Bad Behaviours and Disorderly Public Spaces

Order and disorder coexist in the city. On the one hand, urban centres owe their success to density and difference: to concentrating people and resources in space and mixing them together. This is a messy process, one that produces new economic value, social relations, and ideas, but also overlapping claims, power struggles, and inequalities.1 Cities do not have a monopoly on social conflicts or complexity, but they force the urban population to negotiate them daily, as anyone can attest who walks a downtown street, rides public transit, or looks out the window while driving through the city. On the other hand, urban life has long been identified with civility and order.2 Urban areas have been hubs for cultural and creative achievements including the literary salon, jazz clubs, and the skyscraper, and the sites of ambitious projects of control ranging from modern policing to sanitation. At the intersection of these competing currents, between unruly heterogeneity and efforts to tame it, we find the rich historical reality of urban life.