The Dialectics of Urban Form and Violence (original) (raw)
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Urbanisation, Violence and City-Led Policymaking
As the global population is increasing – especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America – and ever more people are moving to cities, urbanisation is shaping the security environment. Although urbanisation is often associated with higher levels of socio-economic development and prosperity, the phenomenon also creates societal problems, particularly when combined with rapid population growth. Fast-paced, unmanaged and poorly serviced urbanisation generates an array of infrastructural, economic, social and security challenges. These problems are most apparent in slums and other informal settlements, where unofficial, often illicit governance and economic structures challenge the host state and licit economy. Many such areas become disputed territories: pockets of high-intensity armed activity in which governance challenges and the activities of non-state armed groups converge.
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Cities generally … comprise a motley of peoples and cultures, of highly differentiated modes of life between which there often is only the faintest communication, the greatest indifference, … occasionally bitter strife, but always the sharpest contrast. (Wirth 1938: 20) As the world moves towards its so-called urban 'tipping point', urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The association between cities, violence, and disorder is not new, however. In a classic article on…/
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At the start of the twenty-first century, urban violence represents one of the most significant challenges for development across much of the Global South. This essay introduces a new framework for analyzing the politics of urban violence that combines a subnational comparative perspective with multi-method and multi-level approaches. The empirical contributions to this special issue analyze the politics of urban violence and its consequences for development in major cities across Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. First, the contributors show how variation in the nature of relations between states and local armed actors poses distinct implications for several outcomes, including patterns of violence, associational life, and economic markets. Second, the volume unpacks how the integration of developing world cities into both licit and illicit global economic flows impacts local patterns of and political responses to violence. And, third, the contributions identify how actors and interests that operate at multiple territorial and institutional scales influence the local dynamics and consequences of urban violence.
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For a fleeting moment during the final decade of the twentieth century, the general trajectory of conflict across the world seemed clear. With the Cold War over, the number of interstate wars was in free-fall and the dominant form of violence was internal, within fragmenting states no longer propped up by their superpower sponsors. The age of 'total war' between states had thus been largely superseded by a wave of civil conflicts, often characterised as 'new wars', fought for the most part in rural hinterlands and widely considered as limited in scope and scale.
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This introduction to the special section explores geopolitical dimensions of conflict and violence in cities, pointing at the need to continue learning from marginal urban settings. It broadens the scope across differentiated approaches, such as the francophone and anglophone urban geopolitical traditions. By opening up a wider perspective, the emphasis is not on cities as part of a matrix of global hierarchies of geographical power but on the multiscalar relational significance of urban geopolitical inquiry. The introduction positions the special section articles within a wider review of urban geopolitical provocations outlining a new political vocabulary of urban conflict and violence. It concludes with a general call for a methodological and empirical broadening of the field of urban geopolitics as part of a broader de-colonial social and spatial science research agenda bridging the disciplines of political geography, urban studies, architecture and planning.
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This paper seeks to understand the dynamics of post-conflict/post-major political transition violence in cities. It examines the transformation of violence in these cities from violence associated with protracted warfare and prolonged civil strife into new forms. The paper argues that post-conflict societies in general and cities in particular do not move from conflict and war into peace and normality in
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This Special Feature explores the socio-spatial transformations of cities in the Global South under hybrid neoliberal regimes over the last few decades, which have resulted in significant harm to poor and marginalised groups. Our focus is on identifying the nature of this harm as violence enacted through the very structures-cultural, social, political and institutional-that organise social life. We also aim to illuminate the often contradictory and negotiated responsesranging from resistance to complicity-of the poor and marginalised populations that disproportionately face such violence. The papers presented offer case studies from four different cities in the Global South and demonstrate the emergence of a state-capitalist nexus around the pursuit of grandiose urban (re)development visions. This nexus is historically and socio-spatially specific but reveals an increased capacity, willingness, and even appetite, for enacting structural violence via diverse mechanisms over long temporalities through interplays between slow and spectacular forms of violence.
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The world is urbanising rapidly and cities are increasingly held as the most important arenas for sustainable development. Cities emerging from war are no exception, but across the globe, many postwar cities are ravaged by residual or renewed violence, which threatens progress towards peace and stability. This collection of articles addresses why such violence happens, where and how it manifests, and how it can be prevented. It includes contributions that are informed by both postwar logics and urban particularities, that take intra-city dynamics into account, and that adopt a spatial analysis of the city. By bringing together contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds, all addressing the single issue of postwar violence in cities from a spatial perspective, the articles make a threefold contribution to the research agenda on violence in postwar cities. First, the articles nuance our understanding of the causes and forms of the uneven spatial distribution of violence, insecurities, and trauma within and across postwar cities. Second, the articles demonstrate how urban planning and the built environment shape and generate different forms of violence in postwar cities. Third, the articles explore the challenges, opportunities, and potential unintended consequences of conflict resolution in violent urban settings.