Deconstructing the fragile city: exploring insecurity,violence and resilience

Abstract

An emerging social category – the fragile city – can be described as a discrete metropolitan unit whose governance arrangements exhibit a declining ability and/or willingness to deliver on the social contract. Fragility is thus no longer ascribed by decision makers and analysts exclusively to nation-states and federal institutions. Rather, fragile cities are being reconceived as the primary sites of tomorrow’s warfare and development. Yet, surprisingly little is known about them. When do cities “tip” into fragility? How is fragility distributed within and between neighbourhoods? What allows some cities to cope, adapt and rebound from external and internal stresses? This article, drawing from emerging theoretical and policy literatures, finds that urban fragility is neither inevitable nor irreversible. To the contrary: it is the very resilience of cities, their neighbourhoods and institutions that is often overlooked in efforts to promote stability and development. Fragile cities themselves are constituted of sources of local resistance and agency that, in some cases, can be reinforced and from which positive lessons can be learned.

I. Introduction

The future trajectories of urbanization are now widely acknowledged and internalized. More than half of the world’s population currently lives in cities and the proportion is likely to rise to more than three-quarters over the next 30 years. The coming decade’s most pronounced urban growth will take place not in the Americas or Europe, where the demographic transition is drawing to a close but, rather, in Africa, the Arab world and across Asia. Worldwide, there are already more than 500 cities with populations in excess of one million, with more soon to join the club. Among these are 27 megacities that are home to more than 10 million inhabitants. It is not just their sheer numbers but also their growing influence that matters. Indeed, just 600 cities account for roughly two-thirds of the global economy. Given the ways in which supply chains and financial hubs are interconnected, these urban centres often have more in common with one another than with their own national polities. Although there are many reasons to be optimistic – even triumphant⁽¹⁾ – about the impending urban age, there is also a darker side to runaway urbanization. While some cities are lifting off and realizing their promise, others are sinking into decay and disarray.

A new social category is emerging in the security and development lexicon – the fragile city.⁽²⁾ The preoccupation with “fragile” and “failed” cities – at least in military and aid circles – echoes many of the same anxieties associated with failed and fragile states. Indeed, many scholars draw a straight line between national and metropolitan fragility. Beall and colleagues have demonstrated how “… violent civic conflict is generally linked to state failures to provide security, growth and welfare in urban areas.”⁽³⁾ There is some divergence of opinion, however, in the prospects for improvement. On the one hand, there are some who see cities as potentially “fixing” fragile states, owing in part to their comparative advantages in hosting local elections and managing revenue generation, service delivery, conflict mediation and elite-driven bargaining.⁽⁴⁾ Others are convinced that so-called feral cities and their vast slums⁽⁵⁾ are the most likely future sites of national insecurity, civil conflict and urban insurgencies, with few opportunities available to outsiders other than containment or limited intervention.⁽⁶⁾ In contrast to global city boosters, they fear that fragile cities already constitute, in Norten’s words, “… natural havens for a variety of hostile non-state actors …” and may pose “… security threats on a scale hitherto not encountered.”⁽⁷⁾

Some scholars and practitioners are beginning to critically interrogate the concept of fragile cities.⁽⁸⁾ A nascent epistemic community is emerging, with virtually all of its members seized by the everyday challenges of achieving effective security and development in the metropolis. Much of their recent research has homed in on the corrosive effects of fragility on local social contracts and elite-society bargains and settlements⁽⁹⁾ and implications for wider national stability.⁽¹⁰⁾ After all, cities – especially primate and intermediate cities – are often bellwethers of wider tendencies at the national level. This article builds on the burgeoning empirical and secondary literature on fragile cities. It first highlights the origins and underlying assumptions of the fragile city construct and revisits a number of their key characteristics. It then considers three macro-level risk factors that are reshaping fragile cityscapes, including rapid urbanization, the spatial manifestations of deteriorating governance and emergent forms of (digital) connectivity. The article concludes with a treatment of opportunities to foster and strengthen resilience in fragile cities, drawing attention to the many ways in which local authorities are positively mobilizing to this effect.

