Main Content

Subproject C02
Security, police and urban space - Security heuristics and repertoires using the example of Frankfurt/Main and Munich

1. Funding period (2014-2017)

In the late 19th century, social inequality was increasingly perceived as a danger. This was particularly true of the growing big cities, which were increasingly seen as places of insecurity during this period. One contributing factor was that class differences were now generally reflected in spatial segregation: Whereas rich and poor had lived side by side in the same neighborhoods until well into the 19th century, slums and villa districts were now emerging. The growing slums were seen as hotbeds of disease and crime: The Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892 and the Jack the Ripper murder spree in London fed such perceptions. Bourgeois observers warned ever more urgently that the slums with their miserable living conditions could become the starting point of social unrest.

Against this background, the subproject explores processes of securitization and de-securitization in a German-British comparison. The focus is on the London unemployment riots of 1886/87 and the Hamburg dockworkers' strike of 1896/97. Contemporaries repeatedly emphasized that these events assumed unprecedented proportions. They appeared as an expression of a threatening intensification of class conflict.

The question is how inner-city security became the object of new forms of knowledge production and in what way the knowledge thus generated shaped the establishment of new security regimes. Central actors in the discourse of security were politicians and the mass press of the two cities, as well as activists of the settlement movement and social scientists who formed epistemic communities. The Hamburg-based sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, for example, dealt intensively with the dockworkers' strike, while the London shipowner Charles Booth began his extensive pioneering social-scientific study of the living conditions of London's workers, even if not solely conditioned by the unemployment riots, immediately after them.

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