Editorial: Beyond urban violence

Lo s uaderno Q Explorations in Space and Society No. 59 | July 2021 ISSN 1973-9141 www.losquaderno.net Beyond urban violence 59 3 a cura di / dossier coordonné par / edited by Simone Tulumello and Andrea Pavoni Guest artist / artiste présentée / artista ospite Slinkachu Editorial Caterina Nirta Crisis, hope and the new normal Claske Dijkema What is urban about urban violence in France? Violence in marginalised neighbourhoods as body politics Ariel Handel Urban violence. The dialectics of city-making and ruination in settler-colonial settings Francesco Marilungo & Francesco Pasta The continuation of war by other means. Narrations of violence and coercive urbanism in Sur, Diyarbakır Gabriel Feltran Unequal violence. Illicit markets and the relational distribution of lethal force in São Paulo Lorenzo Mauloni Legitimizing violence when the State is untrustworthy: tales from Medellín Lauren Brown & Jeff Rose Slow violence and homelessness. Activating public space and amplifying displacement Marco Alioni Essere (in)appropriate. Rigenerazione delle periferie e forme intrusive di violenza urbana Niccolò Giacchetta & Eunice Castro Seixas Aliens in the space. Violence and interactions between inhabitants and outsiders in a stigmatized neighborhood in the periphery of Lisbon Camillo Boano Beyond violence. Toward a politics of inhabitation TABLE OF CONTENTS Beyond urban violence EDITORIAL Not many topics have received the amount of (academic, cultural, political) attention that urban violence has had. In a way, since 19th century reflections on the nascent urban modernity, the discourse about ‘the city’ has always been one of violence, with remarkable consequences in the way cities are discussed, regulated, planned, policed, and lived. Reflection on what urban violence may actually be, however, has been for the most part lacking. The urban in urban violence has often been used as a mere adjective pointing at the location where a physical event of violence takes place, rather than a process, a space, an atmosphere, which may be violent in the first place. In this sense, going beyond a narrow understanding of urban violence means attending to its relational, material, and temporal complexity. This is what the following contributions do. It is neither by chance, nor because the authors featured here have not been capable of capturing the present, that Covid-19 features scantly in this collection and, in contrast, historical accounts are the most common. The epistemology of urban violence calls for extended temporalities: and while the effects of governmental health policies in terms of state violence are there to see, tracing the complex interrelations of the latter with urban violence writ large requires a distancing that is impossible for the time being. In counterpoint to this realisation, we begin with the one essay by Caterina Nirta that does engage explicitly with the pandemic and its politics. Confronting the framing of the health emergency, Nirta unpacks the political ambiguity played by the notion of hope, whose soothing projections of a post-crisis future risk ‘transforming the exceptionality of a moment of crisis into a prolonged temporality where violence becomes ordinary.’ This reflection calls for rethinking the ways violence is visibilised and labelled as such. Visibilisation is at the core of the essay by Claske Dijkema, who explores how these matters get ‘lost in translation’ as what would be ‘race riots’ on the other side of the Atlantic is framed, by French media, as violences urbaines, thus erasing their racialised breeding ground and political significance. Protesters are seemingly caught in a quandary: normally invisible in the public discourse, they resort to ‘spectacular’ forms of violence in order to be seen, and yet this hyper-visibility ends up being the way they are framed, and thus silenced, as mere vandals. What if urban violence is explored as entangled with the process of planning and construction, rather than ‘senseless’ destruction? Another step beyond urban violence may entail exploring its sedimentation in the infrastructural strata of the city, as a result of historical patterns of urbanisation. This is what the following two essays do, excavating the history of urban conflict and attempted urbicide vis-à-vis the neo-colonial practices of modern-day Israel and Turkey. Ariel Handel shows how the Israeli planning and development in the Occupied Territories unfolds as an ‘inherently urban’ violence, ‘part of the city’s making and unmaking.’ Likewise, describing layer upon layer the long history of violence in Diyarbakır, ‘omnipresent in the material and symbolic dimensions of the urban experience,’ Francesco Marilungo and Francesco Pasta recount the ‘continuation of war by other means’ by the Turkish state and its violent attempt to ‘discipline’ the city through rationalist planning. The contradictory relation between state and violence, especially as regards the legalistic understandings of violence sanctioned by the state, is the concern of the next couple of essays, which bring us to Latin America, the traditional region of choice for research on urban violence. Looking at São Paulo, a city split by ever widening socio-economical fractures and incommensurable ‘regimes of normativity’ that often communicate merely through violence, Gabriel Feltran considers the asymmetric deployment 7 of lethal force by the police in São Paulo to place urban violence within a broader political economy of illegal markets and urban inequalities. Similarly fractured appears Medellin, a city ‘built’ through the violence of land dispossession and socio-economic inequality. Here, Lorenzo Mauloni shows the urban as a fragmented space full of voids, where the State is not understood as that which ensures protection, where vulnerability is outsourced to non-state armed groups, and where violence slowly fill the atmosphere by becoming a normal, chronic state. Likewise, the violence of exclusion, dispossession and invisibilisation produced by practices and rhetorics of urban planning remains for the most part under the urban radar. This is the focus of the following two essays, which look at the politics and policies of public space, and at the fractures and cleavages these produce. Lauren Brown and Jeff Rose mobilise Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ to discuss how the (re-)activation of a park in Salt Lake City, Utah, ultimately displaces and disenfranchises its homeless populations. Similar policies of reactivation, better known as ‘regeneration’, are the focus of Marco Alioni’s text. Set in Brescia, Alioni looks at the political aesthetics of the Italian notion of decoro urbano, reading between the lines of national and local policies, and showing how these produce ‘inappropriate’ bodies and spaces, violently marked by class, racialised and gendered dimensions. When trying to reframe urban violence, it is important to consider the role of the researchers themselves. This do Niccolò Giacchetta and Eunice Castro Seixas in the last ethnographic essay of the collection, based on research in an informal neighbourhood in the outskirts of Lisbon, reflecting on how violence – or the threat of it – can become a way to shape interactions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in stigmatised contexts. The issue comes to a close with Camillo Boano, whose theoretical reflection touches as diverse cities as Beirut (Lebanon) and Civita di Bagnoregio (in Lazio, Italy), while pondering on the possibility of moving beyond the constitutive violence of urban inhabitation, the violence that lies, barely concealed, beneath practices of planning, regeneration, ‘activation’. ‘Beyond’, here, does entail reworking the process from within, challenging the (often violent) process of construction with a creative and resistant process of de-activation. The politics of inhabitation Boano calls for does not oppose, but rather seeks to dwell in the uninhabitable, a destituent move aimed at making room for new forms of collective living, a suggestion that strongly resonates with our new planetary climate. ST & AP1 1 Acknowledgments: Andrea Pavoni’s research is funded by FCT/MCTES under CEEC Individual contract [CEECINST/00066/2018/CP1496/CT0001]. 9 In this essay I would like to reflect on the role hope plays in the framing of a crisis. In particular, I am interested in the way in which hope utilises a moment of crisis and its affects such as vulnerability, uncertainty, loss, to introduce and legitimise low-balling measures that may offer short-term relief or implement desirable change, but, at the same time, sharpen long-standing precarity and disparities of wealth, opportunity, health thus compromising individual and collective engagement with space. Perceptions of what a crisis might be reflect the hopes and fears of specific cultural, geographical, historical and socio-political circumstances, and tautological affirmations of the ideology underpinning the status quo that certain actions and situations represent: chaos, suffering, disorder, and so forth. The framing of urban problems through the concept of crisis is not novel. It roots back in late 50s and 60s race politics of urban downtown America, and later in the 70s with the emergence of neoliberalism as a model or governance which led to various forms of urban austerity (Weaver 2016) reducing local welfare and causing various forms of stratified hardship in cities. In these contested spaces, conflicting interests appropriate the framing of the crisis transforming it into social reality, each battling to put forth their own idea of post-crisis future (Gotham and Greenberg 2014). Intrinsic to a crisis are in fact discursive normative assumptions about what is desirable or undesirable, and how this may be addressed through quick emergency measures designed to mitigate the sense of danger and instability performed by that crisis. Perceived as events that will endanger our common idea of normality, rights, status, responses to crises legitimise specific modes of government and unorthodox approaches to risk assessment, and project empirical realities and possible scenarios that are largely responsible for the production and regulation of specific patterns of action and reaction. These become inscribed in language, space and the body forming new and more or less acceptable regimes of violence, and unveiling intersectional forms of conflict and responses to conflict that impregnate, alter and, in some cases, forever compromise, the urban tissues where they unfold. To examine the conflicts that constitute a crisis, then, it is not so useful to quantify what a crisis is, rather, paraphrasing Spinoza’s materialist approach, we should focus on what a crisis can. In this short piece I argue that the constitution of specific regimes of everyday life utilises hope, framed by crisis, to materially reference our relationship with space in ways that normalise experiences of violence transforming the exceptionality of a moment of crisis into a prolonged temporality where violence becomes ordinary. Whether narrated, projected, or desired, the function of hope is to provide an image of what is believed possible or expected, and to inscribe that image on our enactments, actions, and engagement with our present and future. In other words, a moment of crisis has material implications that go beyond the time and space of that crisis. These could be the result of change of governance, surveillance, new more or less invasive low-enforcing techniques, and have Caterina Nirta Caterina Nirta is a senior lecturer in the department of social sciences at the University of Roehampton, London. Her research interests are in philosophy of time, utopian studies, ethics, gender and sexuality. She is the author of Marginal Bodies, Trans Utopias (Routledge, 2018). [email protected] Crisis, hope and the new normal 17 In France, urban violence is associated with juvenile violence that concerns certain marginalised spaces of the city and certain, specifically racialised, inhabitants.1 In comparison to British and American contexts, the term is used mostly to address anti-institutional violence: what is called violences urbaines in France corresponds to ‘race riots’ on the other side of the Atlantic. The term ‘urban’ violence is problematic for three reasons. First, it is used as a euphemism for a racialised representation of juvenile violence. Second, the seemingly neutral term ‘urban’ underplays the political significance of these forms of violence. Third, the term renders other forms of violence invisible, by symbolically confining violence to certain spaces. This contribution approaches violences urbaines – such as setting objects on fire, in order to provoke police intervention and altercation – as a form of self-defence by subaltern groups. The youth turn the hypervisibilisation of urban violence by mainstream media into a means to publicise their own anger: they choose fire as a means of public address because they refuse to engage in conversation if they are not heard. The riots that took place in Grenoble in 2010 serve as empirical grounding of this argument. In July 2010, important riots broke out in Villeneuve, a marginalised social housing neighbourhood in the southern part of Grenoble. The riots followed a pattern that has become familiar in France, starting with the death of a racialised young man from a marginalised neighbourhood as the result of a police operation. In many cases, such deaths provoke acts of destruction and setting fire to objects, leading to further police intervention. Confrontations generally last for a couple of days but can last longer, as has been the case in 2005, when riots lasted for a month and spread throughout the entire country. In Villeneuve, the riots that broke out in 2010 lasted three nights. What sparked these riots was the death of Karim Boudouda who was tracked by the police after he had robbed a casino with his partner in crime in a wealthy town not far from Grenoble, and shot in Villeneuve, at the foot of the block where his mother lived. Boudouda was hit in the back by a bullet, after he fired at the police. That night a group of about thirty young men went out on the streets to express their anger about his death: burning roughly 75 cars, breaking the glass of the neighbourhood’s tram stops, throwing stones at the police and firemen, and setting fire to street furniture. I analyse the image that has become symbolic of the 2010 riots in Villeneuve as an example of the hypervibilisation of violence (Fig.1), and I use the theoretical input of Haraway’s space of constructed 1 Acknowledgments: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 894389 and has been carried out with the support of Modus Operandi (modop.org). Claske Dijkema Claske Dijkema is Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at swisspeace and carries out research on Urban Peacebuilding. She is in particular interested in the peace-building agency of marginalized civilian actors. During her Ph.D. research at the University of Grenoble she developed a decolonial approach to stigmatised neighbourhoods in France dealing with urban violence. [email protected] What is urban about urban violence in France? Violence in marginalised neighbourhoods as body politics Violence becomes an option in a context where the use of words does not make sense for those who lack access to the channels of verbal expression visibility, of Butler’s analysis of inverted projections, and Dorlin’s input on violent subjects acting out of self-defence to analyse the interaction between speaking through acts of violence, silencing practices and the hypervisibilisation of violence. They help to answer the question what is urban