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This chapter is a transcript of an informal conversation between Jack Katz and Keith Hayward that took place in Rome in August 2019. It covers a number of subjects linked to Professor Katz’s academic career, as well as some personal biographical reflections on how his upbringing shaped his sociological thinking about the ‘seductive’ nature of crime and transgression. The chapter also discusses Professor Katz’s various contributions to qualitative research methodology (specifically ‘analytic induction’ and ‘social ontology’), before concluding with a summary of his latest research for the ‘Hollywood neighborhoods’ project and some brief thoughts about future research trajectories.

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the “techniques of neutralization,” “subterranean values,” and “drift” within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's “calculated hedonism” can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is “alive and well” through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity.

This chapter offers a theoretical appraisal of our contemporary hyper-regulated urban spaces situated against a backdrop of deindustrialisation, the shift to consumer economies and the rise of the creative city paradigm. While existing work has characterised urban space as dead and asocial spaces bereft of life. This chapter opts to think our city centres as ‘Zombie Cities’: cities which have been eviscerated the social but are forced to wear the exterior signs of life through the injection of economically productive but artificial modes of culture and creativity. This sets the stage for explaining why parkour is inconsistently included and excluded from urban space, and how it attains spatio-economically contingent legitimacy and inclusion into urban space that problematises existing theoretical perspectives around a revanchist urbanism.

This chapter uses ethnographic data to explore the embodied aspects of parkour’s practice and how traceurs move around and navigate the city. It draws upon a blend of non-representational theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain the attraction to parkour’s intensely embodied, effective and risk-taking practice. It then looks at how the traceurs exist in the interstices of hyper-regulated urban spaces and develop an alternative cartography of the city, which is generated from their situated knowledge and the temporal rhythms and flows in the city centre’s consumer economy. It is argued that this alternative cartography constitutes a spatio-bodily transgression that violates the hyper-regulated city’s command for its subjects to be passive bodies who accept the dominant cartography of the city geared towards consumption.

This chapter draws upon ethnographic observation and walking interviews with private security staff to offer in-depth insight into the hyper-regulation of the city and the lived dynamics of parkour’s inconsistent inclusion and exclusion from urban space. This chapter argues that the street-level governance of urban space is largely incoherent, fractured and characterised by a myriad of conflicting spatial interests. As neoliberalism has privatised and fractured the city into a series of microspheres of spatial sovereignty, there is a lack of any notion of the common urban good; therefore, what should be allowed and prohibited from urban space. This is a manifestation of the broader trend towards post-political forms of governance. It is argued that the confusion and contradiction that surrounds what city spaces should be for actively contributed to the forms of spatial compromise developed between private security and the traceurs.