Is the design of a city a decisive factor in the development of violent behavior by its inhabitants? The discussion following the 2005 riots in the French suburbs shows that many blame the concept of La Ville Radieuse and its most famous founding father, the architect Le Corbusier, for the social degeneration of the banlieues. For some critics, like the British author Theodore Dalrymple, this ‘totalitarian’ architecture symbolizes the evil of the welfare state with its social security, mass immigration, egalitarism and its elites with their blindness for the threat to the western Enlightenment values coming from these ‘black’ suburbs. However, the truth of urban development is that cities are fundamentally unpredictable. After several generations a building will be used in a completely different way than perceived, by people whose existence one wasn't aware of and in a social context one couldn't have predicted. This ‘natural’ development is labeled as the failure of a project, often leading to a policy of repression and demolition. However, local politicians, project developers and architects should realize that it's not their actions that determine the development of cities, but the way the inhabitants use and interpret their environment. They create their own city. Instead of replacing the inhabitants by demolishing their houses, we probably have no other choice than getting to know these quarters better and renovate these together with and for the local inhabitants.

The question of social engineering is an important aspect of debates on security: up to what point can undesired behavior be corrected, prevented or diminished? To what extent is human behavior malleable? This article is a reflection on the development of social engineering, through the lense of the developments in the north of Amsterdam. It is an area that can be seen as a laboratory, a testing ground for the social democratic dream to create a new man, by uplifting and disciplining the urban poor. The central thesis is that the present redevelopment of Amsterdam Noord is predicated upon a shift in governmental strategy: from social engineering to spatial engineering. Location is arguably no longer used to uplift the population, presently the social composition of the population is being changed to uplift the location.

It is now well established that both the ‘war on terror’ and its descendents have been heavily constituted through highly urban discourses, materialities and practices. This article - deliberately transdisciplinary, synthetical and polemical in scope - seeks to demonstrate that new ideologies of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying the militarization of urban life in the contemporary period. By engaging with Michel Foucault's concept of the ‘boomerang effect’, this paper delineates the ways in which contemporary processes of militarisation - which surround what I label the ‘new military urbanism’ - raise fundamental questions for critical urban and political scholarship because of the ways in which they work to normalise the permanent targeting of everyday urban sites, circulations, and populations. Focusing primarily on US military security and military doctrine, culture and technology, this paper explores four of the new military urbanism's inter-related foundations in detail. These are: the deep Foucauldian boomerangs linking experimentation with new architectures and technologies of control in war-zone and domestic cities; the emerging urban political economies of the ‘security’ industries; the ways in which practices and discourses of political violence and securitisation permeate the everyday infrastructures of cities; and the cultural performances of militarised media consumption. The paper concludes by identifying emerging counter-political and countergeographic activism as it seeks to challenge the normalization of the new military urbanism.

Where formerly the government had the monopoly on the governing of security, it seems that there has been a shift taking place towards a more horizontal security care. The government has stopped being the only organizer and executor of issues of security. Private companies increasingly take over the government's responsibilities. This is also the case in the Dutch shopping centre Alexandrium. Alexandrium is one of the first examples in the Netherlands of a Business Improvement District. Nowadays entrepreneurs decide which activities are organized and which projects are being set up in order to keep the area ‘clean and safe’. On the basis of 43 in-depth interviews the authors show that not all parties involved are optimistic about this development. Main point of attention is the lack of cooperation between the entrepreneurs and the police. Moreover, they express the feeling that the shopping area has become less safe in the past years.

Public spaces are often seen by policy makers en researches as places that are essential for a social cohesive society. In daily life public spaces tend to be jungles where citizens rather stay away. Research in Rotterdam shows that much people indeed do not feel at home on ‘their’ squares. This situation can be improved by another view on the fysical construction of public spaces and squares in particular. Places where you can only play soccer are often confiscated by one group. For instance benches can make a place more attractive for different groups.

In recent years there is an increasing trend towards semi-public space. This article seeks to explain this trend. As the heterogeneity of society grows, it becomes more difficult to deal with different groups within one's living environment. Residents prefer a sheltering living environment that attracts similar groups and excludes those they would rather avoid. Social engineering through architecture has a long history: municipalities used to combine the design of neighbourhoods and public spaces with a social agenda of community building. Later, as society evolved, the prevention of friction between people and the creation of public meeting places became leading principles, but never exclusion. However, public housing associations and developers are increasingly accommodating preferences for sheltered living environments by the creation of collective space, appropriating public space and the temporary use of undeveloped space. Three cases illustrate this.