Security and online maps of crime: the other side of citizen participation.

Abstract

Concern for safety and citizen participation are usually expressed as two relevant social problems but are far apart from each other. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the general plan as framework of urban intervention was entering into a crisis and planning was increasingly understood as a process subject to change. Under such conditions, citizen participation became more and more important, but it also became an argument to justify almost any intervention that was often decided elsewhere. At the same time, thinking about crime was building up a speech that was presented as something inevitable and, while refusing to explore its causes, it claimed for mere risk management. The confluence of both factors has led to the proliferation of web pages in which, from different sources, contraventions, complaints or diverse disorders are mapped. Such an instrument is presented as a very powerful tool, which is the result of citizen participation but it also poses great dangers that we intend to reveal here.