Fear of crime and affective ambiguities in the night-time economy

2.1 Emotion and Affect

Because fear of crime embraces a range of emotions and embodied sensations (Pain, 2000, 2009), we use ‘fear of crime’ as shorthand for multiple interrelated phenomena of differing intensity—unease, discomfort, anxiety, apprehension and panic—that are united in three ways. They are linked to other fears and anxieties, including those for terrorism or immigration, and other emotions like safety or excitement (Pain, 2009); they are spatiotemporally complex and tie together (and constitute) multiple spatial and temporal scales, from the here-and-now to events earlier in the life-course and “wider networks of power and privilege” (Pain, 2009, p. 475); and they are all embodied, distributed and emergent.

Fear of crime can be studied empirically as embodied, distributed and emergent by drawing on the work of Deleuze and non-representational geography. Following Anderson (2006) and McCormack (2008), we can analyse fear of crime as experienced in and through one’s corporeal body as visceral and proprioceptive modulations—feelings—like a knot in the stomach or a tremor. These feelings can be put in words in a qualified and personalised form as an emotion, as with ‘I feel uneasy’. Feelings also have transindividual affective dimensions, which pertain to the relations between a person’s corporeal body and other agents. They refer to the capacity of a body—here used in a generalised sense as any set of material or discursive elements held together by “relations of motion and rest, of speeds and slownesses” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 123) ¹ —to affect and be affected by other bodies. Empirical studies of fear of crime should thus consider affective relations among entities and focus on the assemblages—non-homogeneous and continuously changing (‘assembling’) constellations of people, artefacts, words, symbols, memories and so forth ( Anderson et al., 2012; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)—in which fear of crime inheres. Fear of crime needs to be studied as belonging to both the perceiving subject and the assemblage in which s/he is embedded.

2.2 Triggers and Ambiguity

Studying fear of crime in the NTE from the perspective of assemblage thinking comes with two specific advantages. As assemblage thinking does not privilege the material over the discursive (or vice versa), it allows analysts to explore how both socially learnt discourses and specific, changing configurations of materiality are implicated in fear of crime. It thus offers a way of connecting SCP scholarship and the constructivist approaches from feminist geography within a framework of non-deterministic, non-linear causality. Assemblage thinking can act as connecting device because Deleuze (1988) foregrounds the significance of concrete encounters between bodies (in a generalised sense) as part of the continuous flow of practices to the emergence of affects and the increase or diminution of a body’s capacities to act.

A Deleuzian perspective also highlights that triggers of fear of crime are emergent rather than pre-given. What triggers fear differs not simply from person to person, but also between unfolding situations. As Spinoza wrote

Different men [sic] can be affected differently by one and the same object; and one and the same man [sic] can be affected differently at different times by one and the same object (Spinoza, 1996, III/178, p. 51).

This has to some extent been recognised in the geography of fear literature, given that Pain (2000) and others have acknowledged that street light can increase control and safety through the vision and prospect it affords but may equally accentuate and reveal signs of disorder at different times for the self-same individuals. A key reason why empirical research into fear of crime can benefit from assemblage theory is that it offers the conceptual tools to understand and foreground ambiguity—the lack of a stable, well-determined effect—in terms of what ‘causes’ fear of crime.

To understand such ambiguity, we need to seek explanations of the generation, intensification or reduction of fear of crime that are immanent to encounters. Instead of invoking general principles or situation-transcending explanations, researchers should adopt what Stengers (2010) calls an ecological sensibility during fieldwork and analysis. This means not only that analysts should refrain from understanding inanimate materiality as “a silent world, the docile substrate of convictions and interpretations” (Stengers, 2010, p. 40) and foreground its active role within assemblages and the generation of fear of crime; they should also examine if and how the roles that various human and non-human elements in a given assemblage play are ‘metastable’—i.e. shift and change when the composition or character of the assemblage changes (through the process of ‘assembling’). Thus, whilst light often reduces fear of crime among people in public spaces at night (Painter, 1996), it is also possible that a person who moves from the dark into a circle of light created by a lamp-post experiences anxiety as what happens beyond that circle is rendered extra dark and invisible (see also Morris, 2011). For assemblage thinkers, ambiguity is an irreducible part of assemblages, encounters and the on-going generation, intensification and reduction of fear of crime, and empirical research should make clear if and how ambiguities emerge and evolve.

