The spatiality and temporality of urban violence: Histories, rhythms and ruptures

By Alke Jenss

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 capacities, which produces and transforms urban space and time in the long turn, also through the impact of memory. The analytical categories of space and time must be thought as inextricably linked with each other. Expanding this fundamental conceptual idea offers fresh perspectives on urban violence. The book unites case studies on different world regions and historical periods , and thus challenges assumed binaries of cities the global North and South, the past and present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526165725

Book preview

The spatiality and temporality of urban violence

The spatiality and temporality

of urban violence

Histories, rhythms and ruptures

Edited by

Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6573 2 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: ‘Public Property (1969)’ by Eric Fischer, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

In loving memory of Wolfgang Albrecht (1950–2022) for his everlasting encouragement and support.

Contents

List of figures

Contributors

Foreword by Niall Ó Dochartaigh

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Sites of violence, entangled in space and time – Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss

Part I Space-time regimes and regulations: Changing forms of urban violence

1Revolution lost and found: Collective actions, fears and violently contested space-time regimes in Hamburg and Seattle (c. 1916–20) – Klaus Weinhauer

2From riots to massacres: How space and time changed urban violence in Jerusalem, 1920–29 – Roberto Mazza

3Resisting a hegemonic spatiotemporal order: Hindu nationalist violence and subterranean agency in Ahmedabad – Shrey Kapoor

Part II Rhythms and spatiotemporal dynamics: Structuring effects on and of practices of urban violence

4Temporalities of urban violence: A comparative perspective on El Salvador and Jamaica – Hannes Warnecke-Berger

5Disrupting the rhythms of violence: Anti-port protests in the city of Buenaventura – Alke Jenss

6The urban pulse of violence: Spatiotemporal patterns in the riots in Belfast and Jerusalem during the era of the British Empire – Mara Albrecht

Part III Memories and (religious) imaginations: Representations of urban violence

7Beirut’s violence palimpsest: Urban transformations, mnemonic spaces and socio-temporal practices – Christine Mady

8‘Humiliation Days’: Remembering, repeating and expecting urban violence in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies – Andreas Bolte

9Counter-mapping the divided city: Topographies of violence and the religious imagination in urban Brazil – Christian Laheij

Epilogue: Rhythms and space-time of violence in and of the city – Jutta Bakonyi

Index

List of figures

2.1Rare photo of Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem with the clock tower.

2.2Map of Jerusalem with route of Nabi Musa procession 1920. From Palestine and Syria. Handbook for Travellers by Karl Baedeker, 5th Edition, 1912.

2.3Map based on Henry Kendall’s ‘1944 Survey: Distribution of the Population’ (H. Kendall, Jerusalem: The City Plan, Preservation and Development During the British Mandate, 1918–1948 [London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1948]).

3.1TripAdvisor review of the Sabarmati Riverfront.

3.2A Vaghri woman displaying a photo of the day her family was evicted from the riverbed. Photograph taken by author in Ganesh Nagar on 10 August 2017.

3.3Vatva resettlement site, ‘Pakistan’ section. Photograph taken by Surabhi Vaya on 24 August 2018.

3.4The Sabarmati Riverfront in Ahmedabad. Photograph taken by the author on 7 August 2017.

7.1Map: Violence in municipal Beirut.

7.2Map: Violence in Greater Beirut.

7.3Violence markers in Beirut.

7.4Emancipation possibilities in Beirut.

Contributors

Mara Albrecht (University of Erfurt)

Jutta Bakonyi (Durham University)

Andreas Bolte (University of Freiburg)

Alke Jenss (Arnold Bergstraesser Institute Freiburg)

Shrey Kapoor (Cornell University)

Christian Laheij (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle)

Christine Mady (Aalto University)

Roberto Mazza (Independent Scholar)

Niall Ó Dochartaigh (University of Galway)

Hannes Warnecke-Berger (University of Kassel)

Klaus Weinhauer (University of Bielefeld)

Foreword

Niall Ó Dochartaigh

The wellspring for this innovative and ambitious volume is a linked pair of interdisciplinary panels on violence and the city at the annual conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in Hamburg in 2018. Organised by the editors of this volume, Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss, with colleagues Jutta Bakonyi and Kirsti Stuvøy, the two panels were part of a larger section organised by the ECPR standing group on political violence. Those two panels were very much in tune with the spirit of the standing group, characterised as they were by a deeply rooted interdisciplinarity, diverse and innovative methodological approaches and a commitment to locating the study of political violence in broader theoretical debates in the social sciences and humanities. Their focus on theories of space and time resonated too with an earlier book based on contributions to the ECPR conference: Political Violence in Context: Time, Space and Milieu (Bosi, Ó Dochartaigh & Pisoiu 2015).

The work begun in those panels was further developed at a workshop at the University of Erfurt in December 2018 on ‘Histories and Rhythms of Urban Violence’ organised by those four colleagues who had convened the panels at the ECPR. The organisers took the opportunity to draw several more contributors on board and created an energising and stimulating atmosphere. The workshop was a model of its kind and over those two and a half days in Erfurt there was a productive cross-pollination of ideas as the arguments were refined. The theoretical implications of the wide array of case studies were teased out and contributors gained a strong mutual awareness of the nuances of each other’s cases and arguments. The value of that workshop is evidenced in the strong thematic continuities between the chapters and in the powerful overarching vision provided by editors Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss in their introduction.

The volume is marked out above all by the theoretical ambition of the editors whose introduction offers a rich and stimulating reflection on the ways in which theoretical perspectives on space and time can illuminate the specificities of urban violence. It offers a sophisticated analysis of the rhythms and temporalities of urban violence and the spatial configurations of urban violence that enhances theoretical understandings of spatiotemporalities. It is all the more impressive because it synthesises insights that have emerged across such a wide range of disciplines. The book is much more than the sum of its parts, largely because the introduction so effectively draws out the insights from the numerous cases and provides, as the editors put it, both a mapping and a clocking of violence in the city.

One of the reasons those initial panels in Hamburg and the conversations at the workshop in Erfurt were so productive was the diversity of academic backgrounds among the participants, encompassing history, sociology, political science, anthropology, urban design and architecture. The participants brought with them expertise in widely varying cases, across different time periods and examined widely differing forms of political mobilisation and violence; from labour strikes and rioting through gang violence, vigilantism, insurgency and civil war. The focus on time and space provided a powerful analytical lens through which disparate cases were brought into sharp focus, unified by the many common aspects of violence in urban settings. Among the themes that stand out are: the role of past violence in the maintenance of spatial boundaries and in the labelling of districts and streets as safe or dangerous, bad or good; the spatialisation of identities; and the linking of security and safety with the built environment at the smallest scale – in the shelter offered by an entrance, a shop or an alleyway. The historical depth of many of the case studies allows for the excavation of ‘temporal layers’ and brings out with great clarity the imbrications of the local and global and the spatial dimensions of memory and remembering. It is especially impressive to see the way in which archival sources that offer detailed accounts of urban violence have been so effectively mined for the insights they offer on the rhythms and spatialities of violence.

As the authors point out, violence changes perception of urban space and time. While war is raging time seems to speed up as weeks are packed into hours. And local spaces in times of violent conflict become much more densely packed with meaning even as their most trivial material features take on a new importance and urgency: the blind alley, the unlocked door that offers passage to safety, the high rooftops from which observers can survey and dominate the ground below.

This book makes a major contribution to our understandings of urban space and violence and succeeds magnificently in demonstrating the value of spatiotemporality as an analytical tool for understanding violence in cities. It puts us in the debt of editors Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss who have drawn together such a diverse but coherent and illuminating collection of essays.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the Studies for SpatioTemporality Erfurt group for generously financing a workshop on ‘Histories and Rhythms of Urban Violence: Global-local Encounters in the Nexus of Space and Time’ in December 2018, organised by Dr. Mara Albrecht (Erfurt), Dr. Jutta Bakonyi (Durham), Dr. Alke Jenss (Freiburg) and Dr. Kirsti Stuvøy (Akershus) which this volume is based on. For supporting this workshop, we also thank the Forum for the Study of the Global Condition, founded by the universities of Leipzig, Halle-Wittenberg, Jena and Erfurt in Germany. Finally, we thank the Durham Global Security Institute for support for the workshop and bearing the copy-editing costs. We are very grateful for Penny Krumm's thoughtful copy-editing and for Johanna Unewisse's help with the index.

A part of the editing of this volume was conducted during a fellowship of one of the editors at the Humanities Center for Advanced Studies ‘Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations’, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – FOR 2779.

