Urban Violence and Insecurity: Caldeira, Wacquant and Davis

Urban violence is the set of assaults, robberies, homicides and threats that concentrate in cities, and urban insecurity is the perception of risk they produce, which often exceeds the real risk and reorganises urban life and space on its own. Latin America accounts for roughly a third of the world's homicides with less than 10 percent of its population, and its cities are the laboratory where three authors have studied the phenomenon: the anthropologist Teresa Caldeira in São Paulo, the sociologist Loïc Wacquant in Chicago and Paris, and the historian Mike Davis in Los Angeles and in the informal settlements of the Global South.

Teresa Caldeira and the city of walls

In City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (2000), Caldeira shows how rising crime from the 1980s, combined with distrust of the police and the courts, led the middle and upper classes to withdraw into fortified enclaves: gated condominiums, towers with private security and guarded shopping malls. Caldeira also analyses the talk of crime, the everyday narrative about violence that simplifies the world into good and bad people, justifies segregation and erodes the democratic citizenship that the 1988 Constitution had just expanded.

The result is a city where public space loses its role as a meeting place for people who differ. Walls do not reduce violence, but they change its geography: they push it toward neighbourhoods without the means to protect themselves and turn the street into no one's territory. Caldeira warns that this form of segregation differs from the classic centre-periphery pattern, because rich and poor may live a few metres apart, separated by fences, cameras and guards, sharing nothing. Fear thus becomes a principle of urban design.

Loïc Wacquant and advanced marginality

Wacquant, in Urban Outcasts (2008), argues that the violence of American ghettos and European peripheries is not the product of a culture of poverty but of abandonment: welfare retrenchment, structural unemployment and territorial stigmatisation. When formal work disappears, the informal economy and criminal networks take its place as the only sources of income and recognition. The punitive response, which Wacquant analyses in Punishing the Poor (2009), replaces social protection with prison and deepens the cycle.

Mike Davis, the fortress city and the planet of slums

Davis describes in City of Quartz (1990) how Los Angeles became a fortress city: defensive architecture, militarised policing and public spaces designed to expel the unwanted. In Planet of Slums (2006) he widens the lens to the Global South, where more than a billion people live in informal settlements without services or effective state presence. There, violence is not an anomaly but the way precarity is governed: gangs, militias and corrupt police fight over territories that institutions have left empty.

All three authors agree that insecurity is not solved with more walls or more police. The policies that have reduced violence in a sustained way, such as Medellín's social urbanism, combined state presence, transport, schools and quality public space in the hardest-hit neighbourhoods with police reform and youth programmes. Reclaiming the street as shared space requires treating violence as a problem of inequality and rights, not only of public order.