Reimagining Urban Safety in Latin America: An Introduction

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes crime and fear of crime as key challenges to urban sustainability (UN-Habitat, 2019). Latin America is often portrayed as a region with some of the highest homicide rates globally, a framing commonly linked to drug trafficking, organized crime, and entrenched structural inequalities (Rau et al., 2018). Against this backdrop, urban safety has become one of the most contested dimensions of contemporary urbanization. Rather than a purely technical or policing outcome, safety is increasingly understood as a socio-spatial and relational process shaped by the built environment, inequalities, and individuals’ everyday practices.

This issue aims to advance understanding of how urban safety is produced, experienced, and contested across Latin American cities by bringing together empirically grounded studies that examine the roles of the built environment, inequality, policing, and community practices in shaping uneven geographies of victimization and fear experienced by different groups of city users. Thus, this issue sits at the intersection of international and Latin American urban theory, bringing environmental criminology, feminist geography, mobilities research, and critical urban studies into dialogue with Latin American scholarship on informality, violence, and urban inequality. While the international literature has increasingly emphasized the role of perception, effect, and socio-spatial design in shaping urban safety, Latin American approaches foreground structural inequality, territorial fragmentation, and the state’s ambivalent role in providing security services on the ground. By integrating these perspectives, the papers collectively advance a relational understanding of urban safety as a socio-spatial process produced through the interaction of material infrastructures, governance practices, and embodied experiences of fear, care, and belonging.

The issue contributes to this evolving debate by bringing together seven empirically grounded studies from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico that collectively examine how urban safety is produced, experienced, and contested across diverse socio-spatial contexts. Taken together, the papers engage directly with the issue’s core concerns: inequality, victimization, policing practices, community-led initiatives, and the spatial infrastructures that mediate safety. At the same time, they extend the discussion by foregrounding the differentiated experiences of marginalized populations, residents of informal settlements, women, older adults, and children, whose everyday mobilities and spatial practices reveal the uneven geographies of safety in contemporary cities.

Foundational Research in Latin America: A Selection of Relevant Studies

Latin American urban thought offers a particularly rich and critical lens for understanding the entanglement of inequality, insecurity, and spatial transformation in contemporary cities. Yet, the discussion below is not intended to be exhaustive but rather to illustrate selected contributions to the topic from Latin American countries.

We would be remiss not to mention the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano and the Brazilian Milton Santos, whose foundational critiques of global capitalism and historical dependency remain influential. Together, they provide a historical-geographical foundation for understanding urban insecurity as embedded in broader global and historical processes observed in the region today. Galeano wrote Las venas abiertas de América Latina in the early 1970s (translated in Cedric Belfrape, 1997), which analyses the extraction of natural resources over five centuries in Latin America and the structural violence that underpins current socio-spatial inequalities there. Santos (2000) conceptualizes space as a social and political product, and his work is essential for understanding how urbanization, infrastructure, and exclusion are structurally shaped rather than accidental.

Building on this, urban researchers have made significant contributions by expanding analysis into contemporary urban and planning issues. Alba Zaluar, based on ethnographic research over decades, describes Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the 1980s and 1990s, illustrating how drug economies, state presence, and community dynamics intersect to produce violence. Zaluar (2004) frames drug trafficking as part of broader processes of urban marginalization, inequality, and the decline of social institutions. Similarly, Arias and Barnes (2017) show how urban order results from hybrid arrangements among criminal groups, residents, and state actors, challenging clear-cut distinctions between legality and illegality and revealing fragmented governance in Rio de Janeiro. Caldeira (2000), in City of Walls, uses São Paulo as a case study to show how fear of crime manifests spatially through fortified enclaves, private security, and urban boundaries. Rolnik (2019) argues that neoliberal housing policies have fuelled an ‘urban warfare’ against the poor, causing displacement and exclusion, highlighting how governance can generate inequality. Recently, Rocco (2026) adds to this by emphasizing spatial justice and planning politics in São Paulo. In Argentina, Auyero and Berti (2015) focus on the slow, routine aspects of violence and insecurity, revealing how residents in marginalized Buenos Aires neighbourhoods face ongoing neglect and environmental harm within fragmented governance systems.  An important contribution is the governance of violence and the ambiguous boundaries between state, community, and non-state actors. Auyero and Sobering (2019), in the Argentine context, likewise examine the ambivalent role of the state, demonstrating how, while it is the primary guarantor of security, it also operates as an active agent in the production of crime and violence. Together, these authors highlight that policing, fear, segregation, planning, and urban form are closely interconnected. Public policies and planning not only respond to inequality and violence but also help produce them, reinforcing spatial divisions, exclusion, and fragmented urban governance in Latin American cities.

Criminology and urban security studies research have provided key insights into crime, fear of crime, and insecurity as both materially and socially constructed phenomena. In Brazil, studies on the determinants of crime in the 1980s and 1990s were severely limited by the quality of crime data. These studies gained prominence with the work of Coelho (1988) and Paixão (1988) in Minas Gerais, who questioned the importance of socioeconomic factors in explaining crime, emphasizing instead variables related to the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, particularly policing. Beato (2012) connects spatial configurations and crime patterns in Crime e cidades. He combines statistical data, case studies, and spatial mapping to reveal correlations between violence rates, socioeconomic indicators, and urban morphology. The analysis emphasizes how public security policies often fail when they disregard the spatial and social dynamics of urban life. Similar work has been developed by political scientists, economists, sociologists, and geographers on patterns of crime by Coelho, Paixão, and Cerqueira (for a review, see Cerqueira and Lobão, 2003) and, more recently, by Kahn (1999), Ceccato et al. (2007; 2022), and De Melo et al. (2015). Within policing, debates over security interventions have brought these tensions into sharp focus. Scholars such as Cano et al. (2012) critically examine the promises and limits of ‘pacification policing’. Their work shows how the police were initially framed as a shift towards proximity policing and territorial control, but in practice, they revealed persistent tensions between militarization, legitimacy, and everyday coercion. The work by Magaloni et al. (2023) examined the role of technology in policing: more specifically, whether body-worn cameras can change police behaviour in a highly violent and militarized setting: a favela in Rio de Janeiro, where policing is shaped by a ‘warrior’ mentality and weak institutional accountability. In the Chilean case, Luneke et al. (2021) examine the ambivalent role of the police, illustrating how they simultaneously protect certain groups whilst punishing and repressing those residing on the urban periphery, thereby reproducing and reinforcing socio-spatial segregation.

Across Latin American cities, the built environment plays a central role in shaping crime patterns and perceptions of safety, as urban form, infrastructure, and spatial segregation influence both exposure to violence and opportunities for everyday surveillance. However, in contexts where housing is highly precarious, walls are made of cardboard, and basic infrastructure is absent, the built environment itself becomes a material expression of structural inequality and vulnerability, with safety shaped less by design principles than by deprivation and unequal access to urban services. Since 2000, Latin America has increasingly adopted Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and situational prevention strategies to reduce crime and fear of crime, although systematic impact evaluations remain limited. In this context, Rau et al. (2018) advance the development and testing of an assessment model for vulnerable neighbourhoods, while Senna da Costa (2022) further contributes by developing and empirically testing a multi-method CPTED framework that integrates theory, measurement, and applied interventions to better understand and reduce fear of crime through environmental and situational factors in urban areas.

Cities can be understood through their physical structure, governance, and the perceptions of their inhabitants and visitors. As Doreen Massey notes, space is relational, constantly evolving, and shaped by interactions across various scales, never fully finalized (Massey, 1994). Thus, a city exists as much in perception as in its physical form. This is evident in studies of public insecurity in Chile, such as ‘Fear of crime or fear of life? Public insecurities in Chile’. Here Dammert and Malone (2003) argue that fear of crime reflects deeper concerns about social order, trust, and daily urban life. Recent Latin American research increasingly adopts an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1989) to safety, illustrating how gender, age, class, and sexuality shape different experiences of urban insecurity. Multiple studies indicate that safety varies across social groups and environments, particularly in parks, public spaces, transport, and daily mobility areas in Latin American cities. Specifically, research in Mexico City and Colombia shows that urban safety is deeply intersectional, shaped by interactions among gender, socioeconomic status, and mobility patterns (e.g. Santoro et al., 2020; Hidalgo et al., 2020; Moreira and Ceccato, 2021; Olivieri and Fageda, 2021; Focas and Luneke, 2025). These findings indicate that fear of crime and exposure to violence are related, embodied experiences of the built environment, emphasizing that urban safety must be understood as both spatially and socially constructed.

As discussed above, rather than forming a unified school, these studies have attempted to bring together complementary perspectives spanning urban sociology, planning theory, architecture, geography, economy, anthropology, and critical studies, all converging on the idea that urban space is a relational concept, actively produced through unequal power relations and fragmented governance. In the next section, we turn to our issue.