Introduction: Sites of violence, entangled in space and time

Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss

Urban violence

Historically, violence has been a regular feature of cities, sometimes even becoming part of the everyday. Moreover, the physical and socio-spatial making and remaking of cities are often facilitated through violence. However, violence is not something exogenous that enters the city from ‘outside’; cities have their own contradictions and tensions, and thus, urban space intrinsically has a potential for violence (see Pavoni and Tulumello, 2020; Pullan et al., 2013). Violence not only occurs in the city, it is of the city (Fuccaro, 2016). Specific characteristics of cities – such as their population density, heterogeneity and spatial proximity of different groups as well as divisions along social, ethno-national, or religious lines – produce violence. These divisions are mirrored in the urban space and can become ‘urban frontiers’ (Pullan, 2011) at which collective violent actors clash with security forces or with each other. Moreover, different forms of violence can be associated with the urban rather than with the rural context. Riots as a consequence of ‘contentious politics’ (Tilly and Tarrow, 2012), as in the context of Orange parades in Belfast, are one of the most striking examples that occur almost exclusively in larger cities. Moreover, gang violence, collective violence related to ‘hooliganism’ after large sports events and ethno-national or sectarian violence connected to contested or symbolic spaces are specific to the urban environment. It seems that life in cities has its own spatial dynamics and its own temporal rhythms, which enable and generate violence, often in successive waves.

The intrinsic connection between space, time and violence in cities is the main theme of this book. The volume contributes specifically to literature on the significance of time in, and the temporalities of, violence, including historical approaches, in contrast to much existing literature on urban violence, which focuses on a contemporary imaginary of ‘violent cities’ alone. The focus on spatialities of violence is more established in geographical research and urban studies, but frequently less visible in studies on violence. For this volume, it implies attention to spatial and scalar relations, as well as translocal connections. Finally, this book is strongly interdisciplinary. Its approach is not limited to urban geopolitics, urban sociology, the anthropology of violence, or the history of conflicts in cities, but unites these disciplinary perspectives on the space and time of urban violence.

Talking about urban violence means talking about violence that is produced and shaped by urban characteristics and that in turn transforms the urban. Urban, however, is a term that is broadly used yet not well defined (Pavoni and Tulumello, 2020: 49–50). We understand it to mean the physical built environment of a city as well as the symbolic meaning inscribed in the city-space, but also the complex relationships of its inhabitants and their ‘way of life’ or their ‘rhythms of life’. This is a processual understanding of the urban, rather than seeing ‘the city’ simply as the backdrop to or environment of violent practices (see Pavoni and Tulumello, 2020). Additionally, cities have played a crucial role in the histories of empires and in the violent processes of state formation and nation-building (Fuccaro, 2016: 8; Tilly, 2010). This is intimately linked to their frequent presentation as focal points for social, political and cultural developments within a society, for contemporary moves towards the internationalisation of rule, and as centres for economic power. Cities have been understood as hubs of global flows and networks, where modernity’s acceleration and ‘progress’ crystallise most clearly. With their skyscrapers of glass and steel, they epitomise imaginaries of human civilisation and the triumph of technology and capitalism. Conversely, cities are also often seen as the apex of present-day inequality and insecurity (Body-Gendrot, 2012; Davis, 1990; Müller and Feth, 2011), having deprived millions of people of their ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 2016). We agree that parts of cities have frequently become insecure and difficult to navigate, if not outright violent spaces. Insecurity is highly selective, however, and vulnerability to urban violence is significantly higher for those who experience other vulnerabilities as well, along categories of difference such as class, race, gender or belonging to a religious minority group (cf. Alves, 2018; Amar, 2013; Kern and Mullings, 2013; LeBrón, 2020).

Nevertheless, until a few years ago, urban violence was only a minor subject within the field of urban studies and other academic disciplines focused their studies of violence on other objects, in particular the nation-state. While the state per se is undoubtedly a violent actor on many different levels, state-centred accounts often suppress subaltern and alternative forms of resistance and activism that are generated by the city as a ‘social order of parts’ (Fuccaro, 2016: 9). By now, urban violence has become a ubiquitous topic in some disciplines, but remains neglected in others (Koonings and Kruijt, 2007; Moncada, 2015). Few dispute that violence is a pressing problem in modern cities and that it has a significant impact on the security and livelihood of urban dwellers. It is a highly relevant topic as such; in fact, international organisations and observers are increasingly anticipating that conflictual urban relations will shape our future (see Felbab-Brown, 2016). Yet there are more reasons why cities themselves have become prominent in studies on conflict and violence, in conjunction with a lesser focus on nation-states as sites of struggle. Conflict, it seems, has become urbanised – even if we should not neglect the rural–urban continuities of violence, and the rural sites of conflict that we encounter, for instance, when paying attention to contemporary, often highly violent land-grabbing processes with intricate spatial and territorial effects (see Ballvé, 2012; Way, 2021). In any case, much scholarly work has recently aimed at disentangling and analysing the more concrete causes and effects of violence in cities. Attention in conflict studies, geography, history and the sociology of violence has shifted from states to cities (Agnew, 2003), particularly in the attempt to give the everyday practices of ordinary citizens in contexts of violence a more prominent role in analyses, instead of focusing on the macro-structural questions of conflict.

