Book Review: City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience

Abstract

In early February, a new IKEA superstore—an ultra-rational cathedral of consumption—opened at midnight in Edmonton, North London, offering widely advertised heavy discounts on sofas and assorted furniture. The event attracted several thousand people, who burst past security guards to scrimmage for bargains. The store was forced to close after 30 minutes, some people were reportedly hospitalized and IKEA pronounced itself dismayed by the consumer frenzy it had generated. This erudite and ambitious book explores why contemporary criminology cannot cope with the task of explaining and understanding such phenomena. The first chapters revisit the history of cities over the past two centuries as the crucible of modernity. Their extraordinary growth trapped millions in poverty and slum housing while around them a new individualism was taking shape via the arcades and department stores that heralded the era of mass consumption. Social and artistic observers from Mayhew and Dickens to the Chicago School and Georg Simmel sought to capture what this swirl of change was doing to human consciousness. The complex emotions that they conveyed were, however, increasingly ignored by planners and architects who sought to impose rational order on diverse and often conflicting populations. The mass housing estates of the inter-war and immediate post-war years paid some regard to Garden City ideals but still left millions poorly housed. The combination of high-rise and low-income developments in the second wave of mass housing polarized the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ into zones of social inclusion and exclusion. Le Corbusier and often corrupt system building were not the answer. This leads into the central theme of the book, that