Urban violence beyond urban violence

Abstract

In this short essay, we respond to the insightful comments to our Urban Violence: Security, Imaginary, Atmosphere by Drongiti, Tedeschi, Silva and Fauveaud. We reflect with the extent to which our book has managed to dwell in and care for the paradoxes of urban violence. This allows us to reconsider the ethnographic limits of the book and restate a core element and epistemological building bloc of our proposal, namely the intention to combine political-economic and vital materialist lenses to provide conceptually, methodologically, and politically sound grounds for exploring the urban/violence nexus beyond urban violence in the strictu sensu.

As we write at the onset of 2025, being grateful to the four colleagues who have engaged with Urban Violence is no rhetorical gesture. The ashes of the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded in front of the Trump Tower in Las Vegas still warm, we are once again faced with the battle around the naming of a peculiar instance of urban violence: terrorism for some, the act of a madman for others and so forth. We indeed started the path that brought to this book from the issue of naming, directly asking: ‘what is urban violence?’ (Pavoni and Tulumello, 2020). Our aim, as Angeliki Drongiti perfectly puts it, was taking the challenge ‘to name, define, and move beyond existing approaches to both urban space and violence’. A task framed by the aspiration, as Miriam Tedeschi adds, of ‘doing justice to […] the excessive vitality of (urban) life’. Urban violence, we proposed, must be explored at this tentative, tensional threshold, where the socio-material infrastructures composing the urban hold together, often with asphyxiating effects on the collective.

Urban violence, we argue, can be understood as the ‘infra-structural’ (on the hyphenation, see Ch. 1, and Pavoni and Tulumello, 2024) force that debilitates the vitality of the urban. To be sure, we had no intention to provide an essentialising or conclusive definition of urban violence – the battle around naming shall go on. After developing a genealogical deconstruction of existing, often implicit understandings of urban violence, we set out to elaborate a strategic notion, one that would be ‘practically adaptable’, in Drongiti's words, and able to avoid the pitfalls that existing definitions fall into. Our invaluable allies have been the works of Rob Nixon, Lauren Berlant, Jasbir Puar, Christina Sharpe and many other creative endeavours of rethinking violence by questioning its temporality, ontology and experience.

Elsa Dorlin (2022[2017]: n.p.) recently proposed a history of violence that ‘begin[s] from muscle rather from law’, eschewing the political and moral question of legitimacy, and rather focusing on the ‘ethical’ – in Spinozian sense – understanding of self-defence as a ‘vital necessity, as a practice of resistance’. The pars construens of our work has been inspired by a similar sensibility: how to address urban violence from the point of view of the vital necessity for an urban collective to breathe?

In her commentary, Tedeschi captures the Spinozian gist of our proposal, at the same time as she makes our text intriguingly resonate with her research on data (in)justice in smart cities and algorithmic violence – another hint at the Cybertruck's smouldering wreckage. We started by defining and conceptualising the imaginary of urbanisation, that is, the socio-technical imaginary that accompanied the advent of modern urbanisation in the nineteenth century, and that we see as fundamental in shaping the contemporary understanding of urban violence. Thus, in chapter 8, we explored what form that has taken in the present, with attention to the overlapping of the dangerously idealised imaginaries of the smart and safe city. We found especially interesting Tedeschi's conclusive reflection on the paradox that the unavoidable violence of differentiation confronts us with. In the last chapter of our book, we engaged with this problématique by drawing on Spinoza's Tractatus Politicus, understood as an effort to politically preserve – rather than suppress, as Hobbes does – the collective power to act. Moving beyond Spinoza, we reflected on what would a different politics of urban security look like, one able to foster urban vitality while at the same time preventing its excess to overflow in violent ways. Instead of providing recipes for overcoming the paradox, we offered an attempt to ‘dwell in’ and ‘care for’ the paradox itself, following Tedeschi's expression – insightful readers often summarise the gist of an argument much better than its actual proponents.

Dwelling in and caring for the paradox. How could you summarise our ethico-political proposal better? The necessary attitude was prefigured by Derrida, who once said that ‘deconstruction […] is not a tool or technical device for mastering texts or mastering a situation or mastering anything; it's, on the contrary, the memory of some powerlessness […] [,] a way of reminding the other and reminding me, myself, of the limits of the power’ (1995[1992]: 385). This is an especially valuable suggestion in times of academic arrogance – researchers being constantly encouraged to boldly state the ‘original contribution to knowledge’ of their texts.

We are also aware that, at times, we have not let the paradox unfold completely. Moisés Lino e Silva promptly spotted this limit, lamenting what he saw as certain unwillingness to ‘give up some of [our] own power and control over the narrative and open [ourselves] up to the knowledge that emerges from other people's experiences of urban violence’. We listen, therefore, to his subsequent call to ‘leave our offices’ and immerse in the materiality of infra-structural violence – that is, to engage ethnographically with the atmospheric violence of the everyday. The suggestion resonates with another passage from Dorlin: ‘my own history and bodily experience served as the prism through which I listened, saw, and read’ (2022[2017]: n.p.). In fact, we believe that such experience has always been there for us, too. Our reflections on urban violence have been deeply shaped by our own experiences, personal and professional, in cities such as Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Memphis, London and so on. Many times, we felt that ‘unforgettable rush of blood’ Lino e Silva describes when entering for the first time Rocinha, and this corporeal and affective memory did shape our own writing.

Yet, in Urban Violence we have sparsely used direct references to the empirical material we collected throughout the years. Lino e Silva's remarks prompt us to ask: should we had planned a more ethnographic book? And, what kind of ethnographic material should had featured prominently? These are important questions, as empirical engagements on urban violence have often delimited its field of vision and understanding within concrete but often too specific instances. Both Lino e Silva, in his remarks on structural violence (2014), and we ourselves (Pavoni and Tulumello, 2020) have discussed this aspect already. Reporting from ethnographic work is always a filtering process. It is not, per se, a guaranteed way to open the conceptual field to a plurality of perspectives. Conversely, it tends to magnify certain lived experiences in certain (urban) settings – in this case, almost exclusively in large metropolises of the Global South. The decision to not anchor our arguments on any specific set of ethnographic engagements was a partial attempt at leaving our conceptualisation open to a plurality of material (topical, epistemological and methodological) engagements: to open a space to link urban violence qua violence to a plurality of meanings, fields and lenses – links we are glad to see in all the four comments.

Complementarily, we take Lino e Silva's remarks as an opportunity to clarify that our focus on violence beyond its immediate experience does not aim to deprioritise lived realities. Rather, it seeks to highlight how violence operates immanently as a force that shapes social relations. We sought to highlight how violence works beyond, and at times regardless of, the experience of violence. Regardless of the way it is ‘used’, that is, violence is already using the relations composing the social, as an infra-structural consistency whose violent effects, we believe, require a vitalist materialism to be not only pinpointed but also, in a sense, cared for. Terrorism – and the battle of naming around it – is a key dimension in this respect, one that most powerfully expresses the contemporary Zeitgeist.

Drongiti did engage with our notion of atmospheric violence vis-à-vis terrorism, crucially emphasising the possible methodological avenues that remain to be explