Our interdisciplinary Urban Studies list examines how the built environment shapes behaviour and how to address complex problems like urban poverty, gentrification, climate change and educational inequality.
Subjects covered include urban planning, urban geography, urban policy, local governance and community-based participation, to offer a broad understanding of how urban dynamics shape both global interdependence and local spaces.
Urban Studies
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This chapter addresses two ongoing government initiatives that form part of the psychological dimensions of urban warfare. One is an effort to mobilize the affective state of vigilance and the second is an effort to counter so-called radicalization. The chapter argues that these recently revamped urban security governance agendas further intervene on the levels of the body, the sensate, and the atmosphere. The chapter also brings questions of subjectivity to the fore, arguing that race, class, and gender are constantly renegotiated under the conditions of who feels in place or out of place in the city. The chapter ends by synthesizing how the discourses, material objects, bodies, and affects come together to shape atmospheric relations, arguing that such affective atmospheres are enrolled by the state to be at the front line of the battle against “the enemy within.”
This chapter considers everyday practices of undermining and undoing geopolitical violence and engaging with building the notion of everyday peace in the city. While Chapters 2 to 4 foreground how the logic of warfare and militarism becomes inscribed into the material, social, and sensorial fabric of the city, this chapter outlines forms of atmospheric labor as performative assembly of atmospheres of mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability. It addresses notions of embodied peace that are mobilized in cities to reshape war atmospherics, arguing that the spaces and practices involved in mitigating geopolitical violence are frequently overlooked and concealed.
“Banal warfare” describes the ways in which the vision of the city perpetually ridden with conflicts, terrorist attacks, and disease infuses everyday urban life to the point of becoming invisible or taken for granted. The book is situated within decolonial urbanism as, to understand the urban geopolitical struggles in western Europe, it employs the conceptual framework developed in relation to cities conventionally considered war cities in the global east and south. In “reversing the gaze” on urban warfare, the focus is on the impact of framing different public emergencies and incidents of violence in Paris and Brussels as acts of war and how this contributes to the normalization of militarism within urban contexts traditionally viewed as “non-war zones.” From lockdowns to states of emergency, the book addresses how this process shapes urban governance agendas, constructs the notion of the “enemy within,” and conditions the everyday affective atmospheres of urban dwellers in Paris and Brussels. These citizens are not presented as passive victims of military urbanism, but as active subjects in the doing and undoing of notions of cities at war. The book highlights the politics of affective atmospheres in an effort to “make feminist sense” of urban warfare, drawing attention to the processes that sustain social inequalities and deepen urban geographies of exclusion while, at the same time, rethinking notions of urban peace.
The concluding chapter highlights key features of the banality of urban warfare, which has become a protracted and durable condition through affective geographies and ways of feeling that accompany everyday life in the city. It further considers these developments as forms of urbicidal geographies and argues that the military logic underscoring notions of permanent threat supports an “us” versus “them” mentality, justifies the use of force and violence, and ultimately deepens social inequalities.
This chapter examines the material landscape through which the city of banal warfare is brought into being. The aim is to localize and ground discourses on urban warfare in the everyday environment, beyond the notions of emergency, exception, and crisis. Besides the more visible enactments of urban warfare, such as the deployment of military and heavily armed police on streets and the presence of military-grade equipment, attention is turned to seemingly more innocuous “flaggings” or reminders of urban threat, from bollards, trash cans, and plants to various advertisements. Moreover, the chapter addresses recent urban redevelopment initiatives that reinstate the notion of the city at war through capital-intensive private market interventions and neoliberal processes of gentrification.
The chapter begins by putting in relation war-torn global urban peripheries with metropolitan centers. It outlines the process of using cities in the Balkans, and throughout the global south, as epistemic sources for reconsidering the way these places are generative of new knowledge and approaches that reformulate our theories, concepts, and methodologies. Starting from this decolonial and relational urban geography, the chapter considers war not as a delimited violent event or a temporal suspension of “peaceful” social norms, but as a condition of life that continues to shape how cities are imagined, how they look, and how they feel. Inspired by feminist approaches, the chapter further specifies the use and usefulness of affective atmospheres as ways of inhabiting space and place that are laden with power.
The chapter traces the legal, political, and dominant media discourses that have shaped the narrative of urban warfare in the cities of Paris and Brussels throughout the 21st century. It focuses on the legal framework of state of emergency and the lockdown measure, implemented as responses to various events identified as a threat to public order in the two cities. The chapter shows the implementation of the military logic of urban governance, wherein a broad range of public emergencies and urban conflicts are treated as an act of war. The discursive framework on warfare plays a pivotal role in influencing public perception, policy decisions, and the very nature of imagining the city.
Chapter 7 presents the conclusions of the book. It highlights that many regulatory problems related to diversity in cities are usually addressed by reference to two main conceptions of toleration: toleration-as-neutrality and toleration-as-recognition. Each conception provides different responses to practical problems that arise in the spatial regulation of diversity. However, both of them, when mobilized to analyse the legal and political geography of pluralism, reveal some shortcomings. Against this background, the chapter proposes a revised version of the neutralist approach, namely ‘variegated inclusive neutralism’. After identifying the characteristics of this approach, the chapter explains that it entails a conception of cities as made up of ‘spatial spheres of toleration’ anchored primarily to different tenure regimes. Each sphere is legitimately characterized by different prerogatives of exclusion – and, thus, by a different degree of toleration. From this perspective, cities can be regarded (not only descriptively, but also from a normative standpoint, that is, with a focus on public policies and rules) as mosaics of complementary spheres; their pluralistic character is not so much the sum of each individual sphere’s degree of pluralism as it is, above all, the result of the harmonious relationship among them within an appropriate ethical and political framework.
Chapter 4 considers the issue of pluralism in private spaces. First, the case of homeowners associations (HOAs) is examined. It is argued that the answer to problems of regulating pluralism in this case should be sought in the light of two basic principles: the first is equality of public treatment between different types of HOAs (co-housing and gated communities, for example); the second is that of limiting public restrictions on the regulatory prerogatives of HOAs, in the belief that public regulation must seek to be indifferent to individual and collective conceptions of the good as long as they do not cause direct and tangible harm to others. The next part of the chapter focuses on shopping malls, where some problems of pluralism may emerge in connection with the restriction of certain behaviours, such as holding political demonstrations. After presenting various interpretations of this question, the chapter argues that certain restrictions on behaviour, although unpalatable to many of us, should be regarded as legitimate in malls. They are in accord with the idea that the pluralist city can be seen as a mosaic of complementary spaces in which functions that are not admitted in one tenure regime are fully enfranchised in another.
Chapter 3 focuses on problems of pluralism in public space. Its reasoning rests on two related tenets. The first is that public space has an ‘intimate nature’ as the place where diversity in its various forms is expressed to the fullest extent. The second is that public regulation must be indifferent to various conceptions of the good and must consequently aim at maximizing the degree of diversity in public space; thus, it must focus only on negative effects on third parties, so that peaceful coexistence and interaction among people with different histories, cultures and identities is made possible. Starting from these premises, the chapter analyses some widespread practices of public space regulation in Western cities: namely, municipal ordinances dealing with issues of order, decorum and safety. Taking the case of Italy as a frame of reference, the chapter argues that these ordinances quite frequently, but unacceptably, criminalize the status of people in a ‘no-property situation’ (such as homeless people and Roma people). More generally, these ordinances are discriminatory and intolerant because they favour, explicitly or implicitly, a substantive conception of the good. They do so in the unacceptable belief that certain lifestyles and preferences are better than others and must therefore also be promoted through spatial regulation.
