Abstract
Considering the absence of an agreed definition of urban violence, this article suggests that exploring the violence-security nexus in the context of planetary urbanisation provides some necessary steps for theorisation. Moving from the analytical toward the conceptual, we offer three conceptual shifts, intended as steps toward a theory of urban violence: first, from violence in the city to violence in/of/through an age of planetary urbanisation; second, beyond the dichotomous thinking about the violence-security nexus; third, from manifestations of violence in the city to the ‘threshold’ (of visibility) beyond which a city is understood, and depicted, as violent.
Highlights
From violence in the city to urban violence ‘A utopian if not impossible task’: BodyGendrot described the task of writing about urban violence (1995: 525)
Exploring the atmospheres of fear, we argue, may be in this sense a way to investigate the affective dimension of urban violence, a crucial category to understand, following Gregory and Pred, how ‘violence compresses the sometimes forbiddingly abstract spaces of geopolitics and geoeconomics into the intimacies of everyday life and the innermost recesses of the human body’ (2007: 6)
Springer and Le Billon, 2016), we have raised the question about the kind of violence that is specific to the peculiar spatial formation that we know as the urban, by exploring the violence-security nexus from the perspective of the production of atmospheres of fear
Summary
From violence in the city to urban violence ‘A utopian if not impossible task’: BodyGendrot described the task of writing about urban violence (1995: 525). Bohme, 1995; McCormack, 2008; Anderson, 2009), we will address the violencesecurity nexus in the context of capitalist urbanisation, by accounting for the way the contemporary discourses, practices and politics of security, insofar as framing urban violence as an exogenous anomaly to be eradicated, generate the pervasive atmospheres of fear that increasingly characterise contemporary urban space Six, we recap the three conceptual shifts that follow from our discussion: from violence in the city to violence in/of/ through capitalist urbanisation; beyond the dichotomous thinking about the violencesecurity nexus; from manifestations of violence in the city to the ‘threshold’ (of visibility) beyond which a city is understood, and depicted, as violent
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