| Summary: | Fear is among the most powerful of human feelings. Urban fear, the fear of being victims of crime and violence in urban space, particularly so. Urban fear shapes space and is in turn shaped by space. The relationship between fear and space has been studied in terms of three key dimensions: urban (geo)politics, or the political economies of security; otherness, the way social cleavages (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality) mediate the encounter in urban space; and space, the role of the built environment and (modernist) spatialities and urban planning. In line with the recent affective turn in social and cultural geography, the concept of landscapes of fear has provided a fruitful theoretical instrument to understand the co-constitution of emotions and practices in this field. By connecting the dimensions of (geo)politics, otherness, and space, the mobilization of the concept of landscape has allowed understanding how context-specific, yet trans-scalar, atmospheres of fear are (re)produced at the intersection of political-economic, socio-cultural, and technical factors.
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