Jelle Brands is interested in the ways people experience urban public spaces, with an emphasis on fear of crime and perceived (un)safety. He is also interested in the ways design, management, surveillance and policing of urban public spaces affect the experience of its users. Do citizens feel safer when there are more surveillance camera’s or more police? He is also interested in how the public space in cities can be made safer, without compromising the positive aspects of city life. This involves privacy issues, but also about the inclusiveness of urban public spaces. His research is akin to studies in criminology, but it combines other disciplines as well, such urban geography.

Jelle teaches the second year “Safe City Lecture Series” together with Frann Meissner, and the second year “Elective Crime, Criminalization and the Right to the City”  with Esther van Ginneken. He encourages students to see theory ‘at work’ in actual urban environments. For that reason, he organized an excursion to Utrecht with his students that are doing the elective “Crime, Criminalization and the Right to the City”. There, a very special tour guide was waiting for them: a former homeless man. He guided them through his former habitat. Questions that arose were: Where did he live? How did he survive? How did government organizations treat him as a homeless person?

An interesting parallel case Jelle mentioned is that of Love Park in Philadelphia. The behavior of some of the visitors (skateboarders) of this urban park became criminalized over time. Why did this happen, who decided, and who’s interests were primarily served in doing so (and who’s were not?). Such questions are particularly interesting for Jelle’s research, and can also be reflected on when studying homelessness in urban environments. To what extent are the homeless  ‘disallowed’ to be in particular areas of the city? How does this materialize in urban environments, as well as in the practice of managing public space and formulating rules and regulation about the ‘proper’  use of urban public space. Who benefits?

The goal of this excursion was for students to experience how marginal groups experience urban public spaces, how they are treated by other users and by surveillance and policing actors, in order to think critically about this groups’ right to safety, as well as their right to the city. Students were asked to reflect on these questions in class, by designing and presenting a poster.

Jelle Brands (1985) works as assistant professor at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. He obtained his master’s degree in Urban Geography from the University of Utrecht. After obtaining his master’s degree Jelle started working as PhD in Urban Geography at the University of Utrecht, and studied nightlife activities, experienced safety and surveillance and policing in the main nightlife areas of Utrecht, Rotterdam and Groningen. He successfully defended his dissertation “Safety, surveillance and policing in the night-time economy: a visitor perspective” in September 2014.