II. Fragile Cities and their Discontents

Although alarm bells are being sounded over the real and imagined threats presented by fragile cities, surprisingly little is known about them.⁽¹¹⁾ When do cities “tip” into fragility? How is fragility distributed within and between neighbourhoods? What allows some cities or parts of cities to cope, adapt and rebound from external and internal stresses? At a minimum, there is growing recognition that the pathway to fragility is neither linear nor inevitable. Indeed, fragility can be understood as a kind of continuum rather than a static condition. It is a dynamic state that affects different areas differentially. Stable and functioning areas of cities can, and frequently do, co-exist alongside fragile and violence-affected spaces. And while some planned neighbourhoods and informal settlements may experience chronic instability, it is also the case, to borrow from Achebe, that no condition is permanent.⁽¹²⁾

Past efforts to prevent and mitigate city fragility – from community policing to relocation and resettlement programmes – have often focused narrowly on treating symptoms.⁽¹³⁾ Activities have often prioritized cosmetic upgrades and social cleansing. Such interventions have inadvertently glossed over underlying structural factors giving rise to manifestations of city fragility, including social disorganization, inequality, marginalization and under-institutionalization.⁽¹⁴⁾ More positively, a new generation of social scientists – from criminologists and sociologists to economists and geographers – is beginning to rethink the drivers of fragility in cities and neighbourhoods.⁽¹⁵⁾ Their voices are only gradually being heard. Notwithstanding an increasing sensitivity to urban development in some aid circles,⁽¹⁶⁾ many donors have yet to fully engage with research on fragile cities. As the urbanist Stephen Graham writes, the “… urban scale, as a site for or actor in the resolution of international social conflicts, ethno-national conflicts and inter-state war, presents a challenge and potentially an opportunity to decision makers.”⁽¹⁷⁾

While increasingly deployed in aid and military circuits, the fragile cities concept is in fact comparatively new. Etiologically, it emerges from thinking by scholars such as Zartman and others in the 1990s on collapsed, failing and failed states.⁽¹⁸⁾ A rash of international relations and political science scholars were concerned with how ostensibly Weberian notions of statehood (and by implication, cityhood) were giving way to alternate proto-state formulations, whether clientelist, neo-patrimonial, warlord-run or otherwise.⁽¹⁹⁾ While not necessarily collapsed, many regimes in these countries were losing (or had already lost) their monopoly over the use of legitimate force, in some cases ceding large swathes of their territory. In extreme cases, they descended into low-medium intensity and protracted conflict. Over the past decade, a number of northern and southern bilateral aid agencies and defence departments have started to grapple with state fragility.⁽²⁰⁾ This preoccupation is likely to grow since the share of the world’s poor located in fragile states will rise by half over the next five years.⁽²¹⁾ Coalitions of so-called “fragile states”, including the self-described g7+, have also banded together to identify ways of “exiting fragility”.⁽²²⁾ It is only recently that they have become aware that confronting their national challenges may require more directed efforts to deal with city fragility.

It is worth recalling that for centuries, cities have been sites of violent contestation and social control. As noted by Tilly, in pre-Westphalia Western Europe city-states were the drivers of expansionism and territorial control.⁽²³⁾ They also emerged at the centre of the wider state-building project that took hold from the seventeenth century onward. Urban elites regularly sought to extend their capacity to mobilize armies and tax and regulate property in the rural hinterland. Paradoxically, complex forms of political, economic and social violence in cities are contemporaneously contributing to the unravelling of state- (and city-) building efforts, including corresponding social controls and cohesion among citizens. Goodfellow et al. describe the emergence of “civic conflict” in some fragile cities, which includes everything from “… sectarian riots to gang violence, terrorism and turf wars between urban landlords … these forms of conflict are linked both to the city as a distinct space and to contestation over citizenship and entitlements, often reflecting a sense of neglect by the state.”⁽²⁴⁾ As urban geographers know well, all conflicts invariably transpire at the local and micro scale.

Depending on how fragility is defined, it is estimated that between 370 million and 1.5 billion people live in fragile and conflict-affected states.⁽²⁵⁾ They are distributed among as many as 50 countries, although the number varies according to how fragility is measured.⁽²⁶⁾ It is of course not the case that all fragile states give rise to fragile cities. Nor are fragile cities geographically confined to fragile and conflict-affected states. Indeed, there are many cities exhibiting all the hallmarks of instability in what are considered in the vernacular as middle- and even high-income settings. Some new empirical work, considering the place of cities across a range of fragile states, draws attention to their diverse and heterogeneous experiences.⁽²⁷⁾ It demonstrates the ways in which different cities are either targeted, incubate strife and antagonism or emerge as bastions of relative safety, providing an important challenge to the easy tendency towards universalization and homogenization. The implication, then, is that fragility is not confined to conflict- or post-conflict affected countries, and in fact often emerges outside of war zones. More than three-quarters of the most violent countries in the world are not affected by conventional warfare.⁽²⁸⁾ Likewise, 46 of the top 50 most violent cities in the world in 2013 were not experiencing armed conflicts and virtually all of them were in the Americas.⁽²⁹⁾

