they are likely to establish profound social borders and foster the creation of separate social environments with contrasting views about the legitimate use of public spaces. Although these disputes have still not degenerated into physical confrontation, low-level conflicts occur on a daily basis and take place within an overall tendency to recognize and disqualify certain social groups as sources of disorder. As such, despite having depicted some sort of commitment among the neighbors in the research sites under analysis, the results reveal that collective efficacy might not be so collective after all, which corroborates the conclusion arising from quantitative research (Browning et al., 2016; Brunton-Smith et al., 2018).

As for the limitations of this study, the qualitative approach is affected by a number of restrictions associated with reduced sample size along with the difficulties of generalizing results and accounting for researchers’ subjectivity. Nevertheless, it should be observed that corrective measures were implemented to reduce these biases, including: the training of researchers prior to the data collection, the validation processes by experts on the data collection instruments, the piloting of collection instruments in each country and the different language versions, and the monitoring actions by experts in method and research design during the implementation of the fieldwork.

Despite such limitations, this research should be seen as an attempt to explore fear of crime, its relationship with social disorganization processes and its impact on collective efficacy from a cross-cultural perspective. Subjective feelings of unsafety, conceived as the combination of the fear of (actual) crime and a more general sensation of unease, have profound and tangible impacts on people’s life and, over the long term, they might impose substantial social and economic costs upon contemporary cities (emergence of stereotypes, self-defensive and protectionist forms of aggregations, residents moving out, drastic reduction of private investment, etc.). Comparing and contrasting across different contexts is clearly lacking in the current literature, and the present research offer a rich vision into eight neighborhoods where, beyond their differences, subjective insecurities are fueling the emergence of new forms of social action and, in some cases, social disinvestment. As already noted by Sennett (1970), “insecurity as such is at the root of this need for an image of community [. . .] that men may forge as a bulwark for themselves against disorder” (p. 34). Such an attitude is as easy as it is potentially deleterious. Accordingly, the challenge is then to understand which factor might encourage citizens to get involved and make sense of the complexity that is inherent to every big city in the world.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge most gratefully the enormous work of the fieldworkers involved during the data collection.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 program (Grant Agreement number 653004; Project MARGIN—Tackle Insecurity in Marginalized Areas).

ORCID iD

Riccardo Valente

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