Insecurities in European cities. crime-related fears within the context of new anxieties and community based crime prevention : INSEC, final report

The report submitted here concludes a European research project titled: "Insecurities in European Cities. Crime-Related Fears Within the Context of New Anxieties and Community-Based Crime Prevention" (INSEC). The project was supported by the European Commission within its 5th Framework Programme (1998-2002) "Key Action: Improving the Socio-economic Knowledge base". Among the seven "Research Tasks" as they were called, the following were relevant for our own plans: Task 2: "Individual and collective strategies in a changing society", Task 4: "Towards social cohesion in Europe"; and Task 6: "Governance, citizenship and the dynamics of European integration". The scientific positioning of the study is in criminology and urban sociology and it has an applied side by involving community crime prevention and community safety, as well as an orientation to comparing cultural patterns of insecurity, anxiety and fear by the parallel study of five large European cities: Amsterdam, Budapest, Hamburg, Kraków and Vienna. Put in a sentence the research project is about insecurity of cities from the perspective of their inhabitants and what can be done about it. To obtain information both in the individual cities and for comparing them to each other, the formulation of the methods and instruments applied were standardised as far as possible.