New frontiers in twenty-first century urban conflict and violence

I. Introduction: Beyond the Roadmap

It is 10 years since Environment and Urbanization’s first special issue on “Urban violence and security” (Vol 16, No 2, October 2004). The “lethal violence and its associated fear and insecurity” that was noted back then continues to escalate in cities across the world, such that many of the issues written about in 2004, including the “introductory roadmap”,⁽¹⁾ are still highly relevant to both research and policy agendas today. Given the well-known fact that more than half the world’s populations now live in urban areas, and that violence, poverty and inequality are inextricably interconnected,⁽²⁾ there is an urgent need for new insights – both new thinking as well as practical answers. The danger in editing a second special issue (this time with Cathy McIlwaine) could so easily be to end up with “more of the same” knowledge production. While there are certainly some continuities, a decade later, fundamental changes have also taken place. The papers in this issue, therefore, intentionally seek to push the boundaries through discussing issues either not identified or not prioritized a decade ago, while also reflecting on reasons why these changes have occurred. This introduction sets the scene by tracing the contours of these new frontiers in theoretical positions, empirical realities and successful practices in relation to urban conflict and violence.

II. New Violence Realities of Twenty-First Century Cities

Ten years ago, there was optimism that violence could be reduced through a better understanding of the phenomenon, additional resources and a marked policy shift towards safety and security.⁽³⁾ Violence, like poverty, was seen as yet another development problem or constraint that could be challenged and overcome, as reflected in the myriad of academic studies that have proliferated over the past decade.⁽⁴⁾ Although the World Bank showed little interest in urban violence,⁽⁵⁾ UN–Habitat’s 2007 Global Report⁽⁶⁾ reflected the more general concern of other international development institutions in this regard. Indeed, following in the footsteps of development agencies, international humanitarian organizations (IMOs) have recently entered the field of urban violence, as described by Simon Reid-Henry and Ole Jacob Sending in this issue of the Journal. Their involvement is based on “… a set of procedures that establish parameters within which something is identified, made into a problem ⁽⁷⁾ and acted upon as a humanitarian concern …”, such that, as Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees has commented, “… increasingly, cities will be the main site of humanitarian response to the needs of the population.”⁽⁸⁾

a. From violence reduction towards its management and contestation

Today, in 2014, while it may be considered controversial, we need to adopt a different positionality and to recognize that urban violence is not going away. Indeed, violence is an integral part of the current model of development itself. While it may deepen, transform and mutate into unforeseeable forms, violence is here to stay. Recognizing this may be the first step towards a new approach that enables those who are more vulnerable and affected by violence not only to manage and control the daily manifestations of violence they experience, but, more importantly, to empower them to contest and confront the structural causes that lead to violence.

For some this idea is not new; since Hannah Arendt’s seminal 1969 thesis⁽⁹⁾ on the relationship between power and violence, political scientists have recognized the omnipresence of violence. Thus Bates, in his historical analysis of prosperity and violence, argues that “… coercion and force are as much a part of everyday life as are markets and economic exchange […] In the process of development […] it becomes a means for promoting the creation of wealth.”⁽¹⁰⁾ Ailsa Winton provides a similar contemporary perspective on this in her review of gangs in this special issue of the Journal. Citing Nateras Dominguez,⁽¹¹⁾ she argues that myriad violence becomes a “… language in the geography of the metropolis …” such that “… far from being an aberration – it in fact makes sense within daily practices.” Indeed, violence itself has been informalized and sub-contracted such that, as Hagedorn reflects, “… the proliferation of groups and networks of armed young men thus may be a normal feature of late modernity.”⁽¹²⁾

Because violence is an endemic systemic phenomenon, there are no blueprint solutions. Nevertheless, important new initiatives continue to address this challenge. The current expanding investment in research on the issue, for instance, such as the recent impressive IDRC DFID-supported US$ 11 million programme on Safe and Inclusive Cities that seeks “… to better understand complex causes of urban violence and find practical solutions”,⁽¹³⁾ will undoubtedly provide important documentation on violence and crime in under-researched cities in African countries such as Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Côte d’Ivoire. However, it is unlikely that the “good practice” intervention measures identified will be successful much beyond micro-level contexts. Even in cases where some success is achieved, such as the case with police reform in El Salvador, this is invariably short-lived.⁽¹⁴⁾ Indeed, the early optimism among development practitioners that violence could be addressed as a time-bound issue is fast disappearing. This has implications for research, policy and programmatic interventions; it makes it important to move beyond descriptions of causes, costs and consequences and the provision of checklist solutions; it requires a more nuanced understanding of the historical, geographical, spatial and structural complexities as well as a more realistic assessment of what can and cannot be done to reduce, better manage and contest violence.⁽¹⁵⁾ Two important questions need to be addressed:

• Where is the evidence to support the rationale for this seismic shift from representing violence as a solvable problem to recognizing that it is an intractable component of development itself?

• How does this shift in understanding change violence-related policy and programme interventions?

The following sections seek to address these questions through the identification of a number of “new frontiers” relevant to addressing these challenges, reflected in the different papers in this issue as well as in references to new policy-focused research completed by the authors of this Editorial.

III. Broadening the Agenda: Connecting Urban Conflict and Violence

The change in this special issue’s title from the 2004 title of “Urban violence and insecurity” to “Conflict and violence in twenty-first century cities” is in no way arbitrary; on the contrary it reflects a profound recognition that conflict is now of greater critical importance in increasing numbers of cities in the global South than it was in the past, even if it has always been present in some form. While the so-called “peasant wars of the twentieth century” identified by Wolf⁽¹⁶⁾ were quintessentially rural in nature, particularly during that century, conflict has transferred from rural to urban areas. In addition, the discourse has shifted from “fragile states” to “fragile cities”, epitomized by terms such as “urban wars”⁽¹⁷⁾ and “slum wars”.⁽¹⁸⁾ What we are witnessing, as Arjun Appadurai sensationally comments, is “… the implosion of global and national politics into the urban world […] with scenarios of unrelieved urban terror.”⁽¹⁹⁾

The fact that cities are defined increasingly not only by violence but also by conflict is reflected in the inclusion in this issue of a number of papers that extend or broaden the remit of “problematizing” urban violence. This is most evident in “post-war” or post-conflict cities in which “new” forms of violence have emerged. For instance, in the case of Juba, which became the capital of Southern Sudan after hostilities ended in 2005, Gabriella McMichael discusses the ways in which “land violence” has replaced armed conflict, as a range of civilian IDPs and military ex-soldiers compete in the struggle over access to land as an increasingly scarce urban resource.⁽²⁰⁾ By contrast, in the case of “post-invasion” Kabul, Daniel Esser focuses on long-existing categories of urban violence and highlights the distinction between the high visibility of “infinitesimal” spectacular insurgent attacks and the making invisible of what he terms “domestic abuse”, especially of women and boys, which he argues constitutes the main threat to physical well-being.

Despite the growing conflation of conflict and violence in cities, it is very well known that cities in post-conflict contexts are clearly not the only ones dealing with gratuitous violence on a daily basis, as widely discussed in the previous issue on violence. Complementing this evidence, Robert Muggah, in his review of fragile cities in this issue, cites evidence that 46 of the top 50 most violent cities in the world were not in fact experiencing armed conflicts in 2013. Yet in the shift from “fragile states” to “fragile cities”, cities are now being reconceived as the primary sites of “… tomorrow’s warfare and development.” Reid-Henry and Sending, also in this issue, maintain, furthermore, that violence in cities is beginning to “… resemble classic armed conflict situations …”, and that this has become the justification for humanitarian aid to now include urban violence within its remit.

a. Extending categories beyond the roadmap

A key aspect of broadening the agenda to focus more explicitly on urban conflict has been an expansion and multiplication of the categories of violence beyond political, institutional, economic and social violence used in the 2004 roadmap, while building on these or incorporating them into other concepts. For instance, the London School of Economics’ Cities and Fragile States programme, with its urban conflict focus, differentiates among sovereign conflict (where international actors are directly and explicitly involved in warfare; civil conflict (violent conflict between two or more politically or militarily organized groups within sovereign boundaries); and civic conflict (the violent expression of grievances vis-à-vis the state or other actors), which are “… deeply political as well as being social or economic.”⁽²¹⁾

