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Roberto Cornelli, Full Professor of Criminology at the University of Milan

When addressing the issue of urban security in Italy, one is immediately confronted with a fundamental paradox: we live in one of the safest societies in the world and, at the same time, we are constantly faced with emergencies. Everything that happens in public life seems to gain social significance and become a political priority only if framed in emergency terms. From migration to protests, from youth issues to new technologies, from urban conflicts to social marginalization, the spotlight is turned on only when incidents cause disruption, overshadowing everything else.

Caught up in a constant state of emergency, we lose the ability to understand what is happening in our communities, what transformations they are undergoing, what their impact on daily life is, and the connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Crime, stripped of its connections to social and urban issues, appears as both an inexplicable and unsettling phenomenon.

Incidents of violence leave us dumbfounded, overwhelmed by a sense of disorientation that offers no solid ground to make sense of such extreme actions, except resorting to the simplistic explanation of wickedness. The media, from traditional outlets to social media and even fiction, often do not help; instead, they freeze these feelings and the reductions they accompany. Crime becomes a symbol of this disorientation, more than any other phenomenon, reflecting the profound crisis affecting democratic societies.

Politicians are asked to intervene, and the solutions are often standardized according to penal logic: if crime, in its malevolent essence, is the problem of all problems, then punishment and segregation are seen as the necessary and always correct responses. Even the market is asked to provide protection, which the security industry has been able to deliver, mostly through the application of military technologies in civilian contexts, effectively stimulating demand, as is the case in any other economic sector. However, both penal logic and market logic create the illusion that social insecurity can be solved with a few, always the same, one-size-fits-all measures.

In this way, along with our ability to understand what is happening in our communities, we are progressively losing the ability to imagine and design public policies capable of supporting social and urban transformations, starting with the issue of security. We believe that today’s challenge is twofold: on the one hand, it is necessary to deconstruct the issue of urban security from the automatic responses that constrain it both interpretively and politically, which, rather than mitigating the problem, actually increase the widespread perception of a society out of control; on the other hand, we must rebuild a concept of security in which rights are the cornerstone of public policies. In short, we must shift from the right to security for some to the security of rights for all.