Urban Threats: Institutional Others of Cities
Urban Threats: Institutional Others of Cities

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on the ways in which the unfamiliar is perceived socially and emotionally by urban societies as a result of an extended influence of international and global tendencies on both the constant flux of cities and the research carried out to understand and anticipate the changes inferred by the dynamics of their communities. Cities can host the cultural invisibility that allows people to express unexpected attitudes and to proceed to unexpected reactions towards each other within residential islands, each with a different subculture; crime fiction best presents this internal differentiation by exposing hidden facts and faces, commonly epitomized by the outsider, the non-familiar, the stranger, the threat of the city. The characters and investigation strategies foregrounded here by the present selection of texts demonstrate a particular perception of the alien in a transitional age, an apprehension supported by a theoretical body relying on thorough observations and findings in the combined field of psychology and urban studies.

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