The game in action: playing on my turf

Social field theory and street capital theory bring a new understanding to the issue of territoriality, revealing it as less about spatial dimensions and more concerned with reputation, metaphor and field dynamics. Territoriality is useful in examining how the concepts of habitus and street capital interrelate within the social field, especially through gang incursions. This chapter examines these concepts to illustrate how ‘the game’ works in the social field. First, however, it is useful to consider how academics and the media have previously misinterpreted the issue of territoriality in relation to gangs.

Misreading territoriality (the game board)

The concept of violence relating to a spatially defined area has been the subject of much gang research (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Spergel, 1964; Klein, 1971; Hagedorn, 1988; Vigil, 1988a; Taylor, 1989; Kintrea et al, 2008). Interestingly, Sanders (writing about Lambeth in 2005) noted very few, if any, accounts of young people protecting or controlling areas or of ‘territorial rivalry’.

One example recently foregrounded by Ralphs and colleagues (2009) borrows from US social geographers Tita and colleagues (2005) and their discussions of ‘gang set space’ which has been defined as ‘the actual area within the neighborhood where gang members come together as a gang’ (p 280), that is, the streets, buildings and spaces where gang members congregate. In a later work, Aldridge and colleagues (2011) conclude that ‘gang members understood, experienced and interpreted territory in complicated ways [with] considerable dissensus amongst gang members about what constituted “gang set space”’ (p 10).

The concept of ‘gang set space’, which fits the quantitative geocoded spatial discourse of Tita and colleagues, becomes considerably diluted when social field theory is applied. Although my research and participant observations identified several locations favoured by gangs, these were often highly temporally variable (for example, seasonal) and used functionally. They were also used by non-gang members. Social field analysis tells us such spaces are seldom exclusive and are usually shared with individuals from other social fields. They are functionally differentiated by actors operating in different social fields, for example, local parks used for recreational purposes by neighbourhood families may be used for dog fighting by local gangs, and housing estate stairwells used by the gang to smoke weed, discuss business or have sex are used by local residents to access their homes.