about urban violence. Violence as a means to make public statements If one has the feeling that one is not heard, violence – in this case, setting objects on fire – can become a viable option. While the established may well require that post-colonial immigrants and inhabitants of marginalised neighbourhoods ask for their rights politely, and patiently wait for their demands to be taken into account, eruptions of violence are only to be expected if the established are perceived to be unwilling to listen and refuse to recognize the subaltern as legitimate political adversaries (Dijkema, 2021; Springer, 2011). Violence becomes an option in a context where the use of words does not make sense for those who lack access to the channels of verbal expression. If they cannot make themselves heard, what does lie in their power is the ability to make themselves visible and to do harm. This approach to urban violence breaks with the common interpretation that violence is a sign of anomie, of powerlessness, and/or a desperate act to exist in some way. Since rioters know that their voices will not be heard, most of them do not even try to speak and instead choose silence. A postcolonial reading of riots leads Piettre (2013) to the conclusion that it was not an incapacity to speak, but a refusal of interlocution that characterised the 2005 riots in France. It is because rioters understand that they cannot speak – in the sense of Spivak – that they choose alternative means of communication, they choose to speak in terms of acts rather than words. The urban dimension of ‘urban violence’? This type of violence is ‘urban’ insofar as it uses physical space strategically, to provoke direct confrontations with the police and to make a public statement. The act of setting something on fire has an important performative function, it produces spectacular images that make visible feelings of anger and revolt. Those involved in riots use the hypervisibilisation of violence by the mainstream media to publicize their anger. I consider the burning of cars, tires, garbage bins, and schools as smoke signals. Hence, fire becomes a means of public address. The only space available to publicize their anger is urban public space. It is there that their public address can meet its audience. Cars, street furniture and walls (graffiti statements) were used in July 2010 to express anger about this death. This message targets security forces but addresses a larger audience. The chosen location for the exhibition of flames, a parking lot at the edge of the neighbourhood, should also be taken into account. Three reasons may have played a part in the choice of this location: it was here that Boudouda was shot; a car park is a logical place to burn cars; and the parking area functions as a transition zone between what is considered to be inside and outside of the neighbourhood. A statement made on the border of the neighbourhood is most likely addressed to those outside of it, but from a space that is considered theirs. The political impact of these smoke signals is however limited because rioters have little influence on the interpretations of these events, and these expressions of anger mostly lead to the strengthening of the security discourse and to measures that negatively affect racialised inhabitants of marginalised neighbourhoods. The hypervisibilisation of urban violence in mainstream media simultaneously leads to silencing and to making this publicized anger incomprehensible. 19 Hypervisibilisation of violence The problem for racialised subjects is that they are seen all the time because they are made visible as ‘others’ (e.g. skin colour), but they are not heard. According to Haraway (2004: 12), “vision is always partial and provisional, culturally produced and performed, and it depends on the spaces of constructed visibility that – even as they claim to render the opacities of ‘other spaces’ transparent – are always also spaces of constructed invisibility”. It is specific of racism that “those who are ‘imaged’ or ‘pictured’ (mises en image) are in reality the objects of a ‘design’ (dessin) that has little to do with them in first instance” (Dorlin, 2007: 153). The image of the riots in Villeneuve is such an example. While the image of the rioting youth has come to represent Villeneuve to a certain extent, the neighbourhood’s inhabitants feel it has little to do with them. I consider images that hypervisibilise violence in the neighborhood as means to disqualify acts or statements in public space and therefore as a form of epistemic violence. To make this argument, I draw on Butler’s concept of inverted projections that transform the meaning of voices and acts through racist representations. The empirical case on which Butler (1993) drew to build this conceptual tool of inverted projections is the Rodney King case, in which physical self-defence was interpreted as an act of aggression. Inverted projections focus on the visual rather than the discursive domain of representation, they deal with an image (projection) of an act that comes to represent the reality. In the interpretation of this image by the established, the intentions behind an act (of a marginalized or subaltern person) are not only made inaudible but the intentions of the aggressor and victim are being inverted: the victim becomes the aggressor. The idea of inverted projections helps therefore to understand the way in which racialised bodies in danger come to be seen as sources of danger. The image of riots in Villeneuve is not object of an inverted projection as such because the young man’s hands in the centre of the picture are not raised in self-defence as in the case of Rodney King. The two other men next to him are throwing objects in the direction of the police. Seeing them as aggressors is therefore not only a projection of white paranoia. However, what this image has in common with the footage of the raised hands of Rodney King is that it suffers from the effect of the “frozen frame”, of using an image taken at one moment in time to portray a whole situation. Butler’s observation (ibid: 20) that “the raised hand, is torn from its temporal place in the visual narrative” is applicable here. In this case the image comes to speak for the 2010 riots and Villeneuve as a whole but does not say anything about what happened prior to this moment. In other words, what this image brings into visibility leaves out of visibility other aspects of what happened that evening: Karim Boudouda being shot by the police, his body being left unattended for over six hours, and the much more structural tensions around police conduct in marginalised neighbourhoods. This frozen frame reinforces the representation of urban violence as “senseless” or “barbaric” and has the function of a “bestialisation of the [racialised] crowds”, as did the frozen frame in the Rodney King case (ibid: 21). The decontextualization of this image by the mainstream media was subsequently to be recontextualised by the French President, explaining the riots in 2010 as a problem of immigration and integration. This political treatment of the riots in 2010 meant that twenty people, the estimated number of people who participated in the riots, came to speak for an entire neighbourhood, while other voices were made inaudible. While visibilising violence, media did not capture the alternative and everyday prefigurative politics that inhabitants are engaged in. While urban violence is interpreted by the established as an attack on the Republic, it is interpreted by many in the neighbourhood as an act of defence. The sentiment is widespread in the neighbourhood that the state either abandons the neighbourhood or represents an oppressive force. Dorlin (2017) explains that if the subalterns are not considered worth defending by those in power, physical violence is one of the few tools they have left to defend their dignity. The violence of the subalterns can therefore be reinterpreted as an act of self-defence. In the case of 2010, rioting and entering into violent confrontation with the police should not be seen as an act of individual physical self-defence, but as the defence of their neighbourhood and the defence of their dignity. Conclusion This article analysed urban violence as subaltern violence and focused on the dynamics between speaking through violent acts, being made visible and being made inaudible. I have demonstrated that, at the same time as subalternised rioters are brought into the field of visual representation, they are maneuvered beyond the range of hearing. Subalterns are not mere victims though, they adopt tactics that use the visual attention that is drawn to their physical appearance, such as skin colour, they use this visibility to publicize their anger. I argue that rioters have developed a means of public address adapted to this condition of the subaltern, and to this age of the image and social networks. Media do the work of widely distributing the images produced by angry young people. They use this visibility that media provide to make public statements, to publicise their frustration and anger. References Butler, J. (1993). Endangered/Endangering, in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge): 15–22. Dijkema, C. (2021). Subaltern in France – A decolonial exploration of voice, violence and racism in marginalised social housing neighborhoods in Grenoble (France), Doctoral dissertation (Grenoble: Université Grenoble-Alpes). Dorlin, E. (2007). Décoloniser les structures psychiques du pouvoir. Mouvements 51 (3): 142–51. Dorlin, E. (2017). Se Défendre: Une Philosophie de La Violence (Paris: Zones). Haraway, D.J. (2004). The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge). Piettre, A. (2013). Islam (im)politique et quartiers (im)populaires. Retour critique sur les émeutes de novembre 2005. L’Homme & la société 187-8: 89–129, https://doi.org/10.3917/lhs.187.0089. Springer, S. (2011). Public Space as Emancipation: Meditations on Anarchism, Radical Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence. Antipode 43 (2): 525–62. 21 Israeli radio report in December 2019 referred to no less than seven deliberate fires of public facilities in East Jerusalem that year, including schools, community centers and playgrounds.1 According to the reporter, all the places that were set on fire have been “built by the Jerusalem municipality for the benefit of Palestinian residents of the east of the city.” Maor Tzemach of the right-wing organization Lach Yerushalayim (‘for you, Jerusalem’) added: “The State of Israel has been investing quite a bit of money in recent years, mainly in civilian infrastructure. It is very painful to see the destruction done by Islamic terrorist elements with the encouragement of the Palestinian Authority”. In Jerusalem, as elsewhere, deliberate damage to urban infrastructure is seen as something between mere vandalism and extreme political response, akin to terrorism. From the authorities’ point of view, in both cases, the action is deemed irrational as the infrastructure under attack is believed to benefit the community at stake. Violence against infrastructures is thus seen as something that lies between ingratitude and thoughtlessness, to the extent of self-inflicted masochism. The purpose of this short article will be to rethink urban violence. Contrary to common views, violence is not meaningless. Rather it should be understood as part of the struggle in the city for the city. The aim will be to seriously think the urban in urban violence: not just as an arena where violence occurs or plays out, but rather as a place that is formed and come undone by violence. My emphasis is on urbanity in the context of settler colonialism, though the conclusions would point at the relevance of the proposed analysis to urban frontiers at large. * * * Walter Benjamin (1996, 236) famously declared that “[t]he task of a critique of violence can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice.” Indeed, it seems that most theoreticians of violence study its relation to questions of law, order and legitimacy (de Haan 2009). While seen as an important component in understanding society and its institutions, the common assumption seems to be that violence itself is a straightforward thing: a direct injury to the body, done with the intent to harm, and having an “eruptive” dimension – that is, a clearly visible action, with distinct points of beginning and end as well as clear identification of perpetrator and victim (Reiss and Roth 1994). This approach has two major weaknesses. First, the tendency to focus on questions of legitimacy, law and order reduces violence to a byproduct of legal and social regulations. The outcome is that 1 Acknowledgements. This paper is part of larger research project, Cities Lost and Found: Ruins and Ruination in Israel/Palestine, funded by Gerda Henkel Foundation. I would like to thank Islam Idaes, Roni Dorot, Mori Ram and Daniel Monterescu for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts. Ariel Handel Ariel Handel is director of the Lexicon for Political Theory project, and academic co-director of Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on human mobilities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, ruins and ruination in Israel/Palestine, the politics of housing and urban frontiers, gastropolitics, and the political philosophy of geography. Handel is the editor-in-chief of The Political Lexicon of the Social Protest (2012), and co-editor of Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (2017). [email protected] Urban violence The dialectics of city-making and ruination in settler-colonial settings Similar to the laws of conservation of matter and energy, rather than seeing violence appearances as singular and disconnected, the idea is thus to see their interrelations the more common, more mundane and more inherent to the regular operation of power, violent acts become less visible, gain more legitimacy – and are therefore not perceived at all as violence by most actors. This is the profound meaning of Arendt’s banality of evil, where the way to hell may not be paved with intentions at all. The second problem concerns the assumption that violence is a clear and visible act that involves a person’s decision to harm another. This common view overlooks structural (Galtung 1969) and slow (Nixon 2011) violence, conducted through a network of material and nonmaterial elements, institutions and regimes of management and regulation. Of specific relevance to urban settings is the notion of “infrastructural violence” (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012). Based on the critical impact of infrastructure on socio-political systems, infrastructural violence can take two main forms. The first relates to infrastructures of violent control (such as walls) or inflicting injury and social suffering (e.g., industrial pollution). The second occurs when the infrastructure that connects privileged points neglects and bypasses marginal populations: for example, neighborhoods that are disconnected from running water, sewage, or electricity networks. Discussing Jerusalem’s Light Rail, Hanna Baumann (2018) adds another type of infrastructural violence, one that is derived from forced connection to the network. Under the pretext of urban development and efficient mass transportation, the Rail sets an infrastructural connection between West and East Jerusalem. Thus, instead of seeing it as compensation for decades of neglect and de-development, Baumann reads the new rail as an instrument intended at fortifying the Israeli occupation and normalizing the illegal annexation. * * * While the impact on their victims is no less than that of direct physical violence, structural and infrastructural violence do not receive the same attention. Their lower visibility is due to the built-in failure in the mechanism of legitimacy: that is, precisely because the action is mundane and routine, its legitimacy base is broader. At the same time, the damage inflicted deliberately to urban infrastructures – which is surely less harmful than the structural actions – is deemed as violence, akin to terrorism. Where “top-down” planning-infrastructural violence is not considered violence – and “bottom-up” violence against infrastructures is considered meaningless vandalism or one that undermines attempts to do good for the residents – my suggestion is to rethink urban violence through what we may term the law of conservation of violence. By that, my contention is to point at the elastic and relational nature of violence. Similar to the laws of conservation of matter and energy, rather than seeing violence appearances as singular and disconnected, the idea is thus to see their interrelations, and how cultural, physical, infrastructural, slow and eruptive violences are part of a circle, where the change of form is part of a process and not of discrete rationales. However, the purpose of this essay is not only to describe the circle of relational violence – violence towards symbols of occupation as a response to the violence of the state – but rather to shed light on the role of violence in the city’s making and unmaking. In this context, it is important to note that common political theories tend to see violence as the opposite of the social and the political. Arendt (1970) characterized violence as destroying the common human power to act in concert and argued that it had no power to create anything positive of its own. Foucault (1979) also pointed to the failure of violence to shape the subject on which it is applied. In contrast to the disciplinary power that shapes the subject through indirect actions, violence destroys the core of subjectivity. In other words, violence destroys both the public sphere and the individual subject (Mouffe 2014). 