When we talk about violence, we generally consider it as a social practice and a power-based action that purposefully leads to physical injuries of others by individual or collective actors (Popitz, 1986). And while it is the base of institutional power and hence an instrument to create order, it also enables people to bring about political and social change. Violence has a central role in processes of social order formation, (re-)production and transformation. It can also be instrumental for communitarisation and the formation of collective identities. The term ‘violence’ covers a large number of different phenomena and we are well aware of debates around what constitutes violence and what doesn’t, which also changes according to the historical, political and cultural context. The broad definitions of violence that were promoted by prominent scholars in the late twentieth century, particularly ‘structural violence’ (Galtung, 1975), ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1977) and ‘normative violence’ (Butler, 2004) drew attention to serious social problems. In this volume we adopt a definition of violence that primarily refers to social, direct and physical activity, but does not neglect the symbolic and structural dimensions of urban violence in their interconnectedness with space and time (see Penados et al., 2022; Mabin, 2014; Alves, 2018). In this contribution, we concentrate on the forms, modalities and practices of violence utilised by social actors. To this effect, von Trotha (1997: 20–2) suggests applying Geertz’s theoretical-methodical concept of ‘thick description’ to the study of violence to direct attention to how violence is used. We also largely focus on collective and state violence (Tilly, 2003), although we do not exclude the occasional glance towards individual acts of violence within a larger context of collective violence.

As we have already highlighted, violence is something intrinsic to the urban and its spatiotemporal qualities, which enable and shape violence. The messiness of cities, however, does not necessarily result in physical violence. Present-day urbanism may involve selective feelings of fear and insecurity for many, yet privilege for others. This volume mainly focuses on spatiotemporal practices of urban violence, as we believe violence to be a major trigger for spatial and temporal reconfigurations of cities. However, some chapters also look into non-violent forms of protest (e.g. strikes; see the chapters in this volume by Weinhauer and Albrecht) and measures by the state to regulate settlement, movement and security, which are coercive and constitute structural or symbolic violence, but do not always include physical violence (see, for example, the chapters by Kapoor and Jenss). Without doubt, urban space – and time, as we argue – plays a significant role in conflict transformation processes and practices of peaceful coexistence (Megoran and Dalby, 2018). In this regard, Nick Megoran (2011) criticises the lack of engagement with peace in the study of political geography. Nevertheless, we concentrate on (physical) violence here, to highlight its impact on urban space-time transformations, an aspect that has not been researched from an interdisciplinary perspective.

There is no consensus on what constitutes urban violence, and our understanding is a broad one, encompassing different forms of violence: civil wars involving conventional armies and/or irregular combatants, violent insurgencies against the state or colonial powers, riots (including violent political demonstrations, sectarian and ethno-national violence, food riots, etc.), gang violence and other forms of violent organised crime. Moreover, we purposefully include urban representations of violence as a category in this volume, with a particular focus on memories of violence. Although the memory of violence is itself not a violent act, its performance in (contested) urban space and at specific times in accordance with a political and/or religious calendar frequently generates renewed violence, often in forms that have themselves become ritualised over time (Albrecht, 2021). From a spatiotemporal perspective, memories of violence have great potential for the study of urban violence, as they are inscribed in urban space, have a transtemporal (and sometimes also translocal) dimension and are connected to the rhythms of a city.

Violence, space and the city

Since the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences (Bachmann-Medick, 2016: 211–43; Massey, 1991; Massey and Allen, 1994b), various disciplines have produced a growing body of literature on violence from a spatial perspective. While in 2015, Bosi et al. (2015; Ó Dochartaigh, 2015) still saw major deficits in the literature linking space and (political) violence, today, this strand of research has grown decisively, although unevenly. Especially in the field of history, the specific interrelation of violence and the city and the particular characteristics of urban violence only became a topic for historical city studies a few years ago (Weinhauer and Ellerbrock, 2013). In contrast, in geography, violence and spatial theory perspectives have long been at the centre of debate (Gregory, 2006; Springer and LeBillon, 2016).

