Risk discourse maps racialized threats onto urban symbolic space

Evidence

The creation of the risk society potentially opens up particular cartographies of the underground and invisible worlds of the city where interrelated complexities of race, class, and criminality are always rewriting new stories of symbolic spaces and places (Beck, 1992). In terms of mainstream debate in the USA and Europe in the twenty-first century it is essential to link a concern with notions of urban regeneration with a debate about pollution and displacement of the body politic, to link a celebration of the urban public sphere with the racial subject positions of those included and excluded from within it, to tie the street and the tower block to the images of the street robber and the racially marked victim, and to link the studies of “risk” to the architecture of the racialized imaginary in the urban uncanny. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2309

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the ‘racialized imaginary in the urban uncanny’ as a framework connecting risk studies, regeneration discourse, and the street-robber image.
• XREF: connects to: Whites linked their children’s safety in public space directly to neighborhood racial composition — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 207