Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited 1

Scholars of the city have long interpreted signs of disorder in public spaces in ways that constitute powerful forces of social differentiation. From observers of London in the 1800s such as Charles Booth (1889) and Henry Mayhew (1862), to authors of modern classics such as Jane Jacobs’s (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, to present day concerns over ‘broken windows’ and crime, signs of disorder – especially when linked to the poor – have been viewed as central to understanding city life. By social disorder, observers commonly mean behaviour involving strangers and considered potentially threatening, such as verbal harassment on the street, open solicitation for prostitution, public intoxication and rowdy groups of young males in public. Traditional conceptions of physical disorder typically refer to markers such as graffiti on buildings, abandoned cars, garbage in the streets and the proverbial broken window. Booth’s detailed investigations and resulting maps of Victorian London served as an early illustration of disorder’s role in the social ranking of places. His painstaking portrayal of this great city included colour codes for the economic and social make-up of its many streets (LSE 2008). The lowest classes, coded in black, were described as not just poor but living in ‘squalor’ with public displays of alcoholism. Expressing a view that many today probably still hold (if silently), Booth unabashedly labelled the lowest-class category as ‘vicious, semi criminal,’ with the lowest grade ‘inhabited principally by occasional labourers, loafers and semi-criminals – the elements of disorder’ (Pfautz 1967:191). What Booth thus accomplished was a merger of ecological classification and spatial difference with a subtle yet potent moral evaluation