Urban Fear

What is Urban Fear?
I'm telling you this so you know what I am dealing with for this semester.

Feeling safety is one of human needs in Mashlow's diagrams. It is on the second chart after the basic one:physiological needs.This is dealing with the place where human lives and with whom he or she communicates with in the level of needs. Facing this kind of needs human is not only as individual only, but also as social person.

From this point, people should consider the things that can cause the appearance of unsafety feeling who threaten them self, so they have to predict how can they fulfill the needs of safety and security. Moreover, to take care and protect them self and their things, people do things or react including the space ordering.

But before, it is important to priorly know about what is Fear? and how it emerges in humans thought. We are talking about the phenomenology of fear then. So, fear, emerges as a fundamental emotion shared in one form or other by almost all sentient beings. It is an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm and It is a feeling of anxiety concerning the outcome of something or the safety of someone.
I would happily share the things that urban society fear the most in the context of urban living in a city. Few of them are the fear of social status' judging, fear of small numbers, fear to the anonymity in the neighborhood, and fear to criminality such as robbery, drug abuse, etc.

Fear of social status' judging determines people on how they choose where they will live, it depends on several factors such as the location of the house, the quality which can be drawn by the style applied to the architecture of the house, and the amenities supplied by the neighborhood. This phenomenon of urban fear about how people would judge them for their social status by looking at where they live, so that there is a tendency from people coming from average and upper social class to live in a prestige place and far away from lower social class' area.

Fear of the small numbers as been discussed by Arjun Appadurai in his book with the same title, that Sikhs, Baeques, Kuds, and other minority groups are considered as the ethnic cleansing's victim that will be done in order to anticipate terrorism. This fear also happens in the littler scope in the neighborhood context. Let's say in Indonesia, there is a fear to specific race or religion where it is a minority in the place it in. It in any ways will be judge as a bad influence in the place which it exists.

Some people don't feel happy dwelling in a neighborhood which the community members are not knowing each other. The anonymity concept that commonly happens in the public space also happens in the community scale. Whereas, in the community context, there should be the same characteristic or identity. Few people would feel the fear of living in a place where they do not know with what kind of people they share the neighborhood with.

The last fear I discussed is fear of criminality which is already be a common sense in the extent of urban life. The criminality itself caused by several complex things such as decreased economic condition, high unemployment rate, unknown politic consideration, Another cause is the emerging of people's untrustworthiness to the government's effort on reacting to the violent crime happened. These causes then demand people to do things them self in order to anticipate the fear that emerges.

There are so many ways can be implemented in the effort to anticipate the people's fear in their urban living context in the city. And it all depends on how far can people go to fulfill their safety and security needs. Few of them are by having distance with the sources of fear and by adding barriers to protect themself.

....

STOP!!!!!!! you are not going to write down all materials of your thesis here, are you?
I am sorry, I just too overwhelmed by the days and nights I passed through lately.
Full of FEAR, I did!!!however, the draft of thesis has been submitted to the supervisor's desk. And I am not done with the Conclusion chapter since I don't know what should be concluded yet


Btw, I brought myself to the bookstore and bought myself with
my own money (pay day!pay day!) two books I found interesting.
One of them is The Hours by Michael Cunningham that my lil brother recommended me to read :)