Different disciplines have approached the topic of violence and its connection with space in successive waves, covering dissimilar areas of focus. Many scholars from the social sciences have focused on violence and insecurity in cities, considering urban space as a mesh of social relations that is not defined by administrative boundaries but rather constitutes a specific context and specific social conditions for urban violence (cf. Bosi et al., 2015). Spatial approaches to (urban) violence constitute much more than simply recognising the unevenness of the distribution of violence. They are also about understanding how the homogeneity of an imagined national territory is an illusion whose destruction becomes most visible only when violent conflict takes place (cf. Ballvé, 2021; Elden, 2013; Ó Dochartaigh, 2015).

Quite concretely (re-)shaping or even fundamentally transforming space, violence can produce urban segregations or create frontiers within the urban as physical and representational divisions of space (Pullan, 2011; Alves, 2018). It can dissect city-space through the building of barriers and reshape urban landscapes in ways that make ordinary inner-city movements a matter of careful, fearful planning and coordination (cf. Colombijn, 2018; Jenss, 2020). Recent literature on violence against gendered bodies goes even further in declaring bodies a territory that is targeted in an everyday war (cf. Gago and Cavallero, 2018). Spatiality in urban violence focuses on the relationality of violence itself, recognising and foregrounding the varied agency of actors involved in acts of physical violence. The patterns of reproduction of violence in areas occupied by specific actors involved in prior violence tell us about the spatiality of unequal social relations and about the potential persistence or recurrent use of abusive and harmful practices in spaces of perpetuated violence (see Laó-Montes and Dávila, 2012; Ó Dochartaigh, 2015; Hobsbawm, 1983).

There is also a significant emerging literature on the idea that cities are simultaneously entangled in dynamics and processes from a sometimes far away ‘elsewhere’ (Robinson, 2016; Ranganathan, 2018), on the wider geographies of violence (Doel, 2017; Springer and LeBillon, 2016), on the role of translocal networks and connections with regard to urban violence (Kaldor and Sassen, 2020; Freitag et al., 2015; Fuccaro, 2016), on local–global tensions (Tsing, 2005), and on the hybridity that emerges when one takes seriously the global condition of the local (Sassen, 2001).

Geopolitics, urban conflict and scale

While cities have always played an important role in war and conflict throughout human history, warfare has become increasingly urbanised and cities have been progressively militarised in recent decades (Graham, 2004; Graham, 2011). This can be seen both in direct relation to violent conflict, and in ways that are more reminiscent of processes of securitisation, disciplining strategies and the so-called war on terror (Alves, 2018; Gregory, 2006). Cities have been more than simply ‘places’ of conflict; violence has strong repercussions for the urban infrastructures and the whole urban fabric of a city, particularly in the spaces of living, through wartime destruction, the drying up of supplies, or the cutting off of one neighbourhood from another (Anderson, 2010; Bauman, 2015; Huffschmid, 2015; Koonings and Kruijt, 2007). Beyond numerous studies on the spatiality of urban violence in conflict, a growing literature of urban geopolitics has turned towards scrutinising actual everyday urban practices in contexts of violence rather than focusing only on militaristic undertakings and the effects of urban warfare as such, promoting an understanding of urban geopolitics that ‘accounts for the postcolonial, ordinary, domestic, embodied and vertical dimensions in order to better comprehend recent global shifts and their urban challenges’ (Rokem et al., 2017: 1). This focus on the domestic, on the micro-practices within long-term contexts of violence, not just during military onslaught, is exemplified in Sara Fregonese’s (2020) work on Beirut. She highlights the renegotiation of geopolitical meanings about sovereignty, territory and the nation-state during close-quarter urban warfare and how these meanings have been re-inscribed in urban space. Fregonese simultaneously connects the everyday to the large-scale geopolitics of war in the Middle East and international diplomacy during the Cold War.