23 Thus, the claim that the city as a social and political entity is not only undone but also done through violence may sound odd. To better understand the argument, we need to consider the interrelationship between the victim of the violence and its perpetrator: a situation in which the harm for the former is the intensification of the latter. Elaine Scarry (1985, 18) argues that in violence there is an “obsessive display of agency that permits one person’s body to be translated into another person’s voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime’s fiction of power.” Scarry’s analysis shows how inflicting pain is unmaking worlds for the victim, while at the very same time enhancing them for the perpetrator through the intensification of power. The nature of violence as making and unmaking worlds remains as we expand our view from physical to structural and infrastructural violence. At this point, I seek to develop the question of urban violence in a specific context: that of settler colonialism. * * * As its name attests, settler colonialism is a specific form of colonialism, in which the “settlers come to stay” (Wolfe 1999, 1). It is not only a project of physical replacement of the colonized by colonizers, however, but rather also an emotional act of home-making and attachment. For Veracini (2013, 28), the settlers’ ultimate goal is to “cease to be defined as such and become ‘natives,’ and their position becomes normalized”. In other words, settler colonialism is a form of violent dwelling, in which making one’s home is based on the denial of the others’ right to have one. Being more than a struggle over resources, settler colonialism is a clash over home and existence. In those antagonistic relations of mutual denial, structural violence appears again as a form of world-making and unmaking, intended at building a city and a home for one group, while revoking them from the other. Denying the colonized tangible and intangible home spreads ruins and loss in their collective life texture, thus directly affecting their right to the city by all means. Disinvestment as infrastructural/planning violence which produces ruins and no man’s land are an integral part of settler colonial urban regimes. Ruination is an act of sovereignty, making violence a form of dwelling (Kotef 2020). For the colonizers, structural urban violence is not only a means for gaining power but rather also an act towards home-making and self-normalization in the colony. For the colonized, on the other hand, violence towards urban infrastructures is not only an act of resistance to the prevailing structural violence but also a positive way of collective world-making. Ruination is thus janus-faced: both a strategy by the settler toward the native that seeks to subjugate and a counterreaction of the colonized undermining the material and symbolic embodimenets of the colonizer. Dwelling is not necessarily violent, but it becomes so in settler colonial contexts. The political slogan Existence is Resistance, therefore, expresses the colonized steadfastness, as existence itself is interpreted as a form of indigeneous violence and contestation. Therefore, the law of the conservation of violence does not refer only to the occupation, control, or deprivation of resources. It also relates to home-making and a sense of place. Damaging a public facility is not only a city-negation (as it hurts the public sphere) but rather also a city-making (as a way of creating attachment and territorialization). As an act of reclaiming the city and either reassure, fix, or bring back what might have been lost and ruined, paradoxically, the city’s unmaking is a way of city-making. Building is destruction and vice versa. Whether it is in Palestinian neighborhoods that are in danger of demolition to establish a Jewish archeological tourism project, such as the al-Bustan neighborhood in Silwan – or whether in neighborhoods like Kufr ‘Aqab, which are within the city’s municipal area but disconnected from the urban fabric by the separation wall, and are therefore in a state of political vacuum, leading to construction References Arendt, H. (1970).On violence. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Baumann, H. (2018). The Violence of Infrastructural Connectivity: Jerusalem’s Light Rail as a Means of Normalisation.Middle East-Topics & Arguments,10, 30-38. Benjamin ,W.(1996).“Critique of violence”. InSelected writings of Walter Benjamin. Volume I, 1913–1926, edited byM.Bullock, andM. W.Jennings, pp.236–252.Harvard University Press Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press. Foucault, M ,(1977)Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Allen Lane. Galtung, J. (1969). “Violence, peace, and peace research”.Journal of peace research,6(3), 167-191. Hann, W. D. (2008). “Violence as an Essentially Contested Concept”. In S.Body-Gendrot and P. Spierenburg (eds.) Violence in Europe. Springer. Kotef, H. (2020).The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine. Duke University Press. Mamdani, M. (2001). “When Does a Settler Become a Native? Citizenship and Identity in a Settler Society.” Pretext 10, no. 1 (July): 63–73. Mouffe, C. (2014).“Democratic politics and conflict: An agonistic approach”. In Lakitsch, M. (Ed.), Political power reconsidered: state power and civic activism between legitimacy and violence.LIT-Verlag, pp.17–29. with enormous density, without planning and engineering supervision, while creating unbearable load on the infrastructure – the cycle of violence conservation not only affects the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized but permeates all layers of the urban life of the colonized population. In East Jerusalem, it is impossible to separate the structural and (un)planning violence from the crowdedness of living and the lack of ontological security resulting from the constant threat of losing one’s home. These are then part of the cycle of internal violence, from parking disputes to domestic violence. * * * To sum up, while (1) planning and development are usually not considered as violence, (2) the destruction of urban infrastructures is seen as senseless vandalism, and (3) everyday inter-communal violence is not considered as political, the article has suggested thinking them together as part of violence’s power to make and unmake worlds. By that, urban violence is not only happening in the city, it is also inherently urban, as part of the city’s making and unmaking. However, the relevance of the suggested analysis goes beyond explicit settler-colonial settings. Home-making (for one) by home destruction (for the other) – not only physical homes but the very sense of home as a place in the world – also characterizes gentrification processes in urban frontiers, where “frontier ideology rationalizes social differentiation and exclusion as natural, inevitable. The poor and working class are all too easily defined as “uncivil” […] As such, the frontier ideology justifies monstrous incivility in the heart of the city” (Smith 1996, 16) Understanding that city-making for the new settlers equals urbicide for the colonized gives sense to urban violence. Ruination is fought with ruination. Rather than an act of boredom or extremism, in the antagonistic relations of a zero-sum game, (colonial) building entails destruction – and (indigenous) destruction is a way of steadfastness. Mahmood Mamdani (2001, 63) explains that the settler can never become a native, as both are relational categories: “Settlers and natives belong together. You cannot have one without the other, for it is the relationship between them that makes one a settler and the other a native. To do away with one, you have to do away with the other." Violence is not a side-effect of the colonial situation (Fanon 1963). It is inherent in its definition and in the very production of the differences between the settler and the native. In a colonial situation, even “normal” planning is predominantly a violent act. Thus, the way out of the cycle of conserving violence must pass through radical decolonization of the city. 25 When on November 28, 2015 the lawyer and human rights activist Tahir Elçi was lying shot on the ground, his lifeless body seemed to illustrate the opening lines of a famous song by Ahmet Kaya, written two decades earlier: “I lie down in the middle of Diyarbakır, shot to death. I’d recognize anywhere the sound of this bullet”.1 His corpse, prone on the basalt stone of the ancient walled town, thus recalled to many Kaya’s lyrics about the violence that had ravaged the city in the ‘80s and ‘90s. As many other local prominent figures of political activism, journalism and culture before him, Elçi was gunned down in the street. The location and timing of his killing anticipated the rampage of violence unleashed on the city’s body in the following months. At that time, amidst heightening tension between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish State, youth armed groups affiliated to the PKK were barricading themselves in the alleys of Sur, Diyarbakır’s historical core, against the pressuring Turkish army. That morning, Elçi had just released a press-conference next to the 16th-century four-legged Minaret, calling for an end to clashes in order to save the city’s architectural heritage. A bullet – which, later investigations concluded, might have come from a police officer’s gun2 – put an end to his life, inaugurating a spell of conflict during which both the population and the architectural heritage suffered long-lasting devastation. Retracing Diyarbakır’s historical evolution and contested representations, here we analyse urban conflict and violence as omnipresent in the material and symbolic dimensions of the urban experience. Diyarbakır. Historical and cultural background Diyarbakır, it could be argued, has historically embodied a space-time of conflict. The stone walls of this fortress city, guarding a disputed borderland over the Tigris, are a threshold between different worlds. Ever since the Assyrian conquest in the 9th Century B.C., up to the recent destruction at the hands of Turkish special security forces, chronicles are replete with ominous accounts of death and sorrow, war and blood. Western travellers in different epochs underlined Diyarbakır’s dim and violent nature, where the sombre black basalt stones seem to naturally evoke mournful atmospheres. The British intellectual and political officer Gertrude Bell, in her notes penned in 1909, recalls a proverb: “Black are the dogs and black are the walls and black are the hearts of black Amid”.3 She imagines a 1 “Diyarbakır ortasında vurulmuş uzanırım. Ben bu kurşun sesini nerde olsa tanırım”, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=I--VbZVy36c&ab_channel=byahmetxan. 2 See Forensic Architecture: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-tahir-elci. 3 Diyarbakır had many names during its history, reflecting the contested nature of this city. The ancient Aramean Amid transposed into the Greek and then Latin Amida. By the Armenians it was known as Dikranagerd. After the Arab conquest, the city’s name was turned into Diyar-i Bekr, later on ottomanized in Diyarbekir. In the early republican effort to turkify the toponymy of the region, the name was transformed according to the Turkish language vowel harmony in the actual Diyarbakır. Currently, many Kurds refer to it as Amed. The continuation of war by other means. Narrations of violence and coercive urbanism in Sur, Diyarbakır Francesco Marilungo & Francesco Pasta Francesco Marilungo holds a PhD in Kurdish Studies (University of Exeter). In his doctoral dissertation he has focused on the literary representations of Diyarbakir in Kurdish and Turkish literature. He is currently a teacher and a free-lance translator of Kurdish literature. Francesco Pasta is currently a PhD student in Urban Planning, Design and Policy (Politecnico di Milano). In his Master thesis, he explored the role of space in the construction of collective identities, focusing on the case of Diyarbakir. Slinkachu’s images are deceptive. At first, we are presented with ‘normal’ urban scenes: a snowy park, a Nelson Mandela statue, an overpass. Then, as we zoom in onto another scale, something utterly different emerges: police beating, murder, poverty, death. Situated at the intersection between sculpture, street art installation and photography, Slinkachu’s work stretches and bends the threshold between the visible and the invisible, normality and surprise, attuning to the violent white noise that often goes unnoticed as urban everyday life unfolds. The ‘universal sense of being overlooked, lost and overwhelmed,’ as he puts it, that these images conjure is appropriate to capture the gaseous quality of urban violence as it slowly wears out urban bodies according to their degree of vulnerability and invisibility. Yet, these quirky images carry no desperation. A quantum of humour 33 emanates from these elusive ‘tiny people’, as well as an ethical call to question the lenses through which we perceive, taking it for granted, the urban. Slinkachu (b. 1979, Devon, UK) has been “abandoning” his miniature people on the streets of cities around the world since 2006. His work embodies elements of street art, sculpture, installation art and photography and has been exhibited in galleries and museums globally. His images have been collected in three best-selling art books; Little People in the City (Boxtree, 2008), Big Bad City (Lebowski, 2010) and Global Model Village (Boxtree, 2012) that have collectively sold over 300,000 copies worldwide. slinkachu.com @slinkachu_official (Instagram) 35 Wellington was 19 years old when he received an offer he couldn’t refuse: one hundred dollars in one day. He was to work all month unloading trucks at a large supermarket for a minimum monthly wage of $200. The offer he received, instead, was risky: he was to steal a new Citroën C4 Pallas and deliver it to a local address. An informal dismantling yard needed an engine of this model for resale; stolen parts allow for affordable sale prices with very high profit rates. Wellington knew that Paulinho had a gun and called him to help. It would be easier to find a new Citroën in a wealthy zone of São Paulo, they chose a neighborhood called Lapa and everything went as planned. The robbery lasted no longer than 45 seconds and no shots were fired. But the police were informed by the victims and immediately notified all their vehicles in the area, which was heavily patrolled. One of them located the Citroën only fifteen minutes after the robbery. Wellington and Paulinho were surprised by a police siren sounding behind them as they tried to flee across the Anhanguera highway, west of the city. Wellington, who was driving, panicked. Instead of stopping, he sped up and took the first available side road in an attempt to escape. A kilometer later, he lost control of the car and the Citroën plunged over the grass cliffs that bordered the road, fell down a six-meter-high ravine and hit the creek at the bottom. Stunned, but having survived the fall, Wellington and Paulinho tried to escape but the police were hot on their trail. Paulinho managed to make his way into some nearby bushes and got safely away, living to tell his tale the next day. Wellington was not so lucky. As he left the Citroën, he was hit by two bullets fired from a .40 automatic pistol. He fell to the ground. I was doing fieldwork in his neighborhood and was told about what happened hours later. I heard Paulinho telling that the policemen photographed the crime scene but only after having placed an old .38 caliber revolver next to Wellington’s body. In the Brazilian police jargon, revolvers planted next to corpses are known as “candles” because they are there to “watch over” the dead man. The official version written up in the police report contained the detail that Wellington had shot at the police car and that the police had fired back. His partner’s version contained the detail that it was him rather than Wellington who was carrying a gun. After the accident the two had merely tried to escape and had not fired any shots at the police. It was not an exceptional case. In the state of São Paulo, police are responsible for one in every five recorded homicides (Bueno et al. 2019). The typical socioeconomic and demographic profile of police victims is the same as Wellington’s: young, black, and male. Indeed, this is the profile of most homicide victims in São Paulo and Brazil in recent decades. All official data and those produced by civil organizations such as the Brazilian Forum for Public Security have shown that more than 90% Gabriel Feltran Gabriel Feltran is Professor in the Department of Sociology, Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil. Researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning. Unequal violence Illicit markets and the relational distribution of lethal force in São Paulo of the victims of these different types of homicides are men; 70 to 75 percent are young people aged between 15 and 29; more than 60% of them are black and about 80% are residents of favelas or poor neighborhoods (IPEA/FBSP 2019). In public debate, it is common for these correlations to be attributed to a single cause: the police killed because he was black or because he was from a favela or because he was a thief. I argue that the search for causality should consider the intersection of these categories in the dominant representation of urban violence, in addition to scrutinizing the specific profiles of police action related to illicit markets. Illicit markets frame urban conflict and must be taken into account. Those who die are mostly low-skilled operators within illegal markets. Young black poor men that are regarded by society as “workers” or “students” are far less likely to be killed than their peers that are regarded as “criminals.” Nor are wealthy thieves killed in Brazil, and the political scandals of recent years have shown that these are not in short supply. Between 2012 and 2016, 60 to 70 percent of homicides committed by police in the municipality of São Paulo were related to vehicle theft and robbery (Godoi et al. 2020; Sou da Paz, 2020). Let us take the two areas in São Paulo where vehicle theft and robbery most commonly occur to analyze the selective ways in which the police deploy lethal force. In the 2010s, the largest absolute number of robberies, and also the largest combined total of robberies and thefts, took place in the district of São Mateus, in the poor eastern side of the city. On the other hand, the highest absolute numbers of vehicle thefts, those that do not involve the use of violence, are concentrated in Lapa, one of the richest districts of the city. I will refer to this richest quartile of the city as “Zone A” and to the poorest as “Zone B.” Vehicle thefts and robberies involve quite different thieves’ profiles in São Paulo. Experienced thieves steal without the use of any violence, which greatly decreases their chances of being arrested or killed. Young, subcontracted thieves like Wellington do not have sufficient resources, technology or contacts to commit thefts. They tend to rob with guns. Bearing in mind the different characteristics of Zones A and B and the level of Sao Paulo’s inequalities, let us see how police use of lethal force varies regularly across urban space, based on an analysis of all 183 Police Reports related to police killings involving stolen vehicles in a single year. Table 1. Vehicle thefts and robberies and police use of lethal force (Zones A and B, 2012). Vehicle thefts Vehicle robberies Deaths following robberies Robberies by death rate Zone A Richest quartile West Zone (Lapa–Vila Leopoldina) 2109 600 7 85.7 Zone B Poorest quartile East Zone (São Mateus–Sapopemba) 1376 2297 13 176.7 Source: The author with technical support of Daniel Hirata and Edgard Fusaro, using data from the São Paulo Public Security Secretariat and from the 2010 IBGE Census. 37 The patterns observed here are regular along many years. The police response to vehicle robberies is relatively two times more lethal in the rich Zone A, while far more people are killed in absolute terms in the poor Zone B. Replete with civil, military, public and private forms of policing, Zone A tends to be considered “totally peaceful” by its residents. Not for the thiefs. Experienced thieves have told me on several occasions that they avoid stealing cars with violence in the wealthiest areas of the city. They don’t know the territory well and they do know that police control is much tighter. They tend, therefore, to carry out thefts without violence in rich areas and robberies in territories close to those where they live. The number of violent robberies is, therefore, much lower in Zone A than in Zone B. This reproduces violence in the peripheries of the city, deepening urban inequalities. This mechanism of selective police response by territory according to population composition gives rise to adaptations in the world of crime. Police reactions to thefts are less violently repressive than they are in response to armed robberies, and these reactions are much harsher in Zone A. Property owners in Zone A enjoy higher levels of protection of their property at the expense of the lives of those who are hired to steal, inhabitants of Zone B. Actually, in Zone A, lethal force is used to send a message and “show who’s in charge,” as one policeman I interviewed put it. “Who’s in charge” here of course triggers the class, racialized and gendered senses of traditional territorial domination. Lethal force is used not only because a vehicle is stolen – the São Paulo police know how to avoid killing when they want to. They do kill, however, when the territorial codes governing urban conflict are violated. In predominantly rich, white areas like Zone A, where much of São Paulo’s wealth is concentrated, the police do not tolerate “invaders,” especially invaders that act violently. Zone A falls under the purview of the State police, who possess a monopoly on legitimate violence there. In liminal areas like Zone B, the police dispute their monopoly on violence with the “world of crime.” It is in poorer and darker parts of the population, and through disputes over the material and social profits from illegal markets, that Wellingtons are recruited for violent crime. Thus, Wellingtons are more likely to kill and be killed. Wellingtons are young, black males and come from a favela. The underlying main reason for the regularity in the profile of homicide victims is the fact that Wellingtons tend to occupy the lowest positions in the illegal markets for drugs, weapons, and vehicle theft (Feltran 2019; 2020; Hirata 2018). This regularity also reveals a lot about the way the police operate in different parts of the city. Contrary to popular belief, deaths committed by the police are not concentrated in the city’s poorest and blackest territories but rather along the boundaries of the urban conflict between rich and poor (Feltran 2021). It is true that young criminals expose their victims to armed violence: murders during robberies account 2-3% of total homicides in Brazil, i.e., about 1,500 murders a year. But their subordinate position within illegal markets exposes the thieves themselves to a much bigger risk of an armed reaction. Wellingtons are victims of 45,000 murders a year in the country. In the city where I was born, this violence is entangled with multidimensional inequalities that make life expectancy in Zone A no less than 23 years longer than in Zone B (Rede Nossa São Paulo 2019). The reproduction of these inequalities does not respond to a simple cause, but to a set of entangled elements that frame our urban conflict. Contrary to popular belief, deaths committed by the police are not concentrated in the city’s poorest and blackest territories but rather along the boundaries of the urban conflict between rich and poor References Bueno, S, Marques, D, Pacheco, D, and Nascimento, T. 2019. “Análise da Letalidade Policial no Brasil.” Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 58–71. Feltran, G. 2019. “(Il)Licit Economies in Brazil: An Ethnographic Perspective.” Journal of Illicit Economies and Development 1 (2): 145–54. ———. 2020. The Entangled City: Crime as Urban Fabric in São Paulo. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Feltran, G. (ed). 2021. Stolen Cars: A Journey through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict. Wiley Blackwell. Godoi, R., Grillo, C., Tonche, J, Mallart, F., Ramachiotti, B., and De Braud, P. 2020. “Letalidade Policial e Respaldo Institucional: Perfil e Processamento Dos Casos de ‘Resistência Seguida de Morte’ Na Cidade de São Paulo.” Revista de Estudios Sociales 73. Hirata, D. V. 2018. Sobreviver Na Adversidade: Mercado e Formas de Vida. São Carlos: EDUFSCar. IPEA/FBSP. 2019. “Atlas Da Violência 2019.” https://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33410& Itemid=432. Rede Nossa São Paulo. 2019. “Mapa Da Desigualdade.” https://www.nossasaopaulo.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Mapa_ Desigualdade_2019_tabelas.pdf. 39 This essay comes from the findings of a fieldwork conducted in Medellín in 20191. It focuses on the structural issues that made violence a constituent element through the urban and social history of the city. In fact, the broken pact between citizens and the State made people arrange other mechanisms in order to sustain their life, and informality and illegality played an important role through the rapid demographic growth that started in the 1950s. These shortages to secure basic-need services in the rising peripheral communities by the local administration, left governance voids that brought the population to arrange also their own structures of security and justice, recurring to violence in desperate cases. Soon enough, these vulnerable citizens confront with non-State armed groups, urban gangs in particular, that offered alternative forms of fidelity and social order, violently imposing their law or legitimizing their presence by providing employment and other State-denied services. The result today is an urbanscape of several juxtaposed laws, where policemen are not considered reliable while those assuring security and justice might be urban gangs, whose position blurs the boundary between trusted authorities and life threats. Building Medellín through violence When “La Violencia” started in Colombia (1948-1958) and the conflict escalated countrywide, people from the inner regions were forced to migrate to major urban agglomerations. Before that, land dispossession and labour exploitation affected part of these populations, as equivocal land titling laws favoured big land owners and colonial settlers to the expenses of peasants and indigenous populations (LeGrand 2016). Although the following agrarian movements claimed their land rights by occupying the stolen lands, the rising violence and the appeal of better wages in cities facilitated rural families’ migrations. In those years, Medellín was facing an important economic crisis and the new-comers settled in the hillsides of the Aburrà valley, where the city takes place. Informal economy and black trades represented the main means of livelihood (Samper 2015). Local authorities attempted to halt the instauration of these settlements, but each time comunas were burnt and torn down, new ones were built, and the increasing migration flow facilitated the spread of new communities throughout the valley. Soon, the criminal market saw an opportunity in fulfilling the need for protection of these informal citizens as the illicit nature of their businesses also required territorial protection from State’s eye. Common bandits and small criminal networks were present since the 60s, working with a low profile and without recurring to an exaggerated use of violence. When cocaine entered the illegal market, 1 The fieldwork took place between July and October 2019. Seventeen non-structured interviews were carried out. For security reasons, some of them were conducted in covert mode (see Calvey 2013). Lorenzo Mauloni Lorenzo Mauloni is a PhD student in Urban and Regional Development at Polytechnic of Turin. His research questions informality through the agency of urban refugees, taking into account the implications of the European regulations addressed to asylumseekers. Earlier, he worked in vulnerable contexts of the Global South, both as a practitioner and as a student. [email protected] Legitimizing violence when the State is untrustworthy Tales from Medellín One of the people I interviewed, a 50-year-old woman, still recalls the moments of that military intervention along with earlier ones, where many civilians were killed in the State’s attempt to eradicate FARC members some of these groups turned into armed forces at the service of criminal entrepreneurs. Other armies came directly from marginalized contexts, such as the case of the galladas, youthful street aggregations not born with criminal means but trying to counter socio-economic exclusion (Melguizo & Cronshaw 2001). Peripheral and informal neighbourhoods transformed into protected narco-traffic hubs, where the underworld provided not only sources of income, but also offered more attractive life alternatives both economically and socially. In some cases, armed groups achieved trust from locals building housing and providing other public facilities, at times turning into political referee