A plea for urban disorder

Can we live together? Can we live together in cities? Robert Sampson’s argument is that signs of disorder in disreputable areas, robust pockets of poverty and the homes of stigmatized minorities or immigrants, generate social differentiation and an urge to avoid both the spatial and the social stigma.Why is social meaning given to perceptions of disorder in the urban context ? Why does the endemic ‘unsafety’ of our times – what Bauman (1998) calls Unsicherheit which could also be translated as insecurity or uncertainty – translate into feelings of urban malaise focused on certain places and certain individuals or groups rather than into other forms of social anxiety? Is city life condemned to be overshadowed by forms of social anxiety and their avoidance? Professor Sampson suggests that our imagination is socially constructed, made of layers of transmitted and accumulated knowledge meant to help us get ‘streetwise’.We learn to be afraid or anxious through urban experience and to be prepared for what might happen. Evolution has put this kind of knowledge into our brains, stimulating fight/flight responses in the presence of risks (Debiec and Ledoux 2004: 807). This knowledge and its transmission by our kin, observations, experience and the city itself is part of our learning how to survive. It triggers actions of avoidance of certain places and people. The Reverend Jesse Jackson is not unique among African Americans in fearing victimization by young African American men (Cohen 1993: A23). There is nothing new here and the comparison of a city with a jungle comes to mind, together with an approach of individual and collective guardedness which has accompanied the history of cities since their beginning.