Introduction

Safety is now top of both the domestic and international political agendas. A recent edition of The Economist (5 February 2005) gave front-cover prominence to the issue of anti-social behaviour (ASB) in the UK and drew parallels between it and international terrorism. One result of the high profile given to the crime and ASB agendas has been an attempt to locate and tackle those spaces most strongly associated with these problems via increasingly punitive measures. The aim of this chapter is to consider the way that an unwinding of this agenda has focused on areas of social rented housing through the coopting of residents of these areas as a means of tackling disorder. This connection, between poverty and ASB, can be seen in the key documents that set out the government's agenda:

This agenda is focused on areas in which social housing predominates where it has become a key space within which a wider social politics of conduct is being played out (Flint, 2002). In this latter sense housing is a site of disciplinary action wherein certain behaviours have been increasingly delimited within wider normative frameworks (Ellison and Burrows, 2004). The current agenda of enforcement, punitive sanctions and being tough on the symptoms of social problems and ASB have made residential areas the primary spaces of control under a mantle of community empowerment. This chapter seeks to examine these issues in the context of spatial aspects of control implied by current policy developments while trying to consider the social forces that have given rise to the social geography of ASB.

Constituting the geography of anti-social behaviour

How then is the geography of ASB constituted and represented? A piece in a recent edition of the Daily Telegraph offered an unusual, but illuminating, commentary on ASB. It described the summer gathering of the University of Oxford's Bullingdon Club at which heavy drinking had led to fighting in a pub cellar which was ‘redecorated with clots of blood’ (Mount, 2004).