In this issue of the Journal, examples come from Alfredo Rodríguez et al., who in their paper on violence and inequality in neoliberal Santiago, Chile, combine roadmap categories with Galtung’s distinction between visible and invisible violence, and within them a relational triangle of three forms of violence identified as direct, structural and cultural. Another contribution is provided by Winton’s review of gangs from a global perspective, in which she describes the foundations of youth gangs less in terms of criminality and more in terms of identity politics and resistance in a wider context of exclusion. Winton explains that this requires a shift from identifying violence as individual, isolated socially aberrant acts, towards an understanding of the intersection of structural violence (the exclusion from legitimate means of making a living) and symbolic violence (stigma).

b. Introducing new conceptual frameworks connecting violence and conflict

Another key aspect of broadening the agenda on urban violence to include conflict is to recognize the symbiotic relationship between urban conflict and violence. These intersections have challenged researchers to theorize beyond single categories and causalities and to construct conceptual frameworks specifically focusing on the interconnections between conflict and violence. One such example is a University of Manchester research project on Understanding the Tipping Point of Urban Conflict (UTP) recently completed by Caroline Moser and Dennis Rodgers, together with colleagues in four cities in the global South.⁽²²⁾ Here, the underlying rationale was that cities are inherently conflictual spaces in that they concentrate large numbers of diverse people with incongruent interests within contained spaces. This conflict is more often than not managed and/or resolved in a peaceful manner through a range of social, cultural and political mechanisms, but can sometimes lead to violence when such mechanisms cannot cope.⁽²³⁾

In order to comprehend the interrelated dynamics of urban conflict and violence in an innovative way, the analytical framework introduced two concepts not previously included in violence-related research. First was the conception of the potential transition from conflict to violence in terms of a “tipping point”, a notion that goes back to the 1950s and refers to the moment a given social process becomes generalized rather than specific in a rapid rather than gradual manner. This usually occurs when a social process acquires a certain critical mass and crosses a particular threshold, but ultimately, as recently popularized by Gladwell, it is “… the possibility of sudden change.”⁽²⁴⁾ Second was the concept of “violence chains” to explore how different forms of violence that are generated by tipping point processes interact with each other in a knock-on effect. The concept of a violence chain was inspired by that of a commodity chain, and was used to highlight the way in which violence operates systemically and involves a range of interconnected processes.

Research findings in different contexts illustrate the explanatory power of these concepts. For instance, in Kenya’s capital city Nairobi, the city profile identified the tipping point as the brutal political violence that took place after the 2008 presidential elections in which more than 1,000 people were killed, an event closely associated with the contestation of power among the dominant elites. Sub-city participatory violence appraisals, undertaken in three peripheral urban informal settlements, confirmed political violence as their primary concern; however, the concept of violence chains added texture and complexity, showing how in this context politics often tipped into violence relating to tribalism, political fights and loss of property. A further chain-related result identified the way in which political leaders and criminal gangs transformed landlord–tenant violence into ethnic violence. Communities with stronger, multiple chains were perceived as more violent. Here, ethnic violence was frequently the driver, determining the linkage from political to landlord violence.⁽²⁵⁾

In the case of Santiago, Rodríguez et al. identified two critical city-level tipping points; the first associated with the 1973 military coup d’état and the second in 1990, linked to the transition to democracy. In this study, the sub-city participatory violence appraisal, focused on “violence in the street and in the home” and, unusually for violence research, was undertaken in spatial communities representative of three income groups: a low-income “popular” social housing settlement; a middle-income neighbourhood; and an elite area. Contrary to perceived wisdom, research results showed that violence was not confined to poor areas; victims as well as perpetrators were found in all socioeconomic groups. However, factors influencing the tipping points of conflict and violence chains varied with the intersectionalities of place, income group and gender. In the low-income areas, violence resulted from exclusion and a lack of opportunities in interconnected chains of drug use, micro-trafficking networks, fights and shootings, and power struggles, generating high levels of fear and constraining men, women and children from using public spaces. Houses were also considered unsafe places, with their small size generating a chain of stress and frustration that led to violence in family relationships, child abuse and violence against women. While men were more affected by violence associated with fights, the use of weapons and conflicts between gangs, violence against women was more prevalent within the home, relating both to patriarchal gender relations but also to drugs – both the conflict associated with illicit drug-dealing and violence between drug users and other household members. In contrast, in the middle-income area, in a context where households struggled to improve their lot and suffered high levels of family breakdown, violence against women within couples was explained in structural terms, as a result of the “stress that we live as a society”. Finally, in the elite area, the priority concern was the chains linking direct forms of economic violence, such as assaults, house burglaries and car thefts, with a fear of the “other” as different, poor and violent, creating feelings of insecurity and a perception of the community as unsafe.⁽²⁶⁾

IV. Contradictions Between Spaces and Scales of Urban Conflict and Violence

The last decade has also witnessed a fundamental increase in the focus on both the space and scale aspects of urban conflict and violence, but with important inherent contradictions. On the one hand, the built environment of cities has become more spatially divided by fear and insecurity; on the other, the scale of violence and conflict has expanded beyond the city such that it is “… now fuelled and sustained by transnational networks that can be global and local at the same time.”⁽²⁷⁾ Both factors are reflected in many of the papers in this issue.

a. Spaces of urban conflict and violence

In identifying the pathways to urban fragility, Muggah argues this is neither inevitable nor linear; fragility can affect different places differentially. Thus, ostensibly stable and functioning areas of cities can, and frequently do, co-exist alongside fragile and violence-affected spaces. Cities continue to be increasingly spatially divided by the pervasiveness of perceived insecurity as much as by real insecurity, as noted by the elite groups in Santiago described above.⁽²⁸⁾ In addition, ecological and demographic assumptions behind accounts of urban global “slums” continue to identify them as inherently dangerous spaces,⁽²⁹⁾ with the associated reshaping of the built environment through the creation of gated communities, walls, railings and other dividers that generate spaces of exclusion and so-called “infrastructural violence”.⁽³⁰⁾

Another spatial element of urban violence relates to the spatial diversification of gang structures across institutions, particularly, as Winton describes in her paper in this issue, with increased recognition of the role of prisons in street gang organization. Drawing on Latin American examples, she shows that this can manifest itself in different ways; for instance, what began as prison gangs can gradually morph into organized criminal gangs; prison gangs themselves can operate territorially outside the prison; finally, the prison can become an extension of street gang territory. In the case of Central America, the increasing incarceration of gang members means prisons now create alternative organizational spaces for gangs, in which gang members from across the country come together and become a “… sort of standing assembly where they debate, make pacts and decide on structures, strategies and ways to operate.”⁽³¹⁾ As Winton concludes, “… mass incarceration serves not to dismantle gangs but rather to reinforce and transform the ways they operate.”

A more positive contribution to the discussion on urban space is the increasing emphasis on spatial policy relating to gender-based violence. In their historical reflection on partnerships for women’s safety in cities, Carolyn Whitzman et al. in their paper in this issue recount the impressive experience of the Greater London Council in the 1980s in spatially addressing women’s fear and insecurity through transport planning, the design of housing estates and the inclusion of women in consultation processes. These strategies went on to inform the development of women’s safety audit guides in cities across Canada and Europe, later extended to the global South, and finally to influence the spatial focus of the 1996 UN–Habitat Safer Cities programme as well as the 2002 UNIFEM Cities Without Violence Against Women: Safe Cities For All programme implemented in a number of Latin American cities.

b. Changing scales of urban conflict and violence

While the critical location of conflict and violence has shifted from the nation state to city level,⁽³²⁾ simultaneously cities themselves can no longer be theorized as local, bounded entities that are separated from the rest of the world. The “rescaling” of cities and organized crime in relation to one another, or the “scalar politics of security” as Esser terms it in his paper in this issue, determines the visibility and invisibility of different types of physical violence. In the case of Kabul, Esser argues that these are rooted in the international political economy of military intervention and subsequent state-building efforts, and are “… disembedded from local realities” such that they transcend the urban scale.⁽³³⁾

In her review of urban gangs, Winton identifies the shifting of the scale and nature of gang networks with boundaries between different types of gangs and armed groups becoming increasingly blurred in many contexts, as street gangs evolve into more organized, “institutionalized” and progressively violent groups, some with supranational reach.⁽³⁴⁾ At the same time she suggests caution. Citing the Central American maras, the so-called transnational gangs born in the streets of Los Angeles and now with clikas throughout northern Central America, she argues that their transnational elements are more relevant as a vehicle of gang identity than as evidence of any significant transnational organization – even if their very existence and apparent transmutability speaks of a new kind of gang, born of the intertwining of new complex global–local processes.