2.3 Entangling Time and Space: Memory and Futurity

The preceding discussion lacks temporal depth: it focuses on short-term dynamics and is vulnerable to the criticism of ‘presentism’ sometimes levelled at non-representational geography (Rose et al., 2010). Considering how memory and a person’s past experience mediate the ways in which fear of crime brings the future into the present not only avoids such presentism, it also provides a further means to analyse how ambiguity may be central to the generation, intensification and reduction of fear of crime. In this context, we can mobilise Bergson’s (1912) habit-memory and pure memory as analytical tools. The former consists of automatic behaviours and sensori-motor mechanisms. Bodily comportments—in many ways gendered, racialised or otherwise socially differentiated (Simonsen, 2013)—exemplify this habit-memory and matter to fear of crime. Not only can their performance at a particular site in a nightlife district engender fear in others, they also shape fear of crime via perception: how we perceive an encounter is formatted by sensori-motor mechanisms acquired over one’s life-course (Connolly, 2011).

For Bergson, pure memory pertains to the unconscious survival of personal memories through which the past is progressively carried forward into the present, and can become part of embodied action in a specific encounter. This view on memory helps us understand how victimisation and socialisation ² over the life-course—whose significance has been recognised widely in the geographies of fear literature (Koskela and Pain, 2000; Mehta and Bondi, 1999)—continues to shape people’s experience of fear of crime. Through attention for the role of memory scholars can understand how fear of crime as produced in assemblages at specific sites and times bears traces of political discourses, cultural values, rumours, stereotypes and prejudices (re)produced through social institutions (Pain, 2009). Because individuals differ in terms of the internalisation of these discourses, values and so forth, their capacities to be affected by other elements in particular encounters are also differentiated. Hence, an analysis of ambiguities in the effects of encountered elements—for example, policing practices or other consumers’ comportments—on fear of crime demands that attention be directed towards the folding of past experiences into the present.

The future also matters to fear of crime as fear concerns the not-yet. Given fear’s intrinsic future orientation, empirical research into the fear of crime should also consider futurity. Whatever its trigger, fear of crime tends to suspend the ways in which the past (through habit-memory) propels people into the immediate future: they no longer know how to go on, but experience orientational difficulties whereby their ‘action-guiding anticipations’ (Shotter, 2009)—the unreflective, spontaneous and anticipatory responsiveness to the assemblage they are enmeshed in—are disrupted. One example of this is people freezing when becoming fearful; another is the triggering of cognitive thought about the range of immediate futures that might unfold—some of which might involve harm or injury—and about what to do. Herein lies another source of ambiguity: a certain element might reduce the possibility of harm and fear of crime yet also increase these, depending on how the assembling of elements unfolds and the present progresses in time. This can be illustrated with reference to critical policing studies (Cook and Whowhell, 2011; Hinkle and Weisburd, 2008) arguing that police presence in public places not only reassures members of the public but can also—and simultaneously among the same individuals—raise awareness that danger is imminent.

2.4 Towards the Empirical Analysis

We propose to analyse fear of crime in the NTE as an event—a diminution of and shift in the corporeal body’s capacity to orientate itself spontaneously towards the immediate future—that unfolds as part of the on-going encounters and assembling of elements in particular sites of which individuals are necessarily part. Whether fear emerges, intensifies or is reduced is subject to ambiguity. Three forms of ambiguity, defined as the absence of stable and well-determined effects, can be identified

Two questions for empirical research follow from this and will be addressed in what follows. Can these forms of ambiguity be identified with regard to fear of crime and the NTE? If so, what are the elements that trigger these affective ambiguities on a night out?

3.1 Context

Our empirical analysis is situated in Utrecht—a historic city with a population of ±316,000 inhabitants, in The Netherlands. Nightlife facilities are clustered in the city centre, consisting of a mix of restaurant, cinemas, (small) pubs and clubs without strict ‘closing times’ or regulation of alcohol sales (Schwanen et al., 2012). Utrecht was selected because it is the fifth-largest city in The Netherlands and one of the first to develop and implement Safe Nightlife Policies (van Liempt and van Aalst, 2012). Since 2001 the city council has implemented a broad variety of ‘safe nightlife’ measures, even though the ratio of instances of crime to the number of consumers in the nightlife districts was low given the city’s size and compared with other Dutch cities (Snippe et al., 2006). The central nightlife district is covered by many CCTV cameras, complemented with on-site patrolling of a special ‘nightlife team’ of police officers working together with pub and club owners (see van Liempt and van Aalst, 2012, for further details).

Utrecht has a young population, with many inhabitants under 18 years (20 per cent) and between 18 and 26 years (19 per cent), mainly due to the presence of a large university. According to the city’s website, almost half of the population of 16 years and older is highly educated (at least a bachelor degree or equivalent) and 22 per cent of the city’s inhabitants are of non-Western descent. ³ Our previous research has shown that the nightlife district in Utrecht is disproportionally White compared with the city’s resident population (Schwanen et al., 2012): only 11 per cent of the consumers in the NTE were of non-White extraction. The Whiteness of Utrecht’s NTE primarily reflects the supply of bars and clubs, which are oriented strongly towards highly educated (White) students and young urban professionals who live in/around the city.

3.2 Participants

For this study, we concentrated on people who actually participate in Utrecht’s NTE as they are likely to have detailed knowledge of whether and where fear of crime is experienced over the course of a night out in Utrecht and what triggers such fear. To attract people who participate regularly in Utrecht’s NTE, we centred recruitment efforts on students aged 18–25 at three student housing complexes: Ina Boudier Bakkerlaan in the city centre, Uithof on the fringe of the city and suburban Warande. Students were recruited by asking passers-by on streets in each complex whether they wanted to participate, via posters in residential buildings and through snowball sampling techniques. We sought to vary our sample in terms of gender and recruited 18 females and 12 males. All 30 respondents were in (applied) university education and considered themselves ‘Dutch’ although one participant was born in Brazil. Of course, including older participants, with other levels of educational attainment and/or persons from other ethnic backgrounds would have yielded additional insights, but it would also have made the analysis less specifically tied to the unfolding situations characteristic of Utrecht’s nightlife.

3.3 Interviews

Every participant was interviewed three times over the Spring of 2009 with each interview attempting to answer specific research questions. This study relies on the third interview, but was informed by the earlier interviews in two ways. The first two interviews helped in creating trust and rapport between interviewer and participant, which made discussing fear of crime in the third interview much easier and enabled more intimate conversations than would have been possible otherwise. Additionally, the second interview covered the participants’ familiarity with, local knowledge of, and activities undertaken in, Utrecht’s city centre and nightlife district. This information was of great aid in the conduct and analysis of the third interview.

The interviews were conducted by four different persons (all White, in their 20s, two males and two females); each interviewer interviewed participants of the same sex with the idea that this might stimulate participants to discuss gender-specific and/or intimate experiences. The participants themselves chose where the interview took place. All interviewers considered that participants had spoken to them freely and without reservations. The interviews lasted 45–60 minutes and were audio-taped with participants’ informed consent.

Two techniques helped to enrich the participants’ narratives during the interviews. One was the use of photos, which were used not as stable, already finished visual panoramas, but as prompts inviting participants to imagine themselves as enmeshed in the nightscapes depicted. The other technique was to ask participants how onprettig or prettig they would feel when participating in the pictured nightscape on a 7-point likert scale (-3 to +3). These words are best translated as uncomfortable or comfortable, but cover a wider range of emotions. This framing, which is more neutral than fearful versus not fearful, was preferred as preliminary research had suggested that students used onprettig more frequently than fearful or anxious to describe their embodied responses to photos of urban nightlife. We also hoped that using onprettig rather than the literal Dutch translation of fearful [angstig] would lower participants’ reticence to articulating more negative emotions.

