The book "On the Usefulness of Fear" tells a political story of our cities and suburbs. For the artist, urban space is a place where social and economic factors overlap, shaping and reshaping it. In three chapters, Peggy Buth reports on social utopias and economic interests, on the attempts to include and exclude people, on hope, but also on discrimination and defamation. The focus of her artistic research includes the suburbs of Paris and social housing projects, as well as streets in the U.S. state of Missouri and the Ruhr area with former working-class neighborhoods in the north of Essen and districts in Duisburg. The artist received the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation's scholarship for contemporary photography in 2014 for her work. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition "On the Usefulness of Fear" at the Museum Folkwang.