The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence - by Mara Albrecht & Alke Jenss (Paperback)

About the Book

This interdisciplinary edited volume studies practices and representations of urban violence from a spatiotemporal perspective. It discusses how the spatial and temporal characteristics of the urban can produce and shape violence, and how practices as well as memories of violence transform spatialities and temporalities of cities.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

'Theoretically ambitious and grounded in an eclectic methodological approach, this volume is an outstanding contribution to the burgeoning field of urban studies and of violence. It brings together very successfully space and time as regimes and practices of city life that have structured the spatial experiences, temporalities, rhythms, and memories of urban violence. Adopting a scalar, multidisciplinary and comparative analysis to 'map' and 'clock' violent cities and societies, the case studies included in the volume reveal the mutually constitutive nature of the space-time axis in different urban settings, today as in the past. This book is an important and innovative read.'
--Nelida Fuccaro, New York University Abu Dhabi. Editor of Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East

About the Author

Mara Albrecht is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Erfurt

Alke Jenss is Senior Researcher and Head of the Cluster Contested Governance at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg