Un/safety as placemaking: Disabled people’s socio-spatial negotiation of fear of violent crime

Amidst growing international recognition of the disproportionate experience of hostility, violence and hate crime perpetrated against people with disabilities, this chapter explores how disabled people’s everyday, localised, practices of placemaking are bound up with notions of fear and safety in contemporary Ireland. Despite a burgeoning global disability rights agenda which stresses disabled people’s right to live autonomously in the community free from violence and abuse, research has recognised the often mundane and everyday acts of oppression that confront people with disabilities. The chapter seeks to shed light on the material, affective and discursive intertwining of disability and un/safety in local processes of placemaking, such that the experience of un/safety and fear of violent crime works through complex assemblages of bodies, emotions, memories, objects and environments. In particular, it aims to demonstrate how un/safety, as an embodied and affectual phenomenon intimately tied up with disabled people’s perception and understanding of place, interacts with, and sometimes exceeds place-based ‘technical fixes’ (more lighting, or better street design) proposed by policy initiatives to address issues of crime and community safety.