The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence

This edited volume asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular 'urban' social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative as well as destructive capacities, which create and transform urban space and time. By looking at the different ways in which the spatial and temporal configuration of cities produce and shape violence, the authors contextualise the dynamics of urban violence and show how violence affects everyday urban spatial practices and rhythms. Violence may reconfigure spatialities and temporalities in cities in the long term, changing the physical and social space as well the rhythms of a city. Memories and imaginations of violence are also inscribed in city-space, often in several temporal layers, and can lead to new violence through politicised practices of commemoration. In The spatiality and temporality of urban violence, authors from a range of disciplines apply this spatiotemporal perspective to nine diverse case studies, based on original material collected during ethnographic and archival research. The chapters cover cities in different world regions and historical phases, offering translocal and transregional perspectives. This fresh new perspective challenges assumed binaries of cities in the global North and South, and contests the alleged difference between violence in the past and in the present.