Towards a criminology of atmospheres: Law, affect and the codes of the street
| Author | Alistair Fraser,Daniel Matthews |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895819874853 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895819874853
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2021, Vol. 21(4) 455 –471
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895819874853
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Towards a criminology of
atmospheres: Law, affect
and the codes of the street
Alistair Fraser
University of Glasgow, UK
Daniel Matthews
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract
The street has a long and distinguished pedigree in criminology as a site of human sociability,
transgression and spontaneity. Recent scholarship in legal studies has, however, explored the role
that non-human actors play in the normative ordering of urban life. These interventions suggest
the need for criminologists of the street to take seriously not only the experiential foreground
of crime but also its background. In this article, we seek to bring these traditions into dialogue
through engagement with the concept of ‘atmosphere’ – a place-based mood or spatialised
feeling that blends human and non-human elements, and has the capacity to act in a quasi-agentic
manner. Drawing on an experiment in ‘atmospheric methods’ conducted during Hong Kong’s
pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, in which some of the city’s central streets were occupied
for 79 days, we seek to demonstrate that the analytics of ‘atmosphere’ offers a unique conceptual
approach to urban life and street crime in the contemporary age.
Keywords
Affect, atmosphere, Bourdieu, Hong Kong, lawscape, materiality, street culture
Introduction
The concept of ‘the street’ has a long and distinguished pedigree in the field of criminol-
ogy. From the Chicago School onward, scholars have been attuned to the street as a
dynamic yet evanescent space imbued with discrete codes (Ilan, 2015; Shammas and
Corresponding author:
Alistair Fraser, Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow, Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson
Street, Glasgow G12 8LR, UK.
Email: Alistair.Fraser@Glasgow.ac.uk
874853CRJ0010.1177/1748895819874853Criminology & Criminal JusticeFraser and Matthews
research-article2019
Article
456 Criminology & Criminal Justice 21(4)
Sandberg, 2016) or a rationalist space of environmental design (Bruinsma and Johnson,
2018). To date, however, this work has foregrounded the street as a site of human interac-
tion, placing the non-human elements of the streetscape – notably municipal regulation
(Valverde, 2012) and the intersections between law and space (Philippopoulos-
Mihalopoulos, 2015) – out of view. Recent work in legal studies has drawn attention to
the role that non-human actors have in shaping the normative ordering of street life
(Blomley, 2004, 2013; Delaney, 2010). These approaches privilege the ways in which
legal regulation, technology and architecture combine to form complex networks which
shape the capacity for human agency in unique ways (McGee, 2014). These interven-
tions suggest the need for criminologists of the street to take seriously not only the expe-
riential foreground of crime (Katz, 1988) but also its atmospheric background.
Drawing together the parallel traditions of criminology and critical legal studies, this
article seeks to demonstrate the value in attending to the non-human aspects of the
streetscape. Our particular focus is on how a criminology of ‘atmosphere’ (Anderson,
2009, 2014) helps unpack the complex normative ordering of the street. An ‘atmosphere’
here refers to a spatialised feeling, or ‘sensuous geography’, that is produced through
both designed and accidental manipulations of the senses, having the power to connect
people and place in a shared experience. Such ‘atmospheres’ are forged through a ‘com-
binatorial force field’ of human and non-human elements (Amin and Thrift, 2017: 16),
operating at a level of experience that is affective and infra-conscious, with the capacity
to act on individuals in a quasi-agentic manner (Schuilenburg and Peeters, 2018). It is
therefore a concept that bridges between the normative ‘code of the street’ that prevails
in criminological theories of street culture (Anderson, 1999; Bourgois, 1995) and the
ambient legal regulations ‘hovering over’ or ‘lurking under’ the street (Valverde, 2012:
28), assessed in legal geography and critical legal studies. Approaching urban space
through an attention to atmosphere helps us understand the significance of both human
and non-human elements in the production of space (Amin and Thrift, 2017) and a meth-
odological attentiveness to multi-sensory experience. The article argues for a movement
towards ‘a criminology of atmospheres’, opening a space for dialogues across criminol-
ogy, legal theory, urban sociology and cultural studies.
The article is set out in three parts. The first re-examines recent criminological and
legal work through the alternative perspectives offered by the concept of ‘atmosphere’,
bringing into view the role that a range of non-human actors play in shaping street cul-
ture and in mediating the force of law. The second uses ‘atmospheric methods’ (Anderson
and Ash, 2015) to evoke the urban atmospheres within Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement
– a pro-democracy campaign that occupied the city’s central streets for 79 days in late-
2014. Building on Alison Young’s (2014b) distinction between the legislated city and the
uncommissioned city, we explore the ways in which the concept of atmosphere can ren-
der visible the complex interactions between law and normativity in the street. In the
final section, we reflect on the implications of the concept of atmosphere for criminol-
ogy, pressing forward the need to engage with urban space as a relational and affectively
charged site involving human and non-human actors. We argue that a criminology of
atmospheres shifts the ontological foundations of criminology away from traditional
questions of structure, culture and agency, towards an attentiveness to the post-human
‘meshwork’ that constitutes urban life in the 21st century.
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