Social Conflict and Safety in Urban Areas

Abstract

This article examines social conflict and safety in urban areas. Cities are productive systems through which most 21st-century challenges, such as poverty, inequality, unemployment, environmental degradation, and climate change, can be addressed. Cities are habitats for people, and urban design with nature at the centre. It is essential to resilience, sustainability, liveability, and justice. The nature of cities is perceived as ecosystems of people, green and blue nature, and biodiversity based on built infrastructure. Social conflict is the struggle for agency or power in society. Social conflict occurs when two or more people oppose each other in social interaction; each exerts social power with reciprocity to achieve incompatible goals whilst preventing the other from attaining their own. Conflict theory was adopted for this article. As conflict is an inevitable aspect of development and change in urban settings, cities are inherently sites of conflict. Still, as concluded in this paper, they can be generally managed through social, cultural, and political mechanisms.