Safe and inclusive cities: exploring the link between inequality, social cohesion and violent crime 

The study used an innovative combination of qualitative and quantitative data sets to test hypotheses about the link between inequality social cohesion and violence, in two rapidly urbanising cities in the Global South, namely Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro. The SASPRI contribution to this study was to work with the University of Oxford to bring together sets of quantitative data from South Africa in order to understand and map violent crime, inequality and poverty in South Africa.

The overall study was co-ordinated by the Democracy, Governance and Service Delivery research programme of the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa, with participating organisations Laboratory for the Analysis of Violence, State University of Rio de Janeiro; Centre for the Analysis of South African Social Policy, Oxford University; and the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. It was funded through Canada’s International Development Research Centre and the UK’s Department for International Development.