The book gives account of the results of a four-year international project funded by the European Research Agency. Reducing Boundaries considers the way in which the upper-middle classes configure as a goal the preservation of their own security and the ensuing strategies they put in action in order to achieve it.

Reducing Boundaries offers a new perspective on an often under researched topic: what is the upper and middle classes perception of their own security? While human sciences have mainly focused on poor and low-middle classes evicted from urban space, Reducing Boundaries explores the strategies that the most privileged classes enact in order to preserved their own (real or perceived) security. In the context of an interdisciplinary framework of analysis and through a series of case studies (from Porto Alegre, to Brussels, to Venice), class-specific security measures and policies are considered both in themselves, and in terms of their impact of the urban fabric of cities and on the lives of the different social groups involved. This book crowns a four-year international project funded by the European Research Agency.