This book includes work on cities in both the so-called Global North and Global South, with several chapters explicitly focusing on everyday life in urban conflicts – an important analytical dimension that will be further explored in the individual case studies. With cities as focal points in geopolitical struggles, global politics and everyday urban practices are thus closely enmeshed with one another (cf. Graham, 2004; Ren, 2022). In particular, collective violent actors in cities are connected to global movements, transnational diasporas and translocal networks. Cities, with their population density and heterogeneity, are an ideal physical and social space for politics that strengthen group identities, allow for recruitment, especially among young males, and drive mobilisation for a cause while at the same time fostering processes of othering and segregation (Kaldor and Sassen, 2020: 7–9). In the individual contributions in this book, we particularly focus on global–local entanglements as well as transregional and translocal perspectives, while also exploring similar spatiotemporal micro-practices of urban violence, but these always connect various scales of action. Our interest in scale stems in part from the particular relationship between the spatiality of violence in cities with broader national, regional and global geopolitical processes – conflict at a larger scale, so to speak – and partly from earlier work on the multi-scalar character of political processes (see Jenss, 2019; Tulumello, 2017b). The city provides a unique research perspective on violence, being situated on the meso-level, but also intricately entangled with global politics and translocal networks on a macro-level, while at the same time allowing for an analysis of practices of violence on the micro-level. Spatially, the city can be regarded at different scales, all of them socially constructed and subject to political instrumentalisation (Massey, 1991: 277). It can be seen as a whole, with its centre and its outskirts, on the level of quarters, of neighbourhoods, of streets, squares, individual buildings, or even just parts of buildings including liminal spaces such as attics, basements, rooftops or backyards that can become strategically important during urban conflicts. Cities may grow not only at the periphery, and urban frontiers may also be found within a city centre (Pullan, 2011). Violence tends to be employed in different forms at different scales, and translocal networks and global dynamics may link it to a faraway ‘elsewhere’. The scales of action of parties in conflict are contested and shift over time; and violence plays a major role in shaping this scalar reach.

Violence and temporality

Although studies on urban violence from a spatial perspective are in the majority, there is also an emerging body of literature that explores the connection between violence and time, with a particular focus on the ways violence possesses its own rhythm. Physical violence is often attributed with a suddenness, captured in naturalising metaphors: like forces of nature, violence seems to ‘erupt’ or to ‘break out’. This is of course misleading, as violence is a social action and can always be attributed to specific individual and collective actors. However, direct violence is an extreme and sudden social and bodily act that injures and destroys with the inherent aim of eliminating or reducing the options for action of the other(s) at that precise moment in time (see also epilogue by Bakonyi). Despite its suddenness for all involved actors, a violent act is never chaotic but follows sequential patterns (Collins, 2009). When applying this insight to the level of the city, collective forms of violence such as riots do not occur suddenly either, but involve a certain level of coordination among the violent actors (Tilly, 2003: 3). This implies a consideration of the timing of violence with regard to the when as well as to the chronological sequence, at least on a minimal level. Furthermore, violence affects and is subject to mobility and movement in (urban) space (Monroe, 2016; Rokem et al., 2018; Villarreal, 2015). Thus, it has a fundamental effect on the temporalities of the everyday. It may trigger accelerations of movement and simultaneously slow down daily rhythms of life, causing immobility or even incarceration (Colombijn, 2018; Jenss, 2020; Lubkeman, 2008). Violence may also appear as a slow process (Kern, 2016; Nixon, 2011; Penados et al., 2022), eventually leading to long-term developments of residential segregation, forced displacements and radical transformations of livelihoods (Auyero et al., 2015).

Violence can be synchronised with the daily, weekly and yearly rhythms of life in a city, being strongly influenced by cycles of day and night, seasonal changes, or even high and low tide in port cities. It can be subject to daily work cycles, triggered by weekly days of prayer when large numbers of people assemble and listen to incendiary sermons, or concentrated on particular dates of the year such as elections, religious holidays or political commemorations. Violence affects and transforms everyday practices (Jenss, 2020; Scheper-Hughes, 1993; Walker, 2010) and can also lead to ruptures of rhythms of daily life. Moreover, it imposes new time regimes on communities in cities – directly, by official and self-imposed curfews, and indirectly, by barriers, boundaries and checkpoints created by armed actors that serve to direct and slow down people’s movement (Madariaga, 2006). However, people usually cope with the enforced new time regimes by normalising and integrating these temporal patterns into their daily routines. They not only learn to navigate a city spatially, but also temporally, by accumulating knowledge of when it is safe to be where.

