Evi Girling

In a time of climate breakdown, everyday security is shaped as much by ecological degradation as by familiar forms of disorder. Drawing on two research encounters with a northern English town, set 25 years apart, this book reveals how local concerns about chronic environmental damage blur the boundaries between criminal and noncriminal harms. It proposes an ecological rethinking of security—one that recognises how worries about sustainability, place and quality of life increasingly intertwine. Bringing environmental and green criminology into closer dialogue, the book shows how austerity and climate anxieties converge, and how communities’ hopes for habitable futures demand new ways of understanding—and acting upon—everyday disorder.

Crime and Social Change in Middle England offers a new way of looking at contemporary debates on the fear of crime. Using observation, interviews and documentary analysis it traces the reactions of citizens of one very ordinary town to events, conflicts and controversies around such topical subjects of criminological investigation as youth, public order, drugs, policing and home security in their community. In doing so it moves in place from comfortable suburbs to hard pressed inner city estates, from the affluent to the impoverished, from old people watching the town where they grew up change around them to young in-comers who are part of that change. This is a book which will give all students of crime a rare and fascinating insight into how issues at the heart of contemporary law and order politics both nationally and internationally actually play out on the ground.

Crime and Social Change in Middle England offers a new way of looking at contemporary debates on the fear of crime. Using observation, interviews and documentary analysis it traces the reactions of citizens of one very ordinary town to events, conflicts and controversies around such topical subjects of criminological investigation as youth, public order, drugs, policing and home security in their community. In doing so it moves in place from comfortable suburbs to hard pressed inner city estates, from the affluent to the impoverished, from old people watching the town where they grew up change around them to young in-comers who are part of that change. This is a book which will give all students of crime a rare and fascinating insight into how issues at the heart of contemporary law and order politics both nationally and internationally actually play out on the ground.