Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper addresses precarity from a spatial perspective. It draws attention to how power becomes inscribed in urban space and shapes particular spatial arrangements connected with socio-economic vulnerabilities. This is empirically illustrated with a case study of Hargeisa, a city historically marked by the violence of the Somali civil war. Our analysis draws on interviews and participant photography, to foreground the ‘everyday’ experiences of residents living in the city’s marginal settlements. We point to the operations of power that produce political, economic and social deprivation but also agentic options for these residents who experience, cope with, struggle with and work against their marginalisation. Interconnecting precarity with geographies of violence, we elaborate the concept of ‘violent site-effects’ as a means to explain how power inscribed in spatial arrangements can cause harm to people. We emphasise violence as built into structures and as part of social orders that produce precarity. This, we argue, provides a basis on which to reflect on the dynamic ways in which inequality, insecurity and thus, vulnerabilities, are produced and reproduced in the processes of urban reconstruction.
Highlights
This article explores links between precarity, violence and space, and presents empirical material from marginal urban settlements in a city in the Horn of Africa
Urban margins are shaped by multiple agencies, practices and processes, and we identify spatial and structural dimensions that reproduce and perpetuate vulnerabil ities in marginal urban settlements
This approach to experiences of residents in marginal urban settlements draws attention to contingencies in urban change and how it affects precarity in the everyday and connects with processes operating at other scales
Summary
As highlighted from the outset of this article, inequalities are strikingly visible in the urban geographies of Hargeisa, in terms of population densities and vast disparities in types of accommodation This is relevant to our analysis of the (multi-levelled) spatialisation of precarity in that we must consider how people use wider narratives of Somaliland’s (relative) security, peace, stability or social cohesion as ‘illusions of certainty’[44] that help them ratio nalise their place in the city and deal with material disadvantage, place-based and structural violence. If a poor person, who could not afford the expenses of the other neighbourhoods, if he comes to here and finds someone, who is selling a plot of land, he can buy it and he can settle on it
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