Another important dimension of the scale of urban violence and conflict beyond the city in the global South relates to transnational migration and the resultant creation of transnational linkages among diasporic groups abroad. As Cathy McIlwaine shows in this issue with reference to urban Colombia, transnational migration or displacement is a significant outcome of violence and conflict as people manage their experiences of insecurity. To date, most research has focused on the way in which armed conflict has led to the forced migration of refugee populations across international borders, as well as IDPs.⁽³⁵⁾ In contrast, McIlwaine highlights how forced and voluntary transnational migration is also a response to everyday violence.⁽³⁶⁾ Thus cities in the global South have porous violence and conflict boundaries, not only in terms of rural–urban linkages but also, and less recognized, in terms of transnational mobilities. Such transnational linkages are reinforced by the financial remittances that flow back to cities of the global South and fund “infrastructural violence”⁽³⁷⁾ as well as further migration. For migrants in cities of the global North, ironically, fear and insecurity from violence is often replaced by anxiety and discrimination associated with living without legal papers, but it is made invisible in Northern cities such as London.⁽³⁸⁾

V. Gender-Based Violence As a New Dominant Global Agenda

Gender-based violence (GBV), violence against women and children (VAWC), or intimate partner violence (IPV), as it is variously known, has long been a priority of feminist researchers and practitioners.⁽³⁹⁾ Increasingly in the last decade, however, it has become identified as a mainstream concern not only in research, as demonstrated in the UTP,⁽⁴⁰⁾ but also in the policy domain, with its recognition as a human rights violation and development challenge. Within the UN system, for instance, in 2008 the Secretary General launched the global campaign UNiTE to End Violence against Women; also, UN–Women identifies ending violence against women and peace and security as two of their seven core areas of work; and the 2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security recognizes sexual violence against women as a core dimension of armed conflict (updated and reaffirmed in six subsequent UNSCRs, with the latest in October 2013 – resolution 2122 – expressing deep concern with the persistence of such violence in war and post-conflict contexts).⁽⁴¹⁾ At the same time, as Esser reflects in this issue, it can still so easily be made invisible due to the scalar politics of the global media, as is the case in Kabul.

Recent research has highlighted the diversity of GBV, with it occurring in different places and across scales. Within this, GBV tends to be more frequent and acute in cities of the global South, especially in urban “slums”.⁽⁴²⁾ Although it comprises predominantly physical and sexual violence among partners, it also includes non-partner violence and violence against children.⁽⁴³⁾ In relation to the latter, it is important to recognize that it is not just youth and gang violence that proliferates, but also the abuse of younger children, both in the home and in other sites such as schools.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Within the acknowledged constraints of accurate data collection, evidence shows that violence against women by male partners is less prevalent in urban than rural areas, while GBV by non-partners is higher in cities. However, these patterns are not clear-cut; nor is it proven that urbanization processes lead to GBV, although social, economic and institutional changes that accompany urbanization can affect the incidence of GBV. Features of the urban environment that heighten the exposure of women to “stress-induced violence”⁽⁴⁵⁾ include poor-quality and remote sanitation facilities, widespread sale of alcohol and drugs, and secluded, un-policed spaces with limited street lighting. These risks are further compounded by the types of urban occupations in which women engage, such as sex work and employment in export-processing zones where sexual violence against women is so common that it has been referred to as “femicide”.⁽⁴⁶⁾ At the same time, for women there are also positive aspects of living in cities; they have much greater freedom from social stigma and are more likely to seek help to address GBV both informally, through social support mechanisms, as well as through violence reduction projects and interventions that tend to concentrate in cities.⁽⁴⁷⁾ The fact that GBV cuts across both the different types of everyday violence as well as the various dimensions of urban armed conflict means that it is now firmly on the urban development policy agendas associated with states, international agencies and NGOs.

VI. Shifting Paradigms of Intervention

The policy approach matrix with its associated interventions, introduced in the first special issue in 2004,⁽⁴⁸⁾ continues to have relevance today in assisting researchers and practitioners to systematize information, set boundaries and identify both the potentials and limitations of interventions. However, as is already clear from the previous sections of this introduction, current recognition of the complexities associated with interventions reflects not only the limitations of blueprint guidelines but also differences in the context-specific positioning of a growing spectrum of new institutional “governance” actors⁽⁴⁹⁾ involved in the urban conflict and violence industry.

For this reason, it is important to conclude this introduction by returning to the question posed at the outset and to consider whether the shift from representing violence, and indeed conflict, as a solvable problem towards recognizing that it is an intractable component of development itself has changed the paradigm of policy and associated programme interventions. Indications to date are mixed. The lack of evidence limits any real assessment, while pointing to the urgent need for robust evaluation. Consequently, this concluding section is largely exploratory in identifying a continuum of interventions as follows:

• interventions to reduce conflict and violence;

• interventions to manage violence and conflict; and

• interventions to contest the structural causes of violence and conflict.

As a continuum, interventions with different objectives may also have overlapping outcomes. For instance, while it is not their aim, management interventions may lead to violence reduction. Nevertheless, in order to achieve results, their primary more modest objective it to implement pragmatic measures to manage and control violence.

Underlying this continuum are critical debates concerning tensions between “political” and “technical” (or “instrumental”) solutions that underscore the distinctions between reducing, managing or contesting violence. White’s adroit comment during the gender and development policy debates of the 1990s that “… what began as a political issue is translated into a technical problem, which the development enterprise can accommodate with barely a falter in its stride”⁽⁵⁰⁾ is equally relevant today for solutions to address urban violence and conflict. It also alerts us to the reverse, namely that practitioners may consciously choose technical management objectives as an entry point to achieve more transformative outcomes.

Papers in this issue provide important examples that illustrate this continuum and the associated political complexities. First are initiatives that identify conflict and violence as problems that can be solved. One interesting example, described by Muggah, is associated with the links between violence reduction and “resilient cities”,⁽⁵¹⁾ a concept that, even if inadvertently, draws on notions associated with climate change, such as risk and resilience. These refer to the capabilities of social actors at individual, household, civil society and state level to prepare for, respond to and recover from shocks and stresses associated with disasters and severe weather.⁽⁵²⁾ In the case of violence, their focus is on reversing fragility and promoting resilience through a “… range of hard and soft measures […] ranging from pacification programmes, proximity policing initiatives, to mediation and social capital promotion.”⁽⁵³⁾

However, as Reid-Henry and Sending note, the concept of resilience that is gaining traction in conflict-ridden contexts is, in itself, a manifestation of the relative de-politicization of violence and security. Enhancing resilience, while seen as a progressive bottom-up strategy rather than a top-down security response, is a coping strategy, not one of redistribution or political change. Thus, for instance, while humanitarian actors have moved beyond addressing symptoms of urban violence, Reid-Henry and Sending argue that the international humanitarian approach:

“… is approaching the city as a space to be secured and closed off, rather than enabled or opened up. And what is selected for intervention […] is not the structures themselves but those “local bearers” of structural problems […] such as the participants in programmes aimed at consciousness-raising, educational programmes, mobile clinics and so on.”⁽⁵⁴⁾

Further along the spectrum, practitioners increasingly recognize the importance of interventions that are based on the fact that violence is an integral part of development itself and that it is impossible or even potentially undesirable to eradicate violence altogether. As Diane Davis⁽⁵⁵⁾ argues, the difficulty of addressing its causes, with most interventions failing in the longer term, has resulted in recognition that the innovative management of violence in cities needs to be prioritized. However, interventions that focus on managing violence and conflict rather than reducing them are politically challenging and socially provocative and not easy to identify, promote or sustain. At times they can also be criticized as neglectful with regard to the very real daily problems experienced by local households and communities in violent and conflictive urban contexts.

Interestingly, it is in the field of gang-related solutions that this approach is especially advanced. As Winton has argued, greater understanding of the structural contextual, rather than causal conditions in which gangs exist has led to the recognition that gangs are responsive to changing economic and political structures. “As new global processes exacerbate existing inequalities and create new ones, gangs may be seen as a barometer of increasingly widespread societal failings.”⁽⁵⁶⁾ Once gangs are seen as “… institutional actors within this new urban drama”,⁽⁵⁷⁾ they are also recognized as part of fundamental societal change. While gang-related interventions are not new in and of themselves, it is the manner in which they are implemented that is innovative, working as they do with the structure of gangs rather than trying to dismantle them. The willingness to “engage with gangs themselves” shifts the approach from one focused on violence reduction to management.

At the other end of the continuum, an example from GBV policy describes an innovative partnership approach to contest GBV and achieve structural change. Whitzman et al., in their paper in this issue, show how interventions need to be multi-pronged if GBV is to be managed effectively. Their partnership framework uses the metaphor of “four legs for a good table” to focus on the combination of four categories of actors: elected officials who function as “champions”; public servants who can be valued as “enablers” (sometimes referred to in this context as “femocrats” or feminist bureaucrats); community-based groups as “advocates”; and, finally, researchers as “information brokers”. This means paying closer attention to the most appropriate scale for policy action,⁽⁵⁸⁾ with a recognition that a reliance on local strategies to achieve the goal of reducing GBV and fear of violence needs to be interlinked with actions to contest and confront GBV at regional, national and supra-national scales. In addition, it shifts the focus from individual to collective solutions, moving, for instance, from individualized security measures such as carrying pepper sprays or learning self-defence to those identified through collective consultative process in which women identify their right to live, work, move around and participate in the city.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Using experience from the global North and South as well as the international level, Whitzman et al. provide detailed evidence of partnership processes in which the combination of actors has the potential to mobilize sufficient power, information and resources to create the kind of urban social change that can promote gender equity, diversity and inclusion.

Finally, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the Viva Rio project seeks simultaneously, or sequentially, to address all three objectives across the continuum. As Mariam Yazdani et al., in their paper in this issue state:

“The goal of Viva Rio’s project Tambou Lapè in Bel Air is to ‘reduce community violence and to manage and transform conflict’⁽⁶⁰⁾ in the intervention area. As a stabilization strategy, the project works with local power structures through a process of peace negotiations between local community leaders; it also facilitates the implementation of other community projects, thus solidifying the process of stabilization and development as well as the presence of Viva Rio in the neighbourhood.”

Following the signing of a peace agreement by rival leaders of four areas of Greater Bel Air, together with important dignitaries, Viva Rio’s director, Rubem César Fernandes and journalists implemented a highly innovative “incentive” programme that combined peace and education. After one month free of homicides, Viva Rio offered scholarships to children and adolescents in a lottery-based selection procedure; if a conflict-related violent death occurred, the lottery draw was suspended for the month. After two months without a violent death, the programme offered vocational training grants to members of rival groups (bases). Every month without violent death – whether for collective or personal reasons – a lottery draw award was granted to the leaders of the bases, in recognition of the safety advances made in Bel Air. Awards varied and sometimes included motorcycles, which are a symbol of prestige.

This is only one component of an extensive programme of interventions undertaken by the Viva Rio project in Haiti over the past 10 years as part of a South–South knowledge transfer. A community development methodology originally developed in Brazil over 20 years of working in favelas has been adjusted to the Haitian context to work “from within” and in collaboration with the community. This allows the organization to actively confront its “outsider status” and grants it the opportunity to be more spatially and socially connected to realities on the ground to combat the violence that has plagued the country.

VII. Conclusions: Dilemmas in Addressing Sensationalism of Urban Conflict and Violence

A consistent theme running through recent research, including the papers by Winton, Muggah and Esser in this issue, is a very real concern, across cities, categories and political contexts, with the exaggeration and sensationalism that is encroaching on this area of policy-focused work.⁽⁶¹⁾ This produces a dilemma; while the global media attention given to the tragic gang rape issue (especially the case of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi⁽⁶²⁾) was essential in raising awareness of this profoundly severe manifestation of urban violence, sensationalizing can create backlashes in terms of implementing policies to actively address only this type of GBV and neglecting others. Similar debates have been aired even more recently in reaction to the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in June 2014 in terms of the neglect of everyday rape in contexts where there is no armed conflict. As part of this, the inclusion of violent conflict into the field has served to eclipse more mundane everyday causes of victimization in cities. Yet these endemic forms of violence erode urban dwellers’ quality of life much more than what can be conceived of as sensational violence by predominantly Western policy makers and the media.

Therefore, the introduction to this issue of the Journal not only outlines the new frontiers of understanding urban violence in relation to the increasing intersectional and scalar complexities of urban violence and conflict since 2004, but also makes a plea to challenge the “apocalyptic” type of arguments that are promoted around the increasing prevalence of such violence. It is worth remembering that violence is imagined and framed by global discourses as much as other facets of development, if not more so. We need to embrace and address complex local and transnational realities of urban violence and conflict in pragmatic ways. This will entail first, conducting more high-quality, evidence-based empirical research in order to grasp the nuances of such phenomena; and second, recognizing that interventions to reduce urban violence and conflict may realistically involve their management rather than their eradication.

Feedback on Previous Issues

This issue of the Journal presents four case studies on water governance – in eThekwini Municipality (South Africa), Guarulhos (Brazil) and Lima and Arequipa (Peru). These are part of a research programme that examined new configurations in urban water governance, and a comparative analysis drawing on these case studies was published in the previous issue of Environment and Urbanization (Vol 26, No 1, April 2014). All four case studies have an interest in the extent to which state responsibilities for the management of water resources have shifted to regional bodies, and water and sanitation provision to local governments.

In South Africa, the rescaling of responsibilities in water governance has enabled strong water services authorities such as eThekwini’s Water and Sanitation Unit to have a leading role in shaping water and sanitation policy. Yet water governance in the city is complex, shaped by the interactions of multiple social, economic, political and environmental relations in a fast-growing city that still reflects the legacy of apartheid. This paper explores the four dominant water governance discourses evident in the municipality, namely “water as a human right”, “water as an economic good”, “the spatial differentiation of service provision” and, finally, “experimental governance and incremental learning”, which frame the current approach.

The paper on Guarulhos (Brazil) examines the innovations in water governance, which include decentralization of responsibilities and the formation of participatory, deliberative institutions for water basin governance, and considers the limitations, including underlying power inequalities and major decisions taken outside the new deliberative bodies.

The paper on Lima (Peru) considers concertación processes in water and climate change governance and how these processes of knowledge construction contributed to transitions in water governance and climate change adaptation strategies. The paper on Arequipa considers continuities and changes in water governance, which include a shift towards a new water governance system with the creation of a river basin council. But the growing participation of a large mining company in financing water-related infrastructure, and its alliances with other actors, might challenge the potential of the new participatory council to represent equally the interests and views of all its members.

Gautam Bhan’s paper on the “impover-ishment of poverty” explores the mechanisms through which democratic urban polities produce, maintain and reproduce inequality. It does so by looking at case law from 1990–2007 in New Delhi, where a seemingly relentless series of evictions of poor illegal settlements (colloquially known as bastis) were ordered by the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India in Public Interest Litigations. He argues that case law on evictions makes visible not only the claims to the city of an insurgent urban elite but also the simultaneous “impoverishment of poverty”. This impoverishment is marked by a reduction in the efficacy of poverty and vulnerability as the basis of claims made by subaltern citizens to elements of citizenship, i.e. the determination and distribution of rights and needs, access to resources and entitlements and a place within narratives of belonging and personhood. Making visible the multiple and particular processes of impoverishment is a critical part of a praxis that seeks to formulate effective resistance and imagine different urban futures.

Allan Cain’s paper on “African urban fantasies: past lessons and emerging realities” responds to Vanessa Watson’s paper on inappropriate city development plans to make “world-class” cities that was published in the previous issue of the Journal (Vol 26, No 1, April 2014). It describes how the government of Angola has been able to use financing from Chinese credit facilities to build prestige projects that include support for the public–privately developed Kilamba city with 20,000 apartments. This does nothing to address the very large backlogs in urban upgrading of basic service infrastructure and housing for the poor.

The paper on slum types and adaptation strategies in Bangalore (India) draws on an empirical analysis of the lived experiences of more than 2,000 households in different Bangalore “slums”. It shows how migration patterns, living conditions, livelihood strategies and prospects for the future vary widely across distinct types of slums that were initially identified from satellite images and were studied over a 10-year period. Shocks and responses vary in nature and intensity, and coping and accumulative strategies diverge across slum types. More fine-grained policy analyses that recognize this diversity of slum types will help people deal with shocks and increase resilience more effectively.

Mtafu Zeleza Manda’s paper is a case study of Karonga, a small town in Malawi “… where there is no local government.” It considers what this means for addressing disaster risk reduction. It describes the hazards and risks that the town faces from earthquakes, floods, strong winds and drought, and considers what locally appropriate methods could address these. It also discusses the limits of collaborative urban planning in the absence of an elected local government.