Barcelona Metropolis

Over those years, the Barcelona victimisation index reported that up to a quarter of the Barcelona population had been subject to an act that they considered criminal during the previous year. Criminal activity was particularly high against vehicles, homes and in terms of robberies and personal assaults, and often manifested itself with doses of violence. The high level of victimisation was reflected in the population’s low scoring of the level of security in their neighbourhood of residence and, above all, in the rest of the city, with record-low scores in the series. Against this backdrop, the call for citizen security took on growing prominence in local demands.

The efforts to disaggregate the indicators by territory allowed us to observe one of the main defining features of security in this period: the unequal occurrence and spatial distribution of crime and the perception of dangerousness. Firstly, the reasons for crime and the attraction of centrality were corroborated: criminal activity is not distributed randomly in the territory, but regularities occur that run through the population’s pace of life. The attraction to centrality showed the intent and the existence of a rationale that allowed crime to be defined as a structure governed by the rationale of economic rationality: the adjustment of the means with a view to yielding the maximum benefit at the minimum cost. Secondly, in terms of the collective fear of marginalisation, the neighbourhoods considered dangerous were not (nor are they) those in which more criminal activities took place. When appraising the security or insecurity of a territory, social inequality and urban marginality factors are involved, where stereotypes come into play.

The post-Olympic metropolis. Uses of space and the social construction of security

During the post-Olympic years, Barcelona was on the world map. Neighbourhoods experienced major urban planning and regeneration movements. It had emerged from a crisis and unemployment rates dropped as a new productive and social space was built on a metropolitan scale. The tertiarisation of the economy and the modernisation of the city made it a powerful hub of activities and services that attracted a growing number of non-residents. The city and its spaces changed, and so did the people who used them.

This new period had less to do with the emergence of new manifestations of criminal activity than with a profound change in the way security was perceived. The Victimisation Survey reflected a gradual decline in victimisation rates, while the population’s appraisal of the level of security in their neighbourhood and the city as a whole reached record highs. Social concern over violence and drugs began to show a constant downward trend. In contrast, non-violent crime and the uses of squares, parks and streets emerged as the new concern, becoming the indicator of security during this phase. In a context in which the metropolis became a global urban society, shared spaces welcomed multiple actors with different needs and opinions. Conflict in the use of these spaces began to be seen in terms of security, control and social deviation.

Over these years, a series of studies have been carried out on the urban space and the social construction of insecurity, which found that, while the physical make-up of spaces contributes to a greater sense of security, the social use of these spaces (who uses them, with whom they are shared, what social practices are carried out...) is what most determines the likelihood of experiencing insecurity in them. And, whereas in the first period, the stereotype of dangerousness was based on drug addicts or petty thieves in the marginal neighbourhoods, the young population and their user habits of public space emerged as a new scapegoat.

This phase saw the emergence of concern for the design and maintenance of safe and secure spaces as well as the pursuit of mechanisms to regularise their uses, which was to culminate after a number of years with the proliferation of civic ordinances and would continue in subsequent periods and up to this day.

The global metropolis. Neighbourhood coexistence and security in the residential context

From the turn of the century, the internationalisation of the Barcelona metropolis and its demographic and spatial transformation continued. People’s residential experience changed with the rental boom and the influx of migrants to the neighbourhoods. Another economic and social crisis broke out, and the experience of inequality in terms of insecurity heightened. All of this altered the relations that the population established with their neighbourhood of residence and its inhabitants, and once again the focal point of security concerns shifted. During this period, neighbourhood relations gained momentum in the social construction of security, with a tendency towards a greater feeling of insecurity in residential settings characterised by economic difficulties. Insecurity was channelled through the problematisation of coexistence with migration flows that had settled in the metropolitan territory in recent decades.

In the new model of the metropolitan city, the patterns of victimisation changed – with new criminal targets and hubs –, mobility gained importance and the metropolitan scale was consolidated as a real space for criminal activity. Victimisation increased, especially due to non-violent individual robberies, but there was also a sustained and continuous rise in burglaries. Difficulties in access to housing, added to the rise in criminal activities in the living environment, led to coexistence in proximity to social issues that generated insecurity amongst residents. The perceived level of security dropped compared to the high points experienced during the previous period and, although it recovered and even stabilised, a persistent proportion of the population claimed that they experienced insecurity in their neighbourhood. While the neighbourhood was previously considered safer than the rest of the city, now the appraisals virtually do not differ: the reality of the neighbourhoods has changed, and they are no longer necessarily experienced as the nearby and known space.

In this context, data from the Victimisation Survey show that people who have experienced a conflict in their coexistence tend to live in the neighbourhood with a lower sense of security, in some cases more acutely than victims of a crime that is mostly non-violent. Based on the Coexistence and Neighbourhood Relations Survey, we also know that not all situations of neighbourhood conflict are associated with a greater experience of insecurity, and mainly occupations, uses of homes for drug consumption or trafficking, and fights or violent situations are the primary reasons, while noise, conflicts over stairwell maintenance and non-payments generate more malaise than insecurity. The analyses confirm a perception of greater insecurity in those neighbourhoods with a high residential density, small homes and where the population has risen (or a new population has been received). Residential instability means that the people who live in neighbourhoods and buildings change, while the most firmly established residents in the neighbourhood experience conflict and insecurity in their coexistence with the other (the poor, the newcomer, the racialised resident, etc.).

What characterises recent years, then, is the emergence of the residential environment as a strategic area for security management. The bases on which the feeling of insecurity is founded continue to be specified in crime and its violent or irrational behaviours. Furthermore, certain uses of shared spaces continue to be labelled insecure, and young people join racialised people and the manifestation of survival economies in the public space (waste collectors, homelessness, prostitution, street vending, etc.). Even so, the residential and neighbourhood experience has gained importance in the social construction of insecurity.

In short, without denying the role that criminal reality and violence have in the experience of insecurity, the trajectory of all these years reveals how the problems generated by economic and social inequality, the problematisation of coexistence relations and of the uses of spaces, and the criminalisation of conflict, added to the strength of stereotypes, are key factors in the construction of security. Because, referring to the words of Juli Sabaté, coexistence is an exceptional space for the pursuit of security. In light of this observation, by recognising and normalising diversity and conflict, we must continue working on a security management model that makes social and community prevention one of the cornerstones again.