such as the case seen with Pablo Escobar. Other times these armed groups violently conquered a district, usually by overthrowing the previous ruling groups. Once exclusive holders of coercion, these armed actors could decide to apply strong repressive measures toward the community, especially when tensions among groups were high, or to limit violence in order not to lose people’s consensus. In any case, non-State armed groups became the new uncontested law, and death became the ultimate punishment for dissidents. The position of State forces and institutions was ambiguous during those years. On one side, they lost territorial control in large portions of the city to the point they were not allowed to enter certain areas. On the other, the growth of the narco-traffic industry turned into an instrument enabling political corruption, and that complicated the war against narco-traffic supported by the US (Samper 2015). However, after the fall of the Medellín cartel in 1993, an internal war started within the underworld, while the State directed its attacks toward the guerrilla cells, once they entered the city. Tactical alliances with other non-State armed groups, paramilitaries in this case, allowed the State to eradicate the leftist threat at the cost of civil losses: military attacks took place in the midst of informal environments and innocent citizens were killed during the operations. After 2002, conflicts and violence levels have drastically decreased, but the underworld is still having a diffused impact in Medellín in different ways (see Mauloni 2019). Spatial sovereignties here are shared (Agnew 2009) and fluid (Armao 2013), as gangs’ conflicts are still active and turf geographies constantly changing. State and citizens: a broken pact Even before La Violencia, State hardly became reliable to the eyes of the marginalized population, as it failed in protecting peasants’ rights in the countryside, and turned later into a repressive actor exerting violence toward second-class citizens (McIlwaine & Moser 2001). As in other cases in Latin America, the rule of law was seen as an instrument to preserve the privileges of the wealthier class while, for the oppressed, its enforcement symbolized an authoritarian tool that turned State forces into enemies (Pinheiro 1996). Several disappointments led people to delegitimize public force and institutions, and they took security and justice in their own hands, legitimizing the use of violence and justifying, in exceptional cases, their derecho de matar (right to kill). This situation facilitated the rise of non-State armed actors (urban gangs or drug lords) that offered protection and were also able to provide for other basic services denied by the State such as housing, energy and employment. As this world of crime presented itself as alternative, “the boundary marking what could be considered as socially legitimate was redefined” (Feltran 2020) and local population gave their trust and respect for these organizations. Authors refer to chronic violence (Pearce 2007, Muggah 2012, Davis 2012) when describing these particular settings, where growing extreme social inequality and disjunctive democratization, the rise of organized crime and illicit trade and the enduring legacies of armed conflict and historic state 41 society, lead people to “look for protection in smaller, more reliable in-groups” (Adams 2012). In urban environments, the result is “a fragmented, ambivalent and hybrid cityscape with varying manifestations of the complex of poverty, exclusion, coercion violence and fear” (Koonings & Kruijt 2007), where the State has not only lost its monopoly over the provision of security, but also its power and authority (Davis 2009, Armao 2013). The normalization of violence is one of the consequences in these situations, and an example presented itself during a field interview in the district called Padro Centro. Loud screams were coming from the street as a thief had been found in the midst of his coupe when the pedestrians started calling for the attention of the neighbourhood to stop the man. On his side, the ladrón (thief), stuck in the house he was robbing, was faced with two choices: risk his life knowing he would have probably been beaten if someone caught him, or wait for the police to come and pick him up. In the meantime, fifty people had gathered in front of the house: That is normal here (referring to Medellín), not really usual in this barrio but frequent in other areas. Here no one trusts the police and knows that justice will not be made. […] If someone attacks you, do not shout for help but scream ladrón. No one likes to meddle in other people’s problems but the community is united against some things. (Student, 22 years old, commenting the mentioned scene). Although this episode of violence does not reflect the everyday of Medellín, nor a widespread behaviour of its citizens, it underlines the lack of trust between citizens and public authorities that automatically rely on other mechanisms to assure justice. Security and justice in the midst of controlled environment Especially in the early 2000s, several initiatives promoted by the local public administration tried to repair the State’s lacks by aiming to redefine its role and its duties as a service provider. For example, the improvement brought by the Metrocable2 and the Urbanismo Social3 facilitated the mobility of the remote communities with the broader city and furnished public spaces and services to build a sense of citizenship and a feeling of belonging in a larger community. However, people from the comunas still feel ambivalent towards public institutions due to its multi-faceted nature shown during the years. That is the case of Comuna 13, where Operación Orion took place in 2002. One of the people I interviewed, a 50-year-old woman, still recalls the moments of that military intervention along with earlier ones, where many civilians were killed in the State’s attempt to eradicate FARC members. According to her, the municipality has not formally apologized for these as well as other crimes, of which pain is still vivid in the citizens’ memory. The presence of non-State armed groups, on the other side, also posed a challenge for the life of the community. Since the very first moment “they came”, several agencies of violence ruled over the neighbourhood, whose repression and degree of violence changed accordingly (Rozema 2008). People became used to the presence of non-State armed groups and, although they were not accepted as leaders for many, it is through them that security is still guaranteed today. Around the Graffiti Tour4, for example, locals were allowed to have businesses only if under the payment of vacunas (tax): “As long as you follow the rules, nothing happens to you” otherwise “you know what happens.” The same interviewee also admitted she felt safe knowing someone was watching over her, because her belief was that in any case the police would do nothing. 2 Gondola lift system developed across the valley and reaching the most remote communities. 3 An historical moment for Medellín started in 2004 characterized by strong infrastructural interventions in marginalized neighbourhood aiming to tackle both poverty and violence. 4 The Graffiti Tour is a tourist attraction built along a series of art-works. It represents an important source of income for locals that arranged a tailored tourist infrastructure through the path. and cumulative. Slow violence urges an examination of the past to reveal the systems of inequality in contemporary life, creating links between structural and everyday forms of violence. This rethinking of violence challenges conventional assumptions and perceptions of violence as highly visible acts that are “newsworthy” because they are event focused, time bound, and body bound. Slow violence, on the other hand, results in episodic and ongoing “temporal, geographical, and rhetorical displacement” events that are often hidden, and do not seem to demand ethical response or reflection. Linking to the politics of narrative and memory, articulating slow violence is a “pushing back against the forces of temporal inattention that exacerbate injustices of class, gender, race, and religion” (Nixon, 2011, p. 16). The slow violence present in experiences of homelessness is complex and relational, rooted in the historical dispossessions of colonization and the commodification of land, and carried forward through racism, ongoing neoliberal welfare reforms, and legislation that privileges profit for the few over basic rights to shelter for the many. For instance, the legacies of racism via private property manifest in current homelessness and housing insecurity, as private housing sectors are deeply linked to perpetuating racialized poverty and displacement (Lipsitz, 2007; Shapiro, 2017; Taylor, 2019). Data on the demographics of homelessness demonstrate that housing insecurity is experienced differentially along lines of race, class, gender, and other categories of difference. BIMPOC, LGBTQ+, and people living with disabilities endure ongoing systemic disadvantages in accessing housing, leading to disproportionate rates of housing insecurity and homelessness among these populations. These groups are also targets of discriminatory policing practices (Herring, Yarbrough, and Alatorre, 2020), highlighting the compounded burdens of housing precarity, race, gender, and disability (Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Gilmore, 2007). Structural and systemic policy choices have led to an exclusionary and exploitative housing system that dispossesses those who cannot pay, creating increased housing precarity and entrenched, multigenerational inequality. To live without stable housing is to then be exposed to endless forms of violence present in exclusionary, punitive, and dehumanizing anti-homeless ordinances imposed and erratically enforced in public space. These everyday violences of homelessness manifest in slow and insidious ways through insecurities, uncertainties, and the generational burden of poverty. The layered and intersecting forms of slow violence are subsequently entangled with brute force violence, as seen in racial and geographical targeting by police, and the over-exposure of people without housing to violent acts. Activated parks have become key sites in the enactment of urban slow violence through the regulation and displacement of those facing homelessness. Activating parks and public space is a widely touted technique used by urban planners to encourage particular types of people, activities, and commerce in parks, plazas, and city streets. Activation inherently assumes an inert, inactive space that needs to be changed, fixed, and populated by “new and better publics” (Staeheli, 2010, 72). Activation presupposes the people and the uses of the space that will be discouraged as well, effectively invisibilizing and/or displacing unwanted populations. For those facing homelessness, their invisibilization takes place through the shaping of the normative and aesthetic perception of the urban. The slow violence associated with park activation practices highlights one of the less obvious dimensions of the creeping violence associated with urbanization and, more broadly, the production of public space. Regulation and enforcement mechanisms exacerbate and normalize existing racialized, gendered, and classed inequities, resulting in both the criminalization and invisibilization of people experiencing homelessness. 49 Activating Pioneer Park The relatively recent “activation” of Pioneer Park elides a longer and more complex history of the site, one that demonstrates that slow violence through dispossession has been de rigueur for centuries. Common themes include powerful actors deciding who gets to be there, who the desired ‘public’ is, who controls the site, and who doesn’t. People without housing have lived at Pioneer Park off and on ever since the initial dispossession of land in this area from the Ute, Shoshone, Goshute, and Paiute tribes when Mormon colonizers first arrived. Pioneer Park was a main site in this dispossession. The first colonizers started building a fort on the site a week after arriving in July of 1847. Over two years, this settlement expanded from its original ten acres to over 40 acres, making Pioneer Park the first large scale colonialist settlement in the Great Basin (Westwood, 2020). After land was appropriated from Indigenous populations and commodified throughout the West, who was allowed access to land and property became deeply implicated in racial inequalities. Numerous laws and practices reserved land ownership for white settlers, while racist practices of segregation, redlining, urban renewal, discriminatory housing policies, lending practices, and gentrification further dispossessed indigenous peoples and communities of color. As Pioneer Park and the surrounding neighborhood evolved from an extended settler fort to a transportation and industrial hub in the late 19th and early 20th century, immigrants arrived to access jobs, boarding houses, and aid organizations. Due to discriminatory lending practices, along with overt racism and city ordinances, African Americans and people of color congregated in the neighborhood. Pioneer Park became a site of exclusion, imposing Jim Crow-era segregation restrictions on park amenities, like, for example, disallowing African Americans in the park’s wading pools (Westwood, 2020). Plans for the “activation” of Pioneer Park have resurfaced regularly since 1960, often accompanied by urban renewal plans. Large development projects like the Gateway Mall and nearby sports arena cleared many of the city blocks that once contained housing for the city’s low income and immigrant populations (Westwood, 2020). Homeless services were introduced in the area in the 1970s. By the late 1980s, a soup kitchen, free health clinic, and the state’s largest homeless shelter were operating within a few blocks of Pioneer Park. This co-locating of social services and intense gentrification and development made for a turbulent mix of competing forces. In this case, developers recognized that visible homelessness was incompatible with their vision for the urban landscape, and subsequently leveraged the logics of “activation” to accelerate further displacement of people and the accompanying services and resources they need. The contemporary plan for park activation originated from the Pioneer Park Coalition (PPC) in 2015. The PPC is a local organization led by business interests and developers in downtown Salt Lake City that aggressively and successfully campaigned to close the nearby homeless shelter. This push to remove the shelter came shortly after an Arizona-based company bought the mall adjacent to the shelter, and announced plans to invest up to $100 million in its redevelopment (Lee, 2018). In 2016, the Salt Lake City Mayor and City Council passed a joint resolution to close the shelter and the county released a plan for new “resource centers,” scattered throughout the county. The new resource centers are smaller and segregated by gender, with the men’s shelter located in a neighboring city adjacent to the County Jail and Sheriff’s Office. The downtown shelter was immediately demolished when the new shelters opened in the winter of 2019, resulting in a net loss of hundreds of shelter beds. Slow violence urges an examination of the past to reveal the systems of inequality in contemporary life, creating links between structural and everyday forms of violence Increased homeless displacement efforts continue, as high-end apartments are constructed on the demolished shelter site and Pioneer Park itself is increasingly regulated, surveilled, patrolled, and sanitized. Through this most recent activation process, Pioneer Park became a conspicuous site of exclusion and criminalization of people experiencing homelessness, with repressive police responses both targeting and invisibilizing the houseless communities using the area (Amster, 2008; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008). The PPC credits themselves with inspiring a large “cleanup” operation of the area near Pioneer Park in 2017 called Operation Rio Grande. Citing an increase in violent crime, the police made more than 5,000 arrests, most of them for misdemeanors or active warrants (ACLU Utah, 2018). These arrests targeted conduct that inevitably accompanies the absence of adequate shelter or services – “crimes of poverty” – like sitting, sleeping, sharing food in public, asking for money, and conducting basic biological functions. Additional exclusionary tactics in the management of Pioneer Park include “defensive” architecture and securitization infrastructure. In 2018, a $1 million investment led to the removal of the park’s bathrooms and 50 trees to create a brightly lit grass field surrounded by a concrete path at the southern end of the park. Salt Lake City also initiated a Downtown Ambassadors Program and Park Ranger program, expanding uniformed patrols in and near Pioneer Park with an expressed focus on homeless populations. Not only did the most recent park activation not address the needs of the communities historically located there, but it removed basic resources and forcibly displaced them, escalating slow violence for impoverished communities through selective investment in policing and securitization infrastructure. The specific tactics and outcomes in Pioneer Park are aligned with larger fiscal and social policies. Funding for affordable housing decreased while the state, city, and county invested millions in policing and decentralizing shelters.1 Framing a socio-structural problem of a lack of housing and inadequate social services instead as a law enforcement problem amplifies the slow violence of homelessness. The everyday violences caused by this policy choice build slowly and seemingly imperceptibly, adding layers of insecurity and instability, manifested by trespassing tickets for sleeping outside, an unattended court date, or an arrest for a warrant leading to further difficulty maintaining access to community and housing resources. These forms of slow violence often lead to more direct forms of state violence (by police, by health departments, or otherwise) over time (e.g., Bloch and Meyer, 2019), and are unevenly experienced across lines of race, indigeneity, sexual orientation, and other categories of difference. These slow violence processes effectively funnel people without housing into jails, shelters, or services based on their perceived criminality (Speer, 2018). Giroux (2006) calls these processes the “new biopolitics of disposability,” where the poor, especially people of color, “not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life’s tragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society” (p. 174). Urban violence slowly continues Slow violence manifests over time and through certain tactics. In the case of Pioneer Park, intentional displacement, selective disinvestment and reinvestment, stigmatization, and criminalization all amplify the slow violence of homelessness. Slow violence has a dimension of invisibility due to its 1 The cost of Operation Rio Grande was $67 million (Smart, 2018). The cost of building the new resource centers was $63 million (SL Tribune Editorial Board, 2020). In 2018, the state legislature established a commission to look into housing affordability, but failed to pass a $100 million bond to build new housing. In 2019, they again failed to pass a bond for affordable housing, and in 2020, they provided $10 million, most of which goes into a city-run loan fund that benefits landlords and developers. Utah is estimated to have a roughly 50,000-unit housing shortage of all kinds, from single-family homes to apartments, according to recent estimates by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. In 2021, this shortage was finally acknowledged with a one-time infusion of $35 million to build and preserve affordable housing. 51 References ACLU Utah (2018). The cost of operation Rio Grande. ACLU Utah website. Accessed March 6, 2021 from https://www.acluutah.org/resources/ articles-position-papers/item/1482-the-cost-of-operation-rio-grande Amster, R. (2008). Lost in space: The criminalization, globalization, and urban ecology of homelessness. LFB Scholarly Publishing. Beckett, K., Herbert, S. (2010). Penal boundaries: banishment and the expansion of punishment. Law Soc. Inquiry, 35(1), 1–38. Bloch, S., Meyer, D. (2019). Implicit revanchism: Gang injunctions and the security politics of white liberalism. Environment and Planning D, 37(6), 1100-1118. Camp, J., and Heatherton, C. (eds.) (2016). Policing the planet: Why the policing crisis led to Black Lives Matter. Verso. Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Broadway Books. Gilmore, R.W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press. Giroux, H.A. (2006). Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability. College Literature, 33(3), 171-196. Herring, C., Yarbrough, D., Alatorre, L.M. (2020). Pervasive penality: How the criminalization of poverty perpetuates homelessness. Social Problems, 67(1), 1-19 Lee, J. (2018). The Gateway is getting a $100 million makeover. Here’s what’s in store for the 1.4 million square food Salt Lake property. Deseret News (November 1, 2018). Accessed April 6, 2019 from https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900039980/the-reinventionof-the-gateway.html. Lipsitz, G. (2007). The racialization of space and the spatialization of race. Landscape Journal, 26(1), 10-23. Mitchell, D. (2003). The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. Guilford Press. Mitchell, D. (2020). Mean streets: Homelessness, public space, and the limits of capital. University of Georgia Press. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press. SL Tribune Editorial Board (2020). State still blind to the real cost of homeless services. Salt Lake Tribune (March 7, 2020) Accessed July 17, 2020 from https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/editorial/2020/03/07/tribune-editorial-state/ Shapiro, T. (2017). Toxic Inequality: How America’s wealth gap destroys mobility, deepens the racial divide, & threatens our future. Basic books. Smart, C. (2018). Utah’s Operation Rio Grande costs $300,000 a month in overtime pay for cops. Salt Lake Tribune (February 24, 2018) Accessed July 17, 2020 from https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/02/24/utahs-operation-rio-grande-costs-300000-a-month-inovertime-pay-for-cops Speer, J. (2016). The right to infrastructure: A struggle for sanitation in Fresno, California homeless encampments. Urban Geography, 37(7), 1049-1069. Speer, J. (2018). The rise of the tent ward: Homeless camps in the era of mass incarceration. Political Geography, 62, 160-169. Staeheli, L.A., Mitchell, D. (2008). The People’s Property. Routledge. Staeheli, L.A. (2010). Political geography: Democracy and the disorderly public. Progress in Human Geography, 34(1): 67–78. Taylor, K.Y. (2019). Race for profit. UNC Press. Westwood, B (2020). Salt Lake West Side Stories. Pre-European Settlement, Crossroads, and the Idea of Home and Twentieth-Century Changes to Salt Lake City’s Original West Side. Utah Department of Heritage & Arts. complex scales and temporalities. As seen in Pioneer Park, the slow violence of park activation is not only rendered invisible, park activation directly invisibilizes homelessness by shaping aesthetic and experiential expectations of the urban landscape so that these violences go unnoticed over time. One consequence of these tactics is that their promoted rhetoric becomes socially and politically acceptable, further normalizing the stigmatization and subsequent displacement and harassment of impoverished populations. Because these processes are less visceral, visible, and dramatic for most housed people, they have the effect of depoliticizing and making invisible the social problem of homelessness. For people without housing, their bodies, their spaces, and their lives are the biopolitical terrain upon which these tactics of slow violence are enacted. 53 Tra il 2015 e il 2016 il Consiglio dei Ministri ha strutturato due programmi nazionali di rigenerazione urbana, il Bando Aree Degradate1 e il Bando Periferie2. I progetti presentati da Comuni e Città Metropolitane sono stati finanziati secondo classifiche appositamente stilate. Il fine di questo articolo è quello di mostrare come forme di violenza urbana ‘intrusive’ siano comprensibili come conseguenze dei processi rigenerativi innescati da questi bandi, in particolare delle applicazioni locali delle loro direttive. È quindi necessario descrivere come i bandi definiscono l’(in)appropriatezza urbana, traendo esempi concreti dai processi avviati dai progetti vincitori. Il caso proposto è stato osservato in ‘Oltre la Strada’ (OLS), il piano rigenerativo di via Milano e dei quartieri circostanti proposto dal Comune di Brescia3. La prima sezione esamina la definizione dell’(in)appropriatezza urbana in riferimento alle periferie degradate, tenendo presente che la valutazione dei progetti si basava su indicatori statistici che stabilivano il livello di degrado delle aree proposte per gli interventi (Mazzamuto, 2016; Saccomanni, 2016; Mazza, 2017). La seconda sezione presenta un caso concreto di queste dinamiche riferito a OLS. L’esempio proposto presenta delle forme intrusive di violenza urbana scaturite dalla rappresentazione di via Milano come un quartiere a luci rosse, una delle narrative che ha permesso al Comune di presentare al governo il progetto di rigenerazione dell’area. Degrado/decoro e periferie: producendo l’(in)appropriatezza urbana Nei bandi, la presenza di degrado e la mancanza di decoro diventano gli elementi caratterizzanti le periferie degradate: attraverso questo nuovo paradigma della marginalità, quella di periferia diventa una categoria giuridica svincolata dalla dimensione geografica (Saccomanni, 2016; Fava, 2010; Mazza, 2017). Gli indici statistici dei bandi mirano a definire lo stato di degrado di un’area a livello urbanistico e sociale; i parametri sono da considerarsi significativi in comparazione ai valori medi del censimento 2011. Oltre ai dati essenziali (deperimento degli edifici, tassi di occupazione e disoccupazione, scolarizzazione, concentrazione giovanile), ai Comuni veniva richiesto di presentare rapporti sulle aree proposte per testimoniare il loro ‘stato di degrado’, includendo tassi di criminalità, violenza domestica e abusi sessuali, abbandono scolastico, immigrazione irregolare – accompagnati 1 DPCM 15/10/2015 – “Interventi per la riqualificazione sociale e culturale delle aree urbane degradate” – G.U. 249 del 26/10/2015. 2 DPCM 25/05/2016 – attuazione del “Programma straordinario di intervento per la riqualificazione urbana e la sicurezza delle periferie delle Città metropolitane e dei comuni capoluogo di provincia” istituito dalla Legge di Stabilità 2016 (L. 208/2015) – G.U. 127 del 01/06/2016 3 https://www.comune.brescia.it/servizi/urbancenter/oltrelastrada/Pagine/UC_AT_080-Introduzione-al-progetto-Oltrela-Strada.aspx Marco Alioni Marco Alioni è attualmente un dottorando in Urban and Regional Development presso il Politecnico di Torino. Negli ultimi anni è stato coinvolto in diverse attività di ricerca presso la Rutgers University, l’Università di Amsterdam (UvA), e l’Università degli studi di Padova. Questo articolo è tratto da una ricerca etnografica condotta nel 2018, supervisionata dalla dott. ssa Adeola Enigboka (UvA), e dalla dott.ssa Olga Sezneva (UvA). [email protected] Essere (in)appropriate Rigenerazione delle periferie e forme intrusive di violenza urbana La rigenerazione prende la forma di un intervento punitivo contro le periferie nel loro essere costruiti come precisi universi sociali e spaziali da analisi delle potenzialità di sviluppo e del posizionamento strategico delle aree in questione. Gli obiettivi degli interventi devono essere legati al riportare le periferie a livelli di decoro, dignità espressiva e resilienza accettabili, promuovendo forme di sviluppo urbano senza ulteriore consumo di suolo. Seppur indirettamente, i bandi aprono la strada per rappresentare in maniera stigmatizzante le interconnessioni di queste condizioni. In OLS, il deperimento degli edifici viene fortemente legato alle strategie dell’abitare delle comunità migranti, coinvolte in circoli viziosi di precarietà legale e speculazione immobiliare nel quartiere. La sicurezza delle donne negli spazi pubblici del quartiere è discussa in termini razzializzati, in quanto la presenza di uomini nonbianchi è posta in antitesi a quella di donne bianche, come si vede in questa immagine che ritrae il prima/ dopo la rigenerazione secondo un noto quotidiano locale (Fig.1)4. Il principale effetto di questi discorsi è la costruzione dell’(in)appropriatezza urbana. Questo termine separa le forme in-accettabili che le aree urbane possono assumere nella transizione dal sistema socioeconomico industriale a quello post-industriale. Questa transizione implica profonde trasformazioni spaziali e sociali dei sistemi urbani. I bandi e le loro applicazioni locali si fondano sul presupposto che la rigenerazione possa rendere le città in grado di rispondere alle esigenze del sistema socioeconomico contemporaneo (Saccomanni, 2016). La definizione di (in)appropriatezza si articola attraverso due definizioni della città, una giuridica ed una storica, che si rinforzano e legittimano a vicenda. I bandi distinguono le aree che possono considerarsi periferie degradate da quelle che mantengono livelli decorosi di appropriatezza – cioè gli standard di civiltà da raggiungere per essere pienamente ‘urbane’ e ‘civili’ (Piano, 2014). Nel caso di OLS, via Milano diventa una periferia degradata per la presenza di siti industriali abbandonati, per l’inquinamento causato dall’ex stabilimento Caffaro, per il pesante traffico di automobili e camion, per la fatiscenza degli edifici, ma anche per la presenza di comunità migranti, della prostituzione o dello spaccio, e per i senzatetto che trovano rifugio negli stabilimenti diroccati. L’intreccio di queste situazioni impedirebbe a via Milano di costituirsi come un vero quartiere, rendendo di fatto necessaria la rigenerazione per restituire dignità storica e funzioni spaziali a questa periferia abbandonata. In questi discorsi emerge la prima dimensione dell’(in) appropriatezza: i bandi sono un potente strumento giuridico orientante lo sviluppo urbano italiano, basato sull’identificazione di aree considerate come ‘degradate’ e ‘distaccate’. Essi trasformano gli approcci di sviluppo urbano in forme istituzionali di stigmatizzazione (Wacquant, 2014), dirette verso la trasformazione spaziale di queste aree urbane per accogliere popolazioni più appropriate a vivere nella città contemporanea. Le “classi pericolose del proletariato post-industriale” (Campesi, 2003) e i loro spazi periferici devono essere allontanate e sostituite da nuovi tipi di città e comunità. La rigenerazione prende la forma di un intervento punitivo contro le periferie nel loro essere costruiti come precisi universi sociali e spaziali (Fava, 2010), atto a riottenere il controllo di aree rappresentate come sottratte alle città da parte di popolazioni inappropriate. Queste definizioni giuridiche e le costruzioni dello sviluppo storico delle periferie nei bandi e nei progetti locali si legittimano vicendevolmente. Nel caso di OLS, mentre la zona è rappresentata come il cuore industriale della città