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<p>This article examines how community voices typically marginalized in debates on urban security politics conceptualize neighborhood safety in two residential areas adjacent to Hamburg’s central station. Drawing on a small-scale participatory study, the article analyzes how seven local residents, seven harm reduction professionals, two people with lived experiences of housing insecurity, and a former client of a local drug consumption facility negotiate and contest dominant security narratives, measures and everyday practices. The findings reveal collective negotiations that unwrite the polemic of the ‘dangerous poor’ prevalent in the dominant local security discourses: rather than locating urban insecurity in the bodies and behaviors of homeless, poverty-affected, and racialized community members, participants identified state systemic neglect, welfare disinvestment, racist police violence, displacement, and the absence of inclusive community infrastructures as structural sources of neighborhood insecurity. Their alternative visions of safety centered on strengthening social cohesion, public health and care infrastructures, affordable housing, and participatory governance.</p>

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Unwriting the Polemic of the “Dangerous Poor”—Community Voices on State Neglect as a Source of Urban Insecurity and Alternative Visions of Urban Safety

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月18日

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  • Laura Reyes Pollak

摘要

This article examines how community voices typically marginalized in debates on urban security politics conceptualize neighborhood safety in two residential areas adjacent to Hamburg’s central station. Drawing on a small-scale participatory study, the article analyzes how seven local residents, seven harm reduction professionals, two people with lived experiences of housing insecurity, and a former client of a local drug consumption facility negotiate and contest dominant security narratives, measures and everyday practices. The findings reveal collective negotiations that unwrite the polemic of the ‘dangerous poor’ prevalent in the dominant local security discourses: rather than locating urban insecurity in the bodies and behaviors of homeless, poverty-affected, and racialized community members, participants identified state systemic neglect, welfare disinvestment, racist police violence, displacement, and the absence of inclusive community infrastructures as structural sources of neighborhood insecurity. Their alternative visions of safety centered on strengthening social cohesion, public health and care infrastructures, affordable housing, and participatory governance.