We opted for photos taken by us to ensure a basic level of comparability across situations and persons. We selected six photos depicting scenes from the NTE in Utrecht’s city centre which we expected to generate affects and emotions relevant to the fear of crime literature. Since social and environmental causes of fear of crime cannot be neatly separated (Koskela and Pain, 2000), each photo depicts specific physical elements to which a range of socially constructed and shared meanings are likely to be linked (see Figure 1)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Photos and their location in the city of Utrecht.

All interviews were transcribed verbatim and were subjected to multiple rounds of open and axial coding (Corbin and Strauss, 2008). We first identified elements that triggered experiences of safety and fear of crime among interviewees and then drew out ambiguities in the generation and diminution of fear of crime.

The use of interviews over some form of mobile method (Büscher and Urry, 2009) is potentially problematic in light of the view of many non-representational geographers that interviews provide at best an incomplete and deadened after-the-fact account of what took place (Thrift, 2007). Yet, based on our own experiences and the comments by Hitchings (2012), we feel that our participants were quite capable of talking about their emotions, triggers of fear of crime and their nightlife practices and experiences. Nevertheless, we readily acknowledge that our interviews foreground some aspects of fear of crime and triggers whilst backgrounding others (but this holds for any method). For instance, only those triggers of feelings that have crossed the threshold of consciousness can be discussed in interviews, meaning that triggers that operate at pre- or subconscious levels will have been excluded. Yet, the interviews seem to have captured how memory—both personal memories and aspects of socialisation—shapes experiences on nights out rather well. Careful analysis of participants’ words also enabled us to understand at least some of the ambiguities associated with the triggers of feelings and emotions.

4.1 Lighting

Consistent with previous studies (Painter, 1996), the participants felt that lighting tends to reduce fear of crime in the context of Utrecht’s NTE. Ambiguities across persons and situations (photos) in the effects co-produced by lighting were limited. This is a noticeable result, given the differences in lamps and in intensity, colour, texture and distribution of light across the photos. Three sets of processes tended to generate the generally positive experiences of lighting. First, the participants felt that light was related to who might be present in a particular place. It ‘normalised’ a site by deterring potential wrongdoers and produced safety in numbers as it meant more intensive use of streets after dark (Painter, 1996). As Willy ⁴ exclaimed, “Surely they don’t put a lamp-post there if nobody ever visits!” Secondly, several participants felt that light in conjunction with bars and ‘normal’ people created an atmosphere of conviviality. This was discussed specifically in connection to photos 5 and 6, which depict two well-known sites with student-oriented bars in Utrecht. Closer analysis suggests that the familiarity of these nightscapes also played a role in how participants experienced and discussed the light and indeed the larger assemblage captured within those snapshot pictures. This in turn suggests that it is not only the momentary ‘presentism’ of an assemblage that was relevant; memories became part of the assemblage and its experience.

The third and most important process was that light afforded visibility in the sense of an overview of the (moving) bodies close to one’s own corporeal body. By assisting in the identification and signification of individual bodies, it also co-produced visibility in another way

The idea that you have to pass that, poorly lit, guy in the dark … and such a small passage I wouldn’t find enjoyable … If there is enough light so that you can just see that guy, then you can assess [the situation] better and it will improve … yeah, I can’t see it in the dark, so it is difficult to assess (William, on photo 4).

For William and others, light aids in the anticipation of immediate futures: it reduces the risk of assault (Painter, 1996; Pain et al., 2006), or at least makes it more manageable at both conscious and unconscious levels. The interviews make it clear that darkness in NTE settings increases orientational difficulties, unsettling people’s action-guiding anticipations (Shotter, 2009). It implies unknowability—the “big dark unknown around you” (Wayne)—and hence a distinctive futurity. Discussing photo 3, Ursel explains

Look how dark it is there, there and there [pointing to sites near the road on the photo]. You don’t know at all who is hiding behind these shrubs and if there is someone—probably not … you have no idea, someone might be a few metres away and you just can’t see it.

Lighting, then, was believed to reveal potential wrongdoers and to make some futures that could spring from encounters in the unfolding present less likely, making public spaces in NTE settings more enjoyable and secure. There nonetheless resides ambiguity in the effects of light: being illuminated raises one’s own vulnerability as a “person does see [you] since you are cycling in the light, but he is not in the light” (Ushi). In such a situation, light not only enables potential wrongdoers to take advantage of how lighting illuminates a victim-to-be; it also makes potential wrongdoers more invisible for a potential victim by intensifying darkness. Having just moved from the dark into the light, potential victims have to adjust their eyesight when a ‘bubble’ effect (Morris, 2011, p. 322) occurs: rather than affording an expanded field of vision, the lamp-post encloses him/her in a circle of light beyond which the dark is extra dark. The distribution of light matters here, for bubble effects are more intense when circles of light are located in a sea of darkness, as in photo 3.

A second ambiguity regarding the effects of light was observed in connection to photo 2, which depicts a well-known square that attracts many pedestrians at night. Many participants were positive about the lighting but responses revealed more ambiguity than with photos 5 and 6 as some participants felt the lighting helped to reduce comfort levels. As Wayne said, “that graffiti and those sharp lights there, it all makes it a bit sinister”. This second ambiguity is different from the first and represents type a) in Sub-Section 2.4. The first ambiguity, however, occurred in one and the same encounter for one and the same person and thus corresponds to type c). For lighting this type could be identified only among several participants, but it was more prevalent with regard to police presence.

4.2 Police

Comments on police officers were made mostly in relation to photo 6. About one-third of the study participants attributed only positive effects to police presence on fear of crime, and a few attributed little effect to policing. Yet, more participants than anticipated articulated ambiguity within one and the same situation

But then you see the police standing there and you think: well yeah, that is a bit ambiguous. For on one hand, I think, yeah, it gives some sense of security, police in the vicinity. On the other, I think well why are they here? Is there something? (Urmela, on photo 6).

Well I always feel that police are there for a reason. Look if it wouldn’t be necessary, the police wouldn’t be there … Apparently something is going on there. Yeah, or apparently they think things can go out of hand or something, you know … But then again it is night out, so they can also be just on surveillance (Umara, on photo 6).

Interviewees like Urmela and Umara confirmed the earlier claim that police presence triggers more than comfort among ‘well-behaved’ consumers in the NTE. Whilst making certain immediate futures less likely, police presence also and simultaneously brought other possible futures into consciousness: it reminded the well-behaved of the immanent possibility that things can go out of hand. Both from first-hand experience and through exposure to global discourses about intoxication, the urban night and specific nightlife establishments, participants in our study were well aware that anger/rage, love, jealousy, etc. are more intense at night and that the encounters with elements in the assemblages depicted in photos 5 and 6 can spiral into commotion more rapidly than during daytime.

In the quote, Umara expresses not simply uncertainty about what might happen but also uncertainty if something (unpleasant) might happen or whether the police are simply on surveillance. This ambiguity triggers not only orientational difficulties, but also a cognitive reorientation towards the assemblage of which she is part and through which a (near) future of disorder becomes imagined. The practices and appearance of police officers to some extent influence whether such reorientation occurs. Ursula, for instance, tended to appreciate visible police presence because of its preventative effects and capacity to intervene when something happens. Yet she also intimated that if she arrived at the square depicted in photo 5 and saw five police officers, she would consider this disproportionate and “think what the f*** is going on here?”. Responses like Ursula’s align with findings reported elsewhere (Brands and Schwanen, forthcoming) that policing practices in the NTE—whether officers are on foot or rather on horse-back or sat in cars, and whether they are wearing batons or reflective vests—shape NTE participants’ experiences of safety. More than simple police presence, it is policing-as-practice that has an influence on fear of crime (see Cook and Whowell, 2011).