Another aspect of temporality that is of particular importance for the urban context is memories of violence. These foster social (re-)construction, strengthen community ties and shape the meaning inscribed in places (Makdisi and Silverstein, 2006; Schindel and Colombo, 2014). They are either communicated actively within a society, through commemoration rituals and performative practices, or, especially in the case of trauma, more or less unconsciously in the form of ‘postmemory’ through (family) stories, images and behaviour – including not talking about the past and avoiding specific places (Hirsch, 2012). Public memories of violence are generally politicised and often re-enacted with militaristic elements, such as parades in military formation and with uniforms. They create a spatial and temporal continuity between the violence of the past and of the present and also project it into the future. Processions, parades and other commemoration rituals in public, especially in contested space, are charged with symbolic meaning and potentially trigger renewed violence (Albrecht, 2021; Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016). With their transtemporal dimension – connecting past, present and future – memories of violence can also change the perception of time by contextualising present violence within an imagined or even mythical past or by generating eschatological meaning.

There is a significant body of literature on memories of violence and urban space, especially with regard to deeply divided post-conflict societies. Some studies focus on state-sponsored memorial projects such as museums and memorial centres, which often further reinforce societal rifts (see Baillie, 2012 on Vukovar; Papadakis, 1994 on Nicosia). Others concentrate on alternative grassroot initiatives that challenge official or sectarian narratives and that can be led by different actors including civil society organisations, trade unions or LGBTQ+ movements (see Carabelli, 2018; Carabelli, 2021 on Mostar; Nagle, 2018 on Beirut and Belfast). Other authors in turn tackle memory projects by semi-state or sectarian actors, such as political parties, which promote exclusive narratives of the past through public commemoration rituals and visual memory practices. These include, for example, political posters or graffiti in order to strengthen in-group solidarity and territorial claims to particular areas of a city, often engaging in memory-wars with each other (see Albrecht, 2020; Albrecht and Akar, 2016; Haugbolle, 2012 on Beirut; Rolston, 2003 with regard to political murals in Belfast). Of particular interest are works that study the commemorative landscape of a city, looking at both the top-down interventions and the bottom-up initiatives as they tend to be inscribed on different scales of a city. Elly Harrowell (2015) has studied Osh, Kyrgyzstan, after the ethnic riots of 2010 in this way, juxtaposing the official ideologies concretised in urban space through monuments erected by the municipal government with the non-elite narratives expressed at street-level by the different communities living in the city. She highlights ‘that popular memory can resist the hegemonic discourses of memory’ (Harrowell, 2015: 207) and that memory is always diverse and complex, consisting not of one unitary narrative but of a plethora of memories and sub-narratives.

Many works particularly focus on how youths in urban post-conflict contexts handle (post-)memories of war and violence in their everyday practices while encountering them inscribed in urban space when traversing the city (Larkin, 2010; Mady, 2018). Pilar Riaño-Alcalá (2006), for example, has highlighted in her study on Medellin, Colombia, how youths make sense of past and present violence by shifting between practices of memory and forgetting, thus developing strategies for daily survival in violent neighbourhoods. Azra Hromadžić (2015) elucidates in her study on Mostar how Croat and Bosnian high school students attend school together but remain divided both physically, by a spatial organisation of the school that limits mingling of the student bodies, and mentally, through different curricula that confer contesting interpretations of the past. Youths’ perceptions of violent memories offer insights into how narratives of the past are socially reconstructed and adapted to present circumstances, by following generations who may be born after the violent events but who nevertheless live in city-spaces that function as repositories of past violence.

Other studies concentrate on the interconnectedness of politicised cultural heritage, contested memories and urban space. In the case of Jerusalem, for instance, the recent archaeological excavations of the ‘City of David’ in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan have been turned into a major Israeli national monument and tourist attraction. With the aim of (re)creating an historical landscape in which a very selective and particular version of the past is inscribed (Yas, 2000), the excavations have become a source of violent conflict between the government-supported settler movement and Palestinian inhabitants. Thus, the very recently developed concept of the ‘City of David’ as a ‘hegemonic ideological and territorial project’ (Pullan and Gwiazda, 2009: 36) leads to the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of an entire neighbourhood, which is now connected to a somewhat imaginary distant past and charged with political meaning in the conflict over the status of Jerusalem.

Memory studies discuss the inherent temporal aspect of memories of violence but they seldom analyse them within an explicit urban space-and-time perspective that sufficiently connects both aspects and fully appreciates their transtemporal and often also translocal dimension, such