The Structure and Contribution of the Issue

This issue brings together twenty contributors (fifteen women and five men) with examples from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and a wide range of professional and academic backgrounds, including geographers, sociologists, urbanists, criminologists, and anthropologists.

The issue comprises eight articles, each approximately 7,000–9,000 words. The evaluation process followed a standard double-blind peer review procedure, ensuring academic quality, transparency, and fairness in the selection of contributions. All submitted manuscripts underwent an initial editorial screening to assess their relevance to the issue’s thematic focus and basic scholarly standards. Papers deemed suitable were then sent out for external peer review by at least two independent referees with relevant subject expertise.

Across these papers, three interrelated analytical axes emerge:

First, the issue advances a relational understanding of urban violence and insecurity as spatially produced and unevenly distributed. The studies on informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Chile demonstrate that violence is not simply an external condition imposed on urban space, but is actively produced through socio-spatial configurations shaped by state selectivity, territorial stigma, and land tenure precarity. This resonates with critical urban theory and Latin American scholarship on informality and urban inequality, while also extending it by showing how violence simultaneously fragments territories and generates micro-geographies of care, resistance, and community organization.

Second, the papers collectively foreground the embodied and experiential dimensions of safety, particularly through gendered, age-based, and affective perspectives. The study of women’s perception of safety in public squares in Uberlândia contributes to feminist urban geography and environmental psychology by demonstrating how lighting, cleanliness, crowd density, and temporal rhythms shape emotional geographies of fear and comfort. Similarly, research on older adults in Chile and Mexico reveals that perceived insecurity, rather than actual crime rates, shapes mobility decisions and undermines the promise of proximity-based urbanism. The study of children further complicates adult-centric models of safety by showing how care relations affects and everyday negotiations shape children’s understandings of crime and policing. Together, these papers challenge dominant rationalist and aggregate models of safety by emphasizing lived experience, perception, and embodiment as central analytical categories.

Third, the issue highlights the role of infrastructure, mobility systems, and governance practices in producing differentiated safety outcomes across urban space. The article on transit-related crime in Belo Horizonte demonstrates how spatial structure and mobility disruptions, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, reconfigure crime patterns in transport environments, linking urban security to broader socio-spatial transformations. Also in Brazil, the study on digitally mediated surveillance shows how surveillance at or around bus stops is enabled or supported by digital technologies, such as cameras and sensors, and real-time monitoring systems, which, for users, raises questions about inclusion and the governance of urban safety. Meanwhile, studies of informal settlements underscore how residents actively reconfigure the built environment as a strategy for safety production, revealing bottom-up forms of urban governance and spatial adaptation.

The issue brings together a wide range of methodological approaches, reflecting its interdisciplinary scope and empirical richness. The contributions include in-depth qualitative studies, such as ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews in informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Chile, which examine how violence, insecurity, and everyday safety practices are socially produced and spatially embedded. Participatory and child-centred methodologies, including workshops and affect-sensitive approaches, are used to capture children’s understandings of safety and policing in urban neighbourhoods. Several papers adopt mixed-method designs that combine surveys, emotional mapping, and focus groups to analyse gendered perceptions of safety in public squares and older adults’ mobility behaviours in relation to perceived insecurity. These are complemented by quantitative and spatial analytical techniques, including geospatial analysis, statistical modelling, and hotspot mapping of crime in transit environments, particularly in studies from Chile, Mexico, and Brazil. Across the issue, this methodological diversity enables a multi-scalar and multi-dimensional understanding of urban safety, linking lived experiences with spatial patterns and the structural conditions that shape insecurity in different contexts.

A limitation of the issue is the contextual specificity of some empirical studies which, while providing rich and in-depth insights, may limit the direct generalizability of the findings across different geographical and socio-political settings. In addition, the diversity of methodological approaches, although a strength in terms of breadth and interdisciplinarity, can make direct comparison between studies more challenging. Finally, several contributions rely on small sample cross-sectional data, which limits their ability to capture long-term dynamics in safety perceptions and spatial transformations.

From a theoretical perspective, the contribution of this issue lies in its integration of three bodies of literature that are often treated separately: (1) critical urban studies of inequality and informality; (2) feminist and affective geographies of fear and embodiment from diverse city users, including children and older adults; and (3) urban criminology and mobility studies focused on spatial distributions of crime. By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the issue advances a more comprehensive understanding of urban safety as a multi-scalar, relational, and socially differentiated process.

In practice, the papers emphasize that urban safety policies cannot rely solely on surveillance, policing, or infrastructure provision. Instead, they call for integrated, context-sensitive, and socially inclusive approaches that recognize the co-constitution of space, governance, and everyday life. Whether by improving public space design for gendered safety, supporting community-led infrastructure in informal settlements, or addressing mobility insecurity among older adults and children, the findings collectively advocate for urban planning approaches that prioritize equity, care, and lived experience.

This issue connects directly to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by foregrounding the centrality of safety, inequality, and access to public space to inclusive and sustainable urban development. In particular, it speaks to SDG 11 (Sustainable Development Goal 11)¹ by showing that the quality of urban life is shaped not only by infrastructure and services but also by everyday experiences of safety, fear, and exclusion in streets, transport systems, and neighbourhoods. Moreover, the findings relate to climate change adaptation, as safer and more inclusive cities are more likely to support active mobility, such as walking and public transport use. The role of the police emerges as central yet complex across the studies. Policing is shown not only as a formal mechanism of crime control but also as a socially uneven and sometimes ambivalent presence that can both generate and reduce insecurity depending on context. This highlights the need for more just, community-sensitive, and place-based approaches to safety governance.

In summary, this issue contributes to ongoing debates about the built environment by reframing urban safety not as a fixed condition to be achieved, but as a dynamic socio-spatial process continually produced at the intersection of inequality, governance, infrastructure, and everyday practices. In doing so, it both reflects and extends international debates on urban safety, offering empirically rich, conceptually grounded insights from Latin American cities that challenge and enrich global urban theory.

Looking Ahead

The contributions in this issue highlight a range of promising directions for future research. Comparative research, both within countries and across Latin American contexts, is essential to enhance the generalizability of findings and to uncover context-specific dynamics of insecurity. The list below is not exhaustive but rather indicative, pointing to key avenues related to the built environment and its symbolic meanings:

1. Research is needed to better understand the interplay between city structure, crime, and fear of crime.

2. There is a need for more research on the relationship between mobility and safety, especially transit safety on public transportation systems.

3. The impact of crime on housing markets remains an important but underexplored area.

4. There is a pressing need for more longitudinal studies to better understand how safety perceptions, violence, and socio-spatial configurations evolve over time across diverse urban settings.

5. Further research should explore the relationship between formal institutions (e.g. policing and urban planning) and informal or community-based safety practices, particularly in marginalized areas characterized by fragmented governance.

6. Research should also emphasize the importance of adopting intersectional approaches that consider how gender, age, and socio-economic status intersect to shape experiences of safety, fear, and mobility in public spaces.

7. More attention should be given to rural–urban relationships and crime, particularly in the context of shifting demographic and spatial dynamics.

8. Further research is needed on the dual role of the police and policing, not only as agents of crime control and violence prevention but also as potential contributors to the production of violence, particularly in contexts marked by inequality and contested legitimacy.

9. More attention should be given to how perceived or actual lack of security can legitimize spatial segregation, including gating practices, and how these processes are increasingly reinforced through the incorporation of new surveillance and security technologies.

10. Emerging topics include the links between climate change and crime, as well as environmental crime in urban-fringe areas.

Latin America is particularly relevant to theory building because it offers contexts in which urban insecurity, inequality, and informality are often more visible, intense, and intertwined than in many Global North settings. This makes it possible to observe processes that may be less evident elsewhere, such as how absent or selective governance shapes everyday safety, or how community-based practices emerge as key forms of protection and control. This is a recurrent issue even when not mentioned in these articles. In this sense, Latin America not only provides empirical cases but also helps refine and challenge existing theories by showing how concepts like fear of crime, territoriality, and socio-spatial segregation operate under conditions of deep inequality and fragmented governance.

NOTE

1. See https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/cities/.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all authors who submitted their work to this issue, as well as to the referees for their careful, constructive, and generous reviews, which were essential to the quality of the selection process. We are also deeply grateful to Built Environment editor, Professor Stephan Marshall, for his support and guidance throughout the development of this issue. Of approximately twenty abstract submissions, fifteen articles were submitted on a variety of topics, and seven papers were ultimately selected for inclusion. We would like to acknowledge and thank all authors whose papers, although not selected, contributed valuable perspectives and significantly enriched the scope and ambition of this issue. Their work was instrumental in shaping the intellectual direction of the issue, even when not all contributions could be accommodated within the final selection.