4.3 Others

Discussing photos 4 and 6, participants brought up multiple ambiguities across persons, across situations and for single participants in one and the same encounter. Some were highly appreciative of the crowd in front of the depicted student-oriented bar in photo 6

I don’t know why I should feel unsafe here. It is just a student bar. I know how those bars are, just attract a nice crowd, I think (Uriel).

Of course it is often drunk people who stand outside but I always like it when there are many people … well, you think, that is cosy [gezellig], you know (Ulla).

Uriel highlights how affective encounters with other nightlife consumers are mediated by memory; his knowledge has accrued from both first-hand experience and wider socialisation processes with stereotypes developed over time mediating perception and experience (Connolly, 2011). The ability to identify with the crowd and their practices narrows down the range of (un)consciously anticipated immediate futures, and therefore ambiguity, to such a degree that drunk others are felt to be manageable risk or no risk at all. Whilst encountering crowds, as in photo 6, created few orientational difficulties for Uriel and Ulla, other participants expressed more reservations. Wanda, for instance, was more cautious in this particular nightlife setting and imagined a more diverse range of immediate futures. Her unconscious and conscious anticipations appeared less entrenched than Uriel’s and Ulla’s because she singled out other elements as relevant within the assemblage and was less familiar with the particular bar that was depicted

It appears to be a bar with people standing outside and certainly in such a situation with police being there you just expect well they are probably there ‘cause there are annoying people walking around … There are also people who have been drinking, doesn’t have to be negative, can also be cute, o well (Wanda).

Ambiguities were more profound in relation to photo 4, which participants generally perceived as threatening. The threatening atmosphere was associated with the unusual combination of underdetermination and overdetermination that characterises photo 4. The underdetermination—lack of clarity about what the depicted person might do and hence what immediate future may unfold—was expressed through the ways in which participants discussed the invisibility of the person and his/her face

’Cause it’s so dark and you just can’t see anything of that very person, except that he wears a hood, but no face or something, you can’t see how old he is. I think it’s a man but maybe it’s woman. Yeah you really can’t get an impression (Whitney).

Resonating with Thrift’s (2007) emphasis on the face as a key affective site, Whitney’s remarks highlight the importance of facial expressions to how likely immediate futures are imagined and to triggering fear for others.

The participants clearly disliked the underdetermination characterising photo 4 because it unsettled their capacities to anticipate the future and made them uncomfortable. Employing Bergson’s concept of pure memory also helps to observe a second effect: it illustrates how a lack of information on the depicted body results in the mobilisation of stereotypes, acquired over the life-course, to make sense of the particular encounter. For Inez the person was “a junk with a hoodie” and Immanuel made similar comments

It is a bit of a stereotypical image of people with hoodies hanging [in such places]. Yeah people who’re after your wallet or whatever … It need not be a junk or a beggar. It can be a little pain in the neck too. And look, if a bloke in a suit or something with a tie stood there (laughs), then you’d pass quite differently (Immanuel).

These stereotypes do more than reduce the encountered body’s underdetermination. They simultaneously increase the participants’ sense of discomfort through overdetermination as they predisposed the participants towards immediate futures of harm or hurt over other possibilities (for example, the person stepping aside and nodding in a friendly way when somebody would like to pass) and so co-created or intensified fear of crime.

As expected, feelings of discomfort were intensified by the specific qualities and capacities of the alley depicted in photo 4: its narrowness, which makes evasion or escape difficult; the lack of light; the absence of ‘normal’ others who might come to one’s aid; and the absence of vibrant nightlife at the end of the alley. This implies that attempts to understand what triggers fear of crime should resist the tendency to isolate or abstract persons from the assemblages of which they are part: fear of crime was triggered not simply by the depicted corporeal body, its age, gender, clothing or comportment, but by the wider body-assemblage. For some participants the experience would have been different had the encountered assemblage been different

Interviewer: And what if we positioned this person to, say, that tree on the Vredenburg? (see photo 2).

Ulla: Oh, then I wouldn’t mind so much. Yeah then it’s not such a—here you can only pass him, but there you can traverse that square in many other ways … Here there is no other opportunity.