Daedalus - Special Issue on "The Conscience of the City" 
Vol. 97, No. 4, Fall, 1968

"Crime is a way to use the city." My thesis, succinctly put of course, by someone else (Geoff Manaugh)

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/crime-is-way-to-use-city.html

Also see very good post "Nakatomi Space" that precedes it, considering the ways Die Hard and the Bourne Movies use space.

Okay, but the next question is then: for what?

Put differently, crime is a way to use the city differently than it is habitually used. To use roofs as streets, windows as doors, walls as passageways, etc.

See also Eyval Weizman's "Lethal Theory," on the IDF's practical uses of critical theory to determine, for example, that it was expedient to blast "overground tunnels" through buildings in Nablus rather than taking streets.

Okay, maybe there are two guiding assumptions of this project: "Crime is a way to use the city" and, Will Straw's accent of Simmel: "secrecy magnifies space."

What Manaugh side-steps is the crime he is referring to is fictionalized crime, not crime as police, crime-victims, or everyday practitioners of socially defined crime activity experience it. It is different from "law and order" rhetoric the emerges out of political discourse. This crime is also different from "true crime" - the pulpy, Dateline NBC private "crimes of passion" and love triangles. There is then, a particular kind of crime - which is an interruption of space - heists, car chases, cons, pick-pockets, theft, hostage situations, kidnapping, chase. This is the fictional topography of crime-exceptional in the everyday world-- around which representational codes and conventions develop. This is architecturalized crime, concerned with spatial operations, agents, time-tables, communications, visibility/invisibility, disguise, sleight of hand, sleight of body, illusion.

"In a 2003 paper for the Naval War College Review, author Richard J. Norton describes the feral city as “a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power.” From the perspective of a war planner or soldier, Norton explains, the feral city is spatially impenetrable; it is a maze resistant to aerial mapping and far too dangerous to explore on foot. Indeed, its “buildings, other structures, and subterranean spaces would offer nearly perfect protection from overhead sensors, whether satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles,” Norton writes, creating, in the process, an environment where soldiers are as likely to die from rabies, tetanus, and wild dog attacks as they are from armed combat.

Geoff Manaugh, "What is the City-as-Bruce-Lee?" (http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/1007-what-is-the-city-as-bruce-lee-geoff-manaugh)

"A harrowing hint of the sunlit terror of our time"

- Judith Crist in New York Magazine on The Parallax View, 1974.

By the Seventies, the city, which had been idolized both negatively and positively through the Sixties, had become untenable: cities were nasty to live in, unmanageable, self-destructing. New York, the god of cities, went down the tubes, given the kiss-off when Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show to Burbank. Having lost all this, the city even ceased to be a viable subject for comedy, as the mean-spiritedness of the Neil Simon school shows. A piece of suggestive folklore, parallel to girls in the early Sixties worrying about hatching black widow spiders in their bouffant hairdos: New York City began to think that all those circus souvenir caymans they flushed down toilets were breeding and living below, and that, in fact, the sewers of their city belonged toalligators….

-"What's Your 10-20?" Redneck Movie Travel Notes, Richard Thompson, Film Comment 16(4) July-August 1980.

Amazing set of photos of NYPD 1978-81 by Jill Freeman here:

http://www.higherpictures.com/Exhibition.aspx?c=44

Super Cops comic from 1974. Apparently only one issue was ever printed by Red Circle, then also responsible for Archie. A single story from the comic, "2 to Get Ready and 4 to Go," is reprinted here:

http://drmonkeyretroblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/have-super-cop-christmas.html