lungo il Novecento, negli ultimi decenni è divenuta un mero vuoto urbano, un quartiere sospeso e distaccato dalla città senza più funzioni urbane precise. La storia del quartiere viene però raccontata in modo consensuale, secondo una visione che non include le conflittualità e disuguaglianze caratte4 https://brescia.corriere.it/notizie/cronaca/18_gennaio_31/brescia-riqualificazione-via-milano-palazzina-140-nuovapiazza-362df6f4-065c-11e8-8b64-d2626c604009.shtml 55 rizzanti la Brescia operaia5. Come chiaro esempio, in OLS è prevista la ristrutturazione della Torretta Caffaro, peculiarità architettonica dello stabilimento, ora elevata a simbolo del passato industriale della via – il suo profilo, non a caso, è posto al centro del logo di OLS. Nello stesso intervento è anche previsto l’abbattimento della cinta muraria dello stabilimento per far posto ad un parcheggio; questo muro è però caratterizzato da numerosi murales che testimoniano tre decenni di attivismo politico di sindacati e collettivi di quartiere, esplicitamente riferiti alle condizioni di deprivazione e vulnerabilità in cui versava la via Milano operaia. La storia del quartiere diventa una serie di punti su una linea del tempo bidimensionale, che passa da un’epoca all’altra senza soluzione di continuità. Il presente della periferia diventa un momento a-storico, sospeso tra il “ricco” passato industriale e il brillante futuro appropriato che potrà raggiungere attraverso la rigenerazione. Gli abitanti delle periferie divengono i responsabili storici e giuridici dell’attuale stato di inappropriatezza; con la sola presenza corporea e simbolica in questi spazi, essi impediscono il pieno dispiegarsi delle opportunità di sviluppo economico e civile di queste aree senza più identità né capacità di adattamento. Lo sviluppo urbano diventa un processo di solidificazione di precise narrative storiche, così come di spazializzazione di specifiche rappresentazioni, condensate nell’approccio a-politicizzato dei processi rigenerativi volti al rinnovamento sociale e spaziale dei quartieri periferici. L’intrecciarsi di queste due definizioni produce effetti sulle forme di rappresentazione degli spazi, delle relazioni tra persone negli spazi così come tra persone e spazi, portando a forme di esclusione e stigmatizzazione di specifici abitanti e comunità. Genere e (in)appropriatezza: forme ‘intrusive’ di violenza urbana quotidiana Una delle principali rappresentazioni di via Milano è quella di essere il quartiere a luci rosse della città, cioè un’area dove la prostituzione è particolarmente accessibile. Partendo da questa narrativa, si può descrivere una forma intrusiva di violenza urbana prodotta dai discorsi sulle periferie degradate. Con il termine forma intrusiva di violenza si indicano i processi relazionali tra persone e spazi, e tra le persone in quegli stessi spazi, attraverso i quali la violenza e il pericolo diventano i principali riferimenti per interpretare e definire relazioni sociali e spaziali. Questi riferimenti risultano dalla circolazione dei discorsi sulle periferie, che oltre a connotare gli spazi secondo le definizioni di (in)appropriatezza, producono sia forme di auto-rappresentazione che di rappresentazione reciproca degli abitanti (Wacquant, 2014). La violenza, la paura e le loro rappresentazioni si intrudono prepotentemente nelle relazioni tra persone e tra persone e spazi, producendo condizioni che rendono difficile la costituzione di legami affidabili e duraturi tra i residenti e i propri luoghi di vita quotidiani. La riproduzione dei discorsi che definiscono l’(in)appropriatezza da parte degli abitanti ha diversi effetti, in particolare sulle relazioni interpersonali negli spazi degradati. La presenza fisica e simbolica dei corpi degli abitanti negli spazi degradati produce ‘comunità immaginate’ (Anderson, 2009), regolanti le politiche di (in)visibilità di gruppi costruiti lungo le linee di classe, nazionalità, etnia, razza, sessualità e genere. In quest’ultimo caso, la riproduzione quotidiana dei discorsi sulla prostituzione da parte dei residenti produce un frame spaziale sessualizzato, che porta allo strutturarsi di forme intrusive di violenza urbana nella vita quotidiana delle abitanti. La polarizzazione delle relazioni urbane di genere, costruite a partire dalle narrative riguardo alla prostituzione in via Milano, spinge gli e le abitanti a creare relazioni inappropriate e sessualizzate con gli spazi quotidiani della via (Andrews, 2016; Doan, 2010). Queste narrative sono legate indissolubilmente alla presenza fisica e corporea di 5 Si ricorda che Brescia fu vittima della strage di piazza della Loggia: il 28 maggio 1974, durante una manifestazione antifascista indetta dalle maggiori sigle sindacali cittadine, una bomba provocò la morte di 8 persone e il ferimento di altre 102. donne e transgender nel contesto materiale e politicizzato del quartiere degradato. Esse producono forme di violenza intrusiva simboliche e psicologiche, che influiscono sulle opportunità di appropriazione della stessa materialità urbana. Dalle interviste svolte emerge che abitanti donne e transgender trovano fastidioso incontrare prostitute nelle vicinanze della propria abitazione, perché ‘trasformano il quartiere in un bordello’, oppure perché la loro presenza crea il rischio che le stesse residenti possano essere ‘confuse’ da eventuali clienti6, come accade in un articolo pubblicato su un portale di notizie locali (Fig.2)7. Le abitanti del quartiere si ritrovano a connettere in maniera profonda spazi urbani, prostituzione, la propria corporeità e la possibilità di essere molestate fisicamente e sessualmente. Questa connessione si traduce in relazioni fugaci, problematiche e violente tra i corpi che abitano il quartiere, gli spazi della loro vita e gli incontri che avvengono in quegli spazi (Andrews, 2016); queste relazioni vengono interpretate secondo un’ottica di violenza e paura, riprodotta dalle interazioni quotidiane che avvengono in quartiere. I discorsi sulle periferie degradate si frappongono violentemente tra questi soggetti e le auto/rappresentazioni di loro stesse e del loro ambiente, aprendo la strada a mobilitazioni opportunistiche dei problemi di genere (Leslie & Mullings, 2013). La connessione intrusiva della violenza tra spazi e sessualità è rinforzata dalla circolazione dei discorsi sull’inappropriatezza, che impongono specifiche modalità di interazione tra le abitanti, i propri sentimenti di sicurezza e la propria sessualità, nel momento in cui esperiscono gli spazi sessualizzati di via Milano. Questa dinamica si esprime in netta contrapposizione alle aspettative riguardo alle relazioni urbane di genere nella città rigenerata e appropriata (Peyrefitte & Sanders-McDonagh, 2018). La combinazione tra le esperienze personali e l’intrusiva natura delle narrative sessualizzate aliena in modo violento donne e transgender dai propri spazi di vita quotidiana, sia da un punto di vista politico-simbolico quanto da quello corporeo e materiale. La costante intrusione dell’intimità psico-spaziale operata dai discorsi sulle periferie e della violenza impedisce la costruzione di forme di interazione con lo spazio intime, affidabili, fidate, sicure. Questo frame sessualizzato imposto sugli spazi urbani colpisce violentemente la presenza di donne e transgender negli spazi pubblici, rendendole soggetti vulnerabili a giudizi, molestie fisico-verbali, e alla possibilità di essere definite come prostitute perché appartenenti a generi interpretati attraverso il frame dell’inappropriatezza di via Milano. Il frame sessualizzato produce relazioni di genere polarizzate e violente, secondo una logica patriarcale ed etero-normativa ereditata dal passato industriale del quartiere così come costruito dalla politica storica alla base di OLS: un’area alla quale solo gli uomini avevano il potere di dare significati, che non ha definizioni alternative se non quelle costruite dalla città appropriata (McDowell, 1997). Questo influisce sulle dinamiche di potere quotidiane, in particolare sulle performance di genere che rendono vulnerabili i corpi degli individui che le producono, condizionando l’appartenenza agli spazi e traducendosi in pratiche di alterità ed esclusione (Andrews, 2016). La visione patriarcale della città appropriata si basa anche sulla tirannica spazializzazione del genere, che limita e riduce alla dicotomia patriarcale uomo/donna le identità di genere e corporee performabili negli spazi appropriati (Doan, 2010). Questa spazializzazione definisce specifiche performance di genere come altre, sostenendo il carattere inappropriato degli spazi del quartiere, e regolando le politiche di (in) visibilità delle donne e delle transgender negli spazi pubblici. Lo stesso avviene nei confronti delle violenze fisiche e simboliche perpetrate nei loro confronti, legittimate e interiorizzate come forme di autorappresentazione di loro stesse come cittadine inappropriate della periferia degradata (Doan 2010; Andrews, 2016; Leslie & Mullings, 2013). 6 Queste affermazioni sono estrapolate dalle interviste etnografiche svolte durante la ricerca sul campo nella primavera del 2018. 7 https://www.bsnews.it/2018/06/09/brescia-trans-colpito-schiena-cacciavite-grave/ 57 References Anderson, B. (2009) Comunità immaginate. Origini e fortune dei nazionalismi. Laterza. Andrews, H. (2016) Gendered Space. In Naples, N., Hoogland, R., Wickramasinghe, M., & Wong, W. (eds) (2016) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Campesi, G. (2003) Il controllo delle nuove classi pericolose: sottosistema penale di polizia e immigrati. Dei Delitti e delle Pene, 1(2), 146-243. Dal Lago, A. (1999). La tautologia della paura. Rassegna italiana di sociologia, 40(1), 5-42. Dal Lago, A., Giordano, S. (2016) A chi appartiene la città? Graffiti e decoro urbano. Nuova informazione bibliografica, 13(4), 751-762. Doan, P. L. (2010). The tyranny of gendered spaces – Reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy. Gender, Place & Culture, 17(5), 635654. Faso, G. (2008) Lessico del razzismo quotidiano. Le parole che escludono. DeriveApprodi. Fava, F. (2010) Spazio sociale e spazio costruttivo: la produzione dello ZEN. Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, 12(1), 63-70. Leslie, K., & Mullings, B. (2013) Urban Neoliberalism, Urban Insecurity and Urban Violence: Exploring the Gender Dimensions. In Peake, L., & Rieker, M. (eds) (2013) Rethinking Feminist interventions into the urban. Routledge, 37-54. Mazza, A. (2017) Città multipolari. Un approccio di politica urbana per assorbire la marginalità. AISRE, XXXVIII Conferenza Scientifica Annuale, Atti del Convegno. Mazzamuto, M. (2016) Esiste una nozione giuridica di periferia? Nuove Autonomie, 25(1), 5-15. McDowell, L. (1997). Women/gender/feminisms: doing feminist geography. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 21(3), 381-400. Peyrefitte, M., Sanders-McDonagh, E. (2018). Space, power and sexuality: transgressive and transformative possibilities at the interstices of spatial boundaries. Gender, Place, & Culture, 25(3), 325-333. Piano, R. (2014) Diario delle Periferie/1. Giambellino. G124. Saccomanni, S. (2016) Urban regeneration and Crisis. EURA Conference: City Lights, Cities and Citizens within/beyond/notwithstanding the crisis: Torino, June 16th-18th, 2016 Wacquant, L., Slater, T., & Pereira, V. B. (2014). Territorial stigmatization in action. Environment and Planning A, 46(6), 1270-1280. 65 References Abrantes, P. (2011). La Métropolisation au Portugal: processus et politiques spatiales. Lisbon. Benjamin, W. (1986). Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Schocken Books: New York. Bernat, C. (2002). Negotiating Dangerous Fields: Pragmatic Strategies for Fieldwork amid Violence and Terror. American Anthropologist, 104 (1), 208222. Chão (2018). “Em Busca do Coletivo - Diálogos para uma Cartografia Social”. In Carmo, A., Ascensao, E., & Estevens, A. (Eds.). (2018). A cidade em reconstrução: leituras críticas, 2008-2018 (pp. 120-126). Outro Modo Cooperativa Cultural. Feltran, G. (2020). The Entangled City: Crime as Urban Fabric in Sao Paulo. Manchester University Press. Giacchetta, N. (2020). Lisbona, una capitale postcoloniale. Spazio, popolazioni, informalità, politiche (Tesi di laurea magistrale Università Iuav di Venezia). Grosfoguel, R. (2007). The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural studies, 21 (2-3), 211-223. Lino e Silva, M. (2014). The Violence of Structural Violence: Ethical Commitments and an Exceptional Day in a Brazilian Favela. Built Environment 40 (3), 314-325. Malheiros, J., & Fonseca, L. (2011), O Acesso à Habitação e Problemas Residenciais dos Imigrantes em Portugal. Alto-Comissário para a Imigração e Diálogo Intercultural, Lisbon. Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture and Society, 26, 159–181. Rodgers, D. (2007). Joining the Gang and Becoming a Broder: The Violence of Ethnography in Contemporary Nicaragua. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 26 (4), 444–461. Rodgers, D. (2016). Critique of Urban Violence: Bismarckian Transformations in Managua, Nicaragua. Theory, Culture & Society 33 (7-8), 85-109. Simone, A. (2014). JAKARTA. Drawing the City Near. University of Minnesota. Viegas, S. L. (2017). Espaços de inclusão (dos e) para os refugiados na Europa atual: que Direito à Cidade? Espaços vividos e espaços construídos: estudos sobre a cidade, 1(6), 109-117. Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Urban Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wacquant, L. (2016). Revisiting territories of relegation: Class, ethnicity and state in the making of advanced marginality. Urban Studies, 53 (6), 1077-1088. 