Book Review: Hayward, K. J. (2004). City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience. London: Glass House Press, pp. 248

Published date01 December 2007
Date01 December 2007
DOI10.1177/0734016807310605
Subject MatterArticles
Hayward, K. J. (2004). City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and
the Urban Experience. London: Glass House Press, pp. 248
DOI: 10.1177/0734016807310605
City Limits uniquely contributes to the burgeoning field of cultural criminology by pre-
senting a cogent cultural analysis of the “crime-city nexus.” In particular, Hayward attempts to
expand classical theories of strain and relative deprivation by examining how the consumer
culture of late modernism has produced a “subject adrift” that often copes with insatiable
consumptive desires through transgression or criminality. In a true multidisciplinary effort,
Hayward’s theoretical analysis incorporates literature from urban, social, and even architec-
tural theories to explicate the ways in which late modern consumer culture has influenced
individuals’ lived experiences and subjectivities.
The first half of the book provides a sociohistorical perspective of the urban experience,
and its transition from early to late modernity. In chapter 1, Hayward describes how modernity
elicited a city full of disruption and continuity, largely characterized by regulatory ratio-
nalizing discourses. The move toward capitalist commodity fetishism in late modernism
was associated with a shifting urban consciousness of intensified consumption. Following
the work of David Harvey and Frederic Jameson, Hayward analyzes representations of the city
in modern art and architecture to underline the disparate emotions and social inequalities that
were associated with the urban experience in the late-19th and early-20th century. Hayward
next discusses the emergence of the late modern or postmodern city and its concomitant
transformation of cultural, economic, and social processes, outlining in particular the emergence
of the late modern subject adrift (chap. 2). Drawing largely on the works of Zygmunt
Bauman and Jock Young, Hayward discusses how late modern consumer culture generates
the insatiable and insistent demand for more, which serves as a catalyst for subjectivities
(e.g., frustration, anxiety) that may ultimately be expressed in criminal behavior.
In chapter 3 Hayward begins to connect the concepts of urban space, late modern con-
sumer culture, and crime. Here he provides a comprehensive review of what early social
ecologists, the Chicago school, environmental criminologists, administrative criminologists,
and new left realists have contributed to theories of urban crime. Hayward strongly critiques
mainstream criminology for extricating urban crime from the physical context of the city,
extricating the offender from the context of crime, and relying on rational choice frameworks
to understand criminal behavior. To overcome these issues, Hayward calls for criminologists
to strengthen the theoretical ties between lived subjectivities and the structural/cultural
determinants of lived experiences, particularly by considering the self and its relationship
to the disorienting consumer conditions associated with late modernism.
In the next two chapters, Hayward links urban crime and consumer culture by discussing
the works of Mike Davis and Jack Katz. Hayward first expands on Mike Davis’traditional
Marxist perspective by outlining how the physical environment and consumer culture of the late
modern city have conflated fear with desire. Namely,security and surveillance have emerged
as forms of urban conspicuous consumption in late modernity, experienced at the street
level as forms of exclusion. Hayward then explicates how the emotions, feelings, and
desires associated with consumer culture in late modernism connect with the commission
of urban crime (chap. 5). In an attempt to reconcile the structural and motivational facets
of criminology, Hayward focuses on the phenomenological aspects of criminal acts—the
438 Criminal Justice Review

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