Cities and regions have long captured the imagination of sociologists, economists, and urbanists. From Alfred Marshall to Robert Park and Jane Jacobs, cities have been seen as cauldrons of diversity and difference and as fonts for creativity and innovation. Yet until recently, social scientists concerned with regional growth and development have focused mainly on the role of firms in cities, and particularly on how these firms make location decisions and to what extent they concentrate together in agglomerations or clusters. This short article summarizes recent advances in our thinking about cities and communities, and does so particularly in light of themes advanced in my recently published book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which focuses on diversity and creativity as basic drivers of innovation and regional and national growth. This line of work further suggests the need for some conceptual refocusing and broadening to account for the location decisions of people as opposed to those of firms as sources of regional and national economic growth. In doing so, this article hopes to spur wider commentary and debate on the critical functions of cities and regions in 21st century creative capitalism.

Parents are worried about the safety of their youngsters in public space, although they do not define all public space as dangerous for their children. This article discusses empirical research of the views of parents of fourteen and fifteen year olds on the safety in different environments. Parents in cities, suburbia and the countryside in the Dutch province of Groningen all worry about the safety of their children. Nevertheless, differences exist in the ways in which they reproduce images of 'the city as a jungle' and the 'rural idyll.' These dominant images influence the parental concerns and the way parents protect their youngsters. At the same time, parents hold alternative and sometimes contradictory views about the appropriateness of their residential environment. Furthermore, parents' opinions on safety are not exclusively based on the places their children visit. Besides local experiences, national and international news frame the parents' views. This is of considerable importance for local safety policies.

This article discusses the changes in the safety policy in the Netherlands over about the last fifteen years. These changes are analysed as reactions to the problems that the police and other criminal justice agencies face and which result from the shift from a modern to a late modern society. Five main changes are distinguished: in the organisational and managerial arrangements of the police; in the relation between the state (police) and other (both public and private) agencies; the rise of extra-judicial instruments and the growing attention for the position of victims; the increasing use of technological instruments for surveillance and crime prevention; and a harsher and more punitive policy. These changes create new fundamental questions for a future safety policy.