It is thus not surprising that cities as diverse as Ciudad Juárez, Detroit, Goma, Karachi, Kathmandu, Johannesburg, Lagos, Manila, San Salvador and Rio de Janeiro have each been described as “fragile” in media and academic outlets.⁽³⁰⁾ Mayors and governors presiding over these cities are often quick to call attention to state and municipal deficits, in some cases invoking fragility as a means of unlocking resources or shaming authorities higher up the food chain. Not surprisingly, there are concerns in some quarters – especially foreign ministries of many of these same countries – that this logic can potentially give rise to new forms of (international and domestic) interventionism. Thus, diplomats from Brazil, China, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia and the United States fiercely contest the label, concerned as they are with everything from resisting encroachments on their sovereignty to maintaining investment flows and tourist revenue. This at least partly explains the limited purchase of the concept of “fragility” in the United Nations and especially the General Assembly. Nevertheless, military strategists in these same countries predict that urban centres will take centre stage in tomorrow’s wars. Not surprisingly, the humanitarian sector is also taking note.⁽³¹⁾

Although heterogeneous, fragile cities share certain commonalities. Indeed, most of them are fundamentally enmeshed with the global economy – linked to international financial and commodity exchanges, overseas assistance and diaspora communities.⁽³²⁾ In most cases, cities become fragile as a result of profound disequilibrium and ruptures in the social contracts that bind city governments and citizens. Urban elites – especially elected and appointed political authorities – may lose the ability to formally regulate, much less monopolize, the legitimate use of violence. In some cases, they selectively deploy violence through state, paramilitary or non-state proxies. In others, they may share or cede control altogether to informal militia, gangs or vigilante groups. As a result, in fragile cities entire neighbourhoods and informal settlements are frequently under the control of parallel modes of governance and control.⁽³³⁾As such, they may exhibit mixed or hybrid layers of authority, with norms and rules set by a constellation of armed groups and local leaders.⁽³⁴⁾ Local coercive power and authority are instead negotiated at the neighbourhood level by multiple entities, from the predatory to the benign. In extreme cases, the ability of urban institutions to adapt or rebound from these stresses may buckle and collapse. Formal systems of municipal authority and service delivery may cease altogether due, in extreme cases, to what Bunker and Sullivan refer to as “criminal insurgencies”, which spread like a “social cancer”.⁽³⁵⁾

The preoccupation in diplomatic, defence⁽³⁶⁾ and development⁽³⁷⁾ networks with fragile cities suggests that the referent of international engagement is moving down the geographic scale. Political theorists such as Benjamin Barber have emphasized that the move towards empowering cities will expand participatory democracy and build a more cosmopolitan global commons.⁽³⁸⁾ Meanwhile, military futurists, including Kilcullen, argue that the shift to cities is inevitable and will reshape counter-insurgency and stabilization priorities.⁽³⁹⁾ These kinds of observations are not entirely without precedent. For example, Appadurai anticipated this “implosion” of global and national politics into the urban world.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Novel or not, fragility is no longer confined exclusively to nation-state institutions but, rather, extends to their primate and intermediate cities and outlying metropolitan regions. With some exceptions, however, the aid (and to a lesser extent military) architecture of most multilateral and bilateral organizations is still stubbornly oriented towards engaging centralized state structures or perpetuating a heavy bias towards rural areas. Notwithstanding recent attention to the issue of fragile cities, the development and defence architecture is still only beginning to grapple with the fragile city.

III. Explaining Urban Fragility: Causes and Perspectives

There are at least three interlocking structural factors that appear to be playing a central role in hastening city fragility in certain parts of the world. These include rapid and unregulated urbanization; failures in national and city-level governance; and the monumental shifts in internet connectivity and digital empowerment. These “macro” factors, alongside others such as the inexorable tilt of populations to coastal areas and growing extremes in sub-national inequality, are inevitably coming together in city spaces. Meanwhile, there is a host of competing “micro-level” explanations for the onset and persistence of urban fragility. These tend to draw from, inter alia, social disorganization,⁽⁴¹⁾ broken-window⁽⁴²⁾ and crime opportunity⁽⁴³⁾ theories. Many of these theories have yet to be explored outside of North America and Western Europe. Indeed, there is comparatively limited research on the micro-level variables that shape city fragility in low- and middle-income settings of Latin America and the Caribbean, and most acutely Africa and Asia.

With respect to these micro-level hypotheses, some North American-based criminologists contend that specific areas within cities offer more intrinsic opportunities for criminal activity as a result of political neglect and the absence of state presence together with local economic decay.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Other insights from social disorganization theory link higher crime rates with areas exhibiting a higher density of offenders,⁽⁴⁵⁾ a higher percentage of rental housing⁽⁴⁶⁾ and large social housing projects.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Likewise, the probability of becoming a violence entrepreneur also increases if the individual is raised in a high-crime affected area.⁽⁴⁸⁾ The causal mechanism here is that a higher density of criminals increases the chances of meeting accomplices because of the persistence of wide networks and close proximity and communication between them. The remainder of this section considers macro-level explanations for city fragility.

The first macro-level factor shaping urban fragility is rapid and unregulated urbanization. More than half the globe’s population currently resides in cities as compared to just three per cent in the nineteenth century. According to UN–Habitat, by 2030, the ratio will increase to two in every three people on earth.⁽⁴⁹⁾ The unprecedented pace of urbanization in the twenty-first century is believed to exacerbate fragility, particularly in large and intermediate cities. The United Nations estimates that the world’s slum population will reach two billion by 2030, accounting for the majority of all future global population growth; and in the process, some cities – Ciudad Juárez, Medellín, Port-au-Prince, Rio de Janeiro and Tegucigalpa – become synonymous with a new kind of fragility, with severe humanitarian implications.⁽⁵⁰⁾ While not necessarily affected by armed conflict, these and other urban centres suffer levels of civic violence on par with war-torn Abidjan, Bangui, Damascus, Juba or Mogadishu.⁽⁵¹⁾

Virtually every demographic forecast predicts that urbanization will continue its runaway pace, although not all areas will be affected equally.⁽⁵²⁾ Rather, future population growth will concentrate primarily in lower- and middle-income countries, especially in large and mid-sized fragile cities. This expansion is giving rise to sprawling cities – and slums – and in some places, altering the geopolitical architecture. Even so, the widespread presumption of a positive correlation between city size/population density and the incidence of urban violence is contested. There is also mixed evidence from Buhaug and Urdal that rapid population growth on its own (owing to both high urban fertility rates and rural–urban migration) necessarily predisposes countries and cities to fragility.⁽⁵³⁾ There are, of course, intermediate variables at play. Indeed, a combination of weak political institutions, economic shocks and the persistence of civil unrest are particularly associated with the onset of warfare. But it is also important to recall that urban violence itself is often a form of resistance to massive (state- and) city-building, including forced population resettlement and relocation. As such, violence in urban areas is bi-directional, multi-causal and spatially uneven, and it is not necessarily the largest cities that are the most fragile.⁽⁵⁴⁾

Urbanization is generating advantages, especially in East and Southeast Asia, but also instability, including in North and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and South Asia. The pace and scale of city growth is concentrating minds. Pakistan’s primary city, Karachi, grew by more than 80 per cent between 2000 and 2010 – and is now home to at least 21 million people. Yet the city, which comprises eight per cent of the national population, accounted for more than 42 per cent of all reported assassinations between 1988 and 2010.⁽⁵⁵⁾ These and other fragile cities will be the future sites of complex forms of conflict and instability. Indeed, they are already being subjected to stabilization and pacification activities by foreigners and local governments alike.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Seismic transformations in urban geographies are precipitating shifts in global governance. It is not just the fact of power and influence diffusing from nation-states to cities and corporations – but the pace at which the process is taking place.

Meanwhile, urban fragility can also be seen as both a cause and effect of transformations in national and municipal governance and spatial organization. In many expanding cities across Latin America and the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, urban governance is divided increasingly between the haves and the have-nots. For example, more than 110 million of Latin America’s 558 million residents live in slums. Many of these shanty towns, townships and slums are now no-go areas – or zones of exception – far beyond the reach of public security forces, much less basic public utilities. These peripheral areas are exempted by the public authorities, stigmatized and often cordoned off. Entire neighbourhoods and sections of cities display a myriad of risk factors that limit the upward and outward mobility of their residents and expose them to threats to their health and well-being. Residents become quite literally trapped, physically, psychologically and symbolically, across generations. For example, the rise of hopelessness, violence and stigmatization has been documented by Perlman and her students in panel surveys of slum residents in Rio de Janeiro over a period of five decades.⁽⁵⁷⁾

It is also the case that in many cities slums are often much less dangerous than believed, at least by outside observers. As Moser and Mcllwaine have shown, there is often a disproportionate fear of crime relative to its real occurrence.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Yet even when evidence to the contrary exists, most elites still opt to build higher walls and more sophisticated security systems to guard themselves. Cities such as Caracas, Maceio, Nairobi, Port Harcourt and San Pedro Sula are giving rise to Manichean landscapes of “safe” and privately maintained gated communities and their “violent” and public peripheries.⁽⁵⁹⁾ The predominance of real and perceived insecurity is quite literally reshaping the built environment in fragile cities. It is part and parcel of what scholars such as Rodgers and O’Neill characterize as “infrastructural violence”.⁽⁶⁰⁾

Together with urbanization and new patterns of governance is the issue of new technologies and connectivity. Across fragile cities in Africa, Asia and the Americas, cyberspace is fundamentally rewiring the ways in which groups, individuals and states engage with politics, economics, social action and governance. In Latin America and the Caribbean, a region experiencing among the highest rates of urban violence on the planet, some 40 per cent of the population is now online and connectivity is expanding faster than in any other part of the world. Most of that expansion is taking place among the young – digital natives with ambitions to change and better their lives. And more than 75 per cent of the region’s population lives in major cities: by 2050 the percentage will rise to 90 per cent. Urban civil society has also moved online, evidenced in a groundswell of blogs and networked social movements ranging from YoSoy132 and Blog del Narco in Latin America to similar digital protests emerging from Cairo and Istanbul, Budapest and Kiev. The 2013 street protests in key cities of Brazil may signal a new popular awakening, as digital natives flex their collective political muscles and translate online action into real-time street violence.⁽⁶¹⁾

Not surprisingly, digitally savvy criminals and radical groups are also rapidly colonizing Latin American, African and Asian cyberspace, as evidenced in the stark rise in cyber-enabled criminality across all these regions.⁽⁶²⁾ In Latin America, for example, the regional narco-economy and associated urban youth gangs use online platforms to organize and advertise their activities, recruit members, intimidate authorities and citizens, extort money and hire contract killers.⁽⁶³⁾ Similar patterns of digital criminality are emerging in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Southeast Asia and also parts of Africa, including Nigeria and South Africa. Across it all, states, but also cities, are struggling to cope with an ever-more chaotic digital environment, and open new channels for consultation and participation. Government responses vary widely.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Most involve a complex mix of leveraging cyberspace to enhance governance while adopting cyber-security policies, laws and capabilities to police and impose order on this promising, but also risky and volatile, space.

IV. Fostering Urban Resilience in Cities

Although fragility can be arrested and in some cases reversed, its consequences are far-reaching. In cities, its legacy can be social and spatial, including the segmentation of public and private urban space, the erosion of social capital and cohesion between neighbourhoods and neighbours, and the reproduction of new and more intractable forms of insecurity and fear. Of course, fragile cities are intimately connected to the structural dynamics of urban agglomeration as well as to the competing interests of – and power relations between – groups. Yet, urban decay and disorder need not imply that cities cannot rebound and ultimately transform for the better. To the contrary, it is the very resilience of cities that offers a pathway out of fragility and a wellspring of resistance and agency from which insights must be drawn.

Comparatively little is known about how fragile cities are able to cope or rebound from shocks and chronic violence. The manner in which both formal and informal urban systems are able to reproduce service functions in fragile settings is under-examined, as are the livelihood strategies adopted by residents within them. The concept of resilience is often described as an ongoing process of individuals, communities and systems to survive, adapt, cope and grow in spite of exogenous and endogenous stresses and shocks. It refers to the capability of public, private and civil society authorities to prepare for, respond to and recover from, and even transform, in the face of multiple hazards, with minimum damage to public safety and security, health and wider social and economic institutions.⁽⁶⁵⁾ And it is not just the ability to anticipate and respond to risks but also the harnessing of protective factors – characteristics of individuals and their environments that strengthen their abilities to confront stresses without resort to violence – that seem to play a role in mitigating fragility.

There is some evidence of innovative approaches to reversing fragility and promoting resilience in low- and medium-income settings. These include a range of hard and soft measures pursued by formal and informal institutions and actors. Examples range from pacification programmes or proximity policing initiatives in Rio de Janeiro to mediation and social capital promotion efforts in Belfast and Johannesburg.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Gang truces have also emerged in fragile cities such as Kingston, Port-of-Spain, San Salvador, São Paulo and Tijuana that seek to prevent violence by rehabilitating and legitimizing local power brokers, although the extent to which these have held continues to be the subject of debate.⁽⁶⁷⁾ More promising are social cohesion programmes, albeit resource intensive, in cities such as Ciudad Juárez.⁽⁶⁸⁾ These and other programmes have targeted the social disorganization arising from urbanization, engineered more legitimate governance and emphasized social and economic connectivity, including through the use of new media and related technologies.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Approaches that proved most effective tended to privilege consultation and dialogue with communities, coordination with multiple layers of government, and a proactive, as opposed to reactive, approach to urban safety and security. They also targeted a combination of macro- and micro-level factors shaping city fragility.

Notwithstanding the popularity of the concept, the evidence base for urban resilience promotion is still comparatively thin.⁽⁷⁰⁾ On the one hand, there is considerable evidence that top-down, heavy-handed, or mano dura, approaches to preventing and reducing urban fragility are ineffective and may, in some cases, radicalize gangs and militia groups, including mara, pandillas and others that are common across Latin America and the Caribbean.⁽⁷¹⁾ In some cases, this may even consolidate their authority and contribute to their shift to more organized crime. As signalled above, there is some clear evidence that gang truces, while yielding short-term dividends in violence reduction, can also contribute to strengthening gang networks, resulting in longer-term violence in cities. Urban stabilization activities, while generating some improvements, have often also been highly spatially and temporally specific in terms of real and perceived violence reduction. This is not to say that they do not work, but rather that better evidence of intended and unintended impacts is required.

Meanwhile, there is mounting data to show how so-called second generation and interim stability activities that work to reinforce local institutions and capabilities may provide a more effective way forward.⁽⁷²⁾ For example, youth violence prevention activities, particularly those emphasizing early childhood and after-school programmes, have registered positive impacts in a variety of urban settings.⁽⁷³⁾ Likewise, urban regeneration and improvement schemes that focus on the built environment – including improved lighting, better-designed social housing, mixing neighbourhoods and physical connectivity – are, in some instances, offering important returns.⁽⁷⁴⁾ Ultimately, a basic requirement of future interventions is the introduction of big and small data-monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. As strategists such as Kilcullen have noted, future stability efforts will need to involve local people to address problems that neither outsiders nor locals alone can solve.⁽⁷⁵⁾ This will require harnessing the insights only neighbourhood residents can bring, together with outsider knowledge from fields such as urban planning, systems engineering, renewable energy, conflict resolution and mediation.

V. Concluding Reflections

Cities are re-emerging centre-stage in debates on counter-insurgency, stabilization, crime prevention and development. To be sure, urbanization and security promotion have a shared heritage. For centuries, the clustering of populations into cities, towns and villages has been accompanied by parallel measures to pacify urban residents and contain violence. Historians such as Muchembled have shown the ways in which cities are connected over time to the pursuit of security and safety by the wealthy at the expense of the poorer periphery.⁽⁷⁶⁾ For some scholars, a kind of wary urban pessimism is taking hold. For example, analysts such as Rapley contend that sprawling slums and townships in lower- and middle-income settings represent a new frontier of warfare.⁽⁷⁷⁾ Other commentators such as Harroff-Tavel describe how humanitarian agencies are confronting new and unprecedented challenges in certain cities, including those not traditionally considered to be in war zones.⁽⁷⁸⁾

Urban settings are being recast as sites of engagement whose density, vulnerability and unpredictability demand new paradigms of intervention. Some academic critics are justly concerned with the tendency to “secure” cities and their wealthy suburbs for the exclusive benefit of the elite and middle class against the urban poor.⁽⁷⁹⁾ Notwithstanding important exceptions, there is comparatively less focus in policy and practice on addressing structural factors that give rise to fragility, much less in developing more inclusive social contracts, responsive services and resilient systems of urban co-existence. What everyone agrees on, however, is that a massive demographic shift is giving rise to fragile cities. Some of these cities, particularly those located in lower- and middle-income settings, are experiencing “epidemic” rates of violence, defined as more than 10 murders per 100,000 people per year. And while it is important to maintain a critical distance from generalizations about fragility, there are nevertheless good reasons to believe that the fragile city has arrived.