Socio-cultural approaches to fear of crime have suggested that responses to questionnaires may channel broader social attitudes towards other culturally-related topics which also shape the public meaning of ‘crime’, such as immigration. Building on this idea, this article uses a discourse analytic framework to examine how xeno-racist ideas, claims and positions are metonymically worked through everyday opinions about ‘urban insecurity’ as a crime-related construct. The analysis of open-ended interviews with ordinary citizens in Barcelona shows that the position of a ‘threatening Other’, typically afforded by the insecurity narrative, is pervasively constructed in xeno-racial terms, whether explicitly or by implication, but is rhetorically rejected on the narrative grounds of its alleged criminal acts. This xeno-racial version of the criminalized Other is itself managed in interaction as a sensitive topic through a set of deracialization strategies that displace rejection from the language of immigration towards culturally contiguous languages of incivilities, cultural differences and socioeconomic disadvantage. The article deepens the ideological versatility of discourses that subtly warrant the structural privilege of ‘natives’ vis-a-vis ‘immigrants’, thereby legitimizing a tenacious system of native supremacy.

This paper presents and confirms the suspicion that there is a disruption in environmental education and environmentally responsible behaviors. Children are well aware of the behaviors and values considered environmentally friendly. However, there is a statistically significant decrease in the scores during adolescence. Scores recover in the College sample but they fail to reach children's scores. This has to do more with specific characteristics of adolescence and social context than with environmental education. A questionnaire built ad hoc was applied to a sample of 2037 persons between 9 and 35 years old. It should be noted, however, that the low scores of teenagers are also notably high in the range of the used scale.

The most significant results of the different studies carried out in the City-Identity-Sustainability research network and published in this special issue are discussed and evaluated. A general structural model was proposed to analyze the existence of a relationship between social identity and propensity to sustainability in the urban life context, in various settings of Latin America and Europe. Propensity to sustainability was valued and the adjustment to two theoretical models (identification and cohesion) was observed in each setting through the structural equation system. Results confirm that there is a relationship between the degree of social identity and propensity to sustainability. Place identity and social cohesion are variables that influence this relationship in a differential way and vary in accordance to the physical quality of the space and the social status of the setting. Thus, the study provides some management guidelines to advance toward sustainability.