67 Violence challenges any analytical focus due its ubiquity and multifarious forms. From the intimate to the global, from the colonial to the capitalist, from the racial to the epistemic and from the personal to the societal. At the time of writing the COVID-19 epidemic violence has covered the entire planet in a deadly way. We are witnessing the violence of the rising medico-techno-scientific state that has emerged strongly in discourses and policies; the physical violence resurrected in places such as Myanmar, Lebanon, Palestine and Colombia, to cite few, and the violence of any direct engagement with living creatures and earth preservation that keep erupting under the camouflage of pro transition and technoeconomic recovery processes. It seems we are left with the question Giorgio Agamben (2020) asked in the mist of the pandemic: “what is a society that has no value other than survival?” A provocative question, as usual, that recalls a sort of vita minima, a bare life, as well some sort of grand universal planetary schema. Taking this lead, let me start to reflect for a moment on the city that I have engaged with most recently – Beirut – on violence and its beyond as inhabitation. The extensivity of violence in Beirut, (the civil War, the 2006 Israel bombing, the 2018 uprising and its financial crisis, the 4th August 2020 port explosion and of course the pandemic) cannot be simply framed with the notion of crisis, even if incremental, connected, overlapping and structural. What is emerging there is an exhausted territory, predated by the absence of the public, brutalised by the fragility of the common and vandalised by the preclusion of a thinkable and imaginable future. Lebanon is living in a catastrophic present. Catastrophe is not a violent event that happens once and for all, that then goes away after having accomplished its gruesome work of leaving a world of ruins, to be fixed, restored and recomposed with the limited resources of its people. For Lebanese peoples it has been a never-ending process, which accumulates and sediments, and that erodes the vitalist and progressive message of those who are working to advocate reclaiming publicness, justice, and equity. Violence is not a linear production of events but a manifold and longitudinal overlapping force of dispossessions, explosions, removal, separation, excavation, evictions that produce complex and contradictory spatial implications. Research on violence asserts that violence goes well beyond physical harm. While suggesting there is no agreed definition of urban violence, Pavoni, and Tulumello (2020:49) warn us against the oversimplification of such complex relations, especially when the adjective ‘urban’ is just “referring to the place (the container) in which instances of violence would occur, rather than as a spatial process constitutive” to it. Challenging simultaneously “the static understanding of the urban and the exogenous understanding of violence” (p.50) the authors look at the ways contemporary urban and capitalist-urban discourses are “framing urban violence as an exogenous anomaly to be eradicated, [and] generate the pervasive atmospheres of fear that increasingly characterise contemporary urban space” (p.51). Camillo Boano Camillo Boano is Full Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche, Territorio del Politecnico di Torino, Italy and Full Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) where he is also Co-Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. Camillo’s research is centred on the encounters between critical theory and urban design processes, specifically engaging with informal urbanisations, urban collective actions, as well as crisis-generated urbanisms. He is working on a series of interconnected research projects in Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East on habitability and the urban project as well as a project titled Lifelines on the making and unmaking of infrastructure. He is the author of The Ethics of Potential Urbanism. Critical Encounters between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture (Routlege, 2017) and Progetto Minore. Alla ricerca della Minorità nel Progetto Archiettonico ed Urbanistico (LetteraVentidue, 2020). Beyond violence Toward a politics of inhabitation Considering their reflection, Beirut becomes represents the contemporary history of the selfdestructive gesture that continuously repeats itself and, by doing so, sets the foundation for a new condition of destruction. Every massive violent event in history was preceded by sequences of smaller events occurring within short periods of time that prepared the ground for additional violence in time and space and led to the last big port explosion; the banking sector crisis with all its destructive implications; the collapsed economy; political crisis; institutional corruption; government inefficiency; the electricity shortage as well as the stress associated with the recent virus. Every violence set the stage for a new time and additional violence. Perhaps, Beirut is telling a much bigger story. A story of perpetual planetary conflict, close to the one that Guinard, Latour and Lin used to title the 2020 Taipei Biennial: “You and I don’t live on the same planet” making Lebanon where several planets collide. The planetarium includes: ‘planet globalization’, constructed around the promise of modernity in its world-making violence with its massive rise in inequality, neoliberalism and unlimited growth; ‘planet security’, where people betrayed by the ideals and the violence of globalization, ask for a piece of land – a fenced or a bordered haven to live in, protected from others; ‘planet escape’ where a limited number of privileged people invest hyper-techno fix security solutions or leave the earth. For all the others excluded by the modernizing project, the privileged full-securitybordered-land or the escape idealized-communities-of-equals, the only option is to be in an inhabitable territory, that the curators call the ‘terrestrial planet.’ This metaphor of planetary conflict is maybe illustrating a form of violence that is simultaneously destructive and constructive: not an interruption but rather a continuous process, that traverses the political history of the planet itself. The metaphorical landscape emerging in the terrestrial planet, that beyond the explicit reference to Beirut, is the one that Maliq Simone would call “uninhabitable”; not because the conditions and limited or impossible capacities of people reside, to shelter or to find a refuge but, rather, because what remains is not intended for habitation: it is a territory that exceed consideration of human emplacement and manifold modalities of livability. Lebanon is inhabitable. It is at the same time a space of exception and an unfinished project, evident in its fragmented, plural, uncertain and temporally precarious grammar, always in motion despite its apparent fixity with a constant movement between past and present. It is exceptional because the very possibility of living and inhabiting has always been inextricably intertwined with violence: the promise of death, destruction, disappearance, displacement, eviction that is regularly and invariably fulfilled. However, the inhabitable is also a continuous creative process through which inhabitants withdraw from death in order to escort it, constituting an industrious community capable of building, maintaining and repairing its living space. A tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtractions of the future, of space, of possibilities, through creating space and forms of life. The intelligence of the urban, when seen beyond the absolute centrality of its violence, is its ability to express politics, excess of life and places of possibility. It is a power that should certainly not be romanticised as it is always constituted by a form of violence as a generative matrix.Lebanon is continuously being produced by the operative efforts of the many voices of resistance in the street, in the arts, as well as in academia. Despite this it remains incalculable. It transcends its historicity of inhabitation, but that cannot be framed under any calculation, any norm, any quality. So, what is inhabiting the uninhabitable? How is it possible to leave destitute the power of violence and find new ways of inhabiting the urban planet? Violence is not a linear production of events but a manifold and longitudinal overlapping force of dispossessions, explosions, removal, separation, excavation, evictions that produce complex and contradictory spatial implications 69 One way is to refer to Heidegger who reminds us that human exists insofar as they inhabit: transforming imperfectly an abstract space in some way – imprecise and precarious – in a place that generates the possibility of intimacy. However, the term Bauen used by Heidegger translates as to built in the sense of to dwell, but also as to preserve and to cultivate, which refers to protecting rather than producing. This interesting connection of dwelling to preserving and cultivating shifts focus not only on to being, staying and existing, but also on to a more complex “ecology” through which inhabitants are constituting an industrious community capable of building, maintaining and repairing its living space. Inhabitation means re-centring the affirmative dimension of enduring relations and it develops an idea of collective life that tenaciously responds to aspects of life and to modes of living, extractive practices and it constructs different horizons of hope. This is exemplified in (refuge) camps and camp urbanism. With inhabitation, camps expand from exception to become sites of a politics that takes shape around habitation: the continuation of habitual, bodily practices, the small and mundane acts of maintenance or a continuous struggle to cultivate and protect a minimum space of survival. This impossibility of building and dwelling is the essence of the camp: always and already exhaustion and inhabitation. Recalling that Auschwitz was designed in 1941 by Karl Bischoff and Fritz Ertl, both graduate of the Bauhaus, Agamben (2019) asks: “how could it be possible that an architect […] built a structure in which under no circumstances was it possible to dwell, in the original sense of being at home […] building the perfect place of the impossibility of inhabitation.” With this example, he portrays how “architecture at present is facing the historical condition of building the inhabitable” (ibid.). With no inhabitation only building is possible and the camp, as matrix of exception, will persist. So, “what does it mean to inhabit (abitare)” asks Agamben in the preface of Giovanni Attili’s Civita (2021): “do still we know what it means to inhabit a village, a city, a territory? and what is a village, a city, a territory if we think of it from the point of view of inhabiting?” Civita di Bagnoregio, the subject of the book, is not a camp and it is not in Lebanon. It is a medieval village in Central Italy, built on a gully, a geomorphological zone that is always in the process of sinking into the void in the Lazio hinterland. For Agamben, questioning inhabitation from such spaces means revealing that “the very possibility of living and inhabiting is indissolubly intertwined with death.” Attili “reconstructs the desire and the practice of the people of Civita di Bagnoregio over the centuries to inhabit their land, the marvellous stubbornness with which they continue to cling to ‘their tuff hillock’ suspended in the void and to keep intact, and if possible, improve, the form of life that has been handed down through the generations. The people of Civita have turned their land into a habitable place […] they have created and continued to forge something without which they seem to have a certain unease: their own presence.” For Agamben inhabitation “it is a creative process through which they withdraw from death in order to escort it” (Agamben, 2021:11-12). Therefore, what seems to matter is an inhabiting life. For Agamben “to inhabit means to be in what one holds dearest, one’s own and at the same time common. That is, to be and to enjoy, that is, to enjoy, one’s own nature. It is certainly a way of resisting, of staying, and of preventing oneself from being dragged elsewhere” (2020). If the uninhabitable is the impossibility of becoming home; of hosting futures; of dwelling relations and to inhabit political projects, and even (in the case of global violent border regimes) the preclusion of the material possibility of staying in a place, then gestures of inhabitation must be becoming livable, if not ‘home’. It must be livable as a terrain, beyond the emergency from which to think and act, even for a politics that seeks nothing more than to overcome the primacy of life. Camp urbanism, informal urbanization and, more generally, all the forms that inhabit the uninhabitable, without essentializing them, are arguably the continuous creative process through which inhabitants withdraw from death in order to escort it, constituting an industrious community capable of building, maintaining and repairing its living space. This impossibility of building and dwelling is the essence of the camp. With no inhabitation only building is possible and the camp, as matrix of exception, will persist. Returning to the terminology of the Taipei Biennial, the potential for deactivating violence lies in the everyday resistance or in inhabitation intended as “counter territorialization” (Boano and Astolfo, 2020) in a “politics of inhabitation” (Abourahme, 2020: 40). This is an inversion. It is not another planet, (in the language of the Taipei Biennial) but an act of an inverse nature: a reconfiguration of the conditions of possibility. It is an effort of unmaking, of redefinition to re-signify territories; ultimately, to undo or deactivate an established territorial order of modernity, security and escape. People’s practices are a multiform remaking of spatial ordering of state sanctioned planned violence that intentionally produces capital accumulation, expulsions, and marginalization. It consists of a destituent (Tarì, 2017; Laudani, 2016; Boano, 2020) politics to create the conditions (an empty space) so that another politics (one that today seems impossible) can happen. Destituent is a politics not founded by power. It indicates a movement to be made: to unleash a politics of the event. The event of politics nests in a singular desertion from what is, breaking the normal course of history and producing a multiple, ecstatic, plurality – not another planet, but another cosmogony. Not the one displayed in Taipei Biennial planetarium rather a different one. Maybe, the one emerging from Giorgio Manganelli’s La Palude Definitiva (the definitive swamp) “a place where it is difficult to enter and impossible to leave” (p.43). In the image of the swamp is a perfect image for the exhausted capacity of thinking beyond the violence of ‘planet terrestrial’. The swamp is a space where knowledge mixes to give deadly form to coercion: “the swamp appears to me as [...] a noble and lowest place, a central and peripheral place, well-formed and deformed, shapeless, deformed, obscene, vile, mephitic and at the same time troubled” (p.57). The ‘proper’ of the inhabitation is not given and, therefore, its great intensity is given precisely because it dwells directly on the substance of politics, or rather in its abyss, on what makes it possible everywhere. Two paradigms converge in the swamp as in Beirut: an uninhabitable without any inhabitation as well the paradoxical but destituent process of inhabiting the uninhabitable. It is no coincidence that the centrality Manganelli’s swamp evokes an epistemology of living where you can feel “a profound sense of rest, as if the fatigue of the future dissolved into a contrary procedure, as if yesterday, the uninterrupted yesterday would give refreshment to all tomorrows, the impossible tomorrows” (p.59). The politics of inhabitation might need to be imagined in the swamp, maybe in Beirut as in Civita, but beyond the planetary prospect of constitutive violence to envision a destituent gesture. 71 References Abourahme, N. (2020) The Camp. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, v. 40, n. 1, pp. 35-42. Agamben, G. (2019) Costruire e Abitare. Apertura Anno Accademico 2018/19 Università di Roma. Available online: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Q_LYyYKLb_8 (accessed on 15 March 2019). Agamben, G. (2021) Introduzione, in Attili, G. Civita. Senza aggettivi e senza altre specificazioni. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2021, pp.11-12. Agamben, G., (2020) Una domanda. Available at https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-una-domanda Attili, G. (2021) Civita. Senza aggettivi e senza altre specificazioni. Macerata: Quodlibet. Boano, C., Astolfo, G. (2020) Inhabitation as more-then-dwelling. Notes for a renewed grammar.International Journal of Housing Policy,v. 20, n. 4,p. 555-577,2020. Boano, C. (2020) Progetto Minore. Alla ricerca della minorità nel progetto urbanistico ed architettonico. Siracusa: LetteraVentidue Edizioni. Laudani, R. (2016) Il Movimento della Politica. Teorie critiche e potere destituente. Bologna: il Mulino. Manganelli, G., (1991) La palude definitiva. Milano, Adephi. Pavoni A., Tulumello S. (2020) What is urban violence?Progress in Human Geography, vol. 44, n. 1, pp. 49-76. Tarì, M. (2017) Non esiste la rivoluzione infelice. Roma: DeriveApprodi. lo Squaderno 59 Beyond Urban Violence edited by // Simone Tulumello and Andrea Pavoni Guest Artist // Slinkachu 73 lo Squaderno is a project by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Cristina Mattiucci & Andrea Pavoni. More Info | http://www.losquaderno.net/?page_id=2 Contact | [email protected] published under CreativeCommons licence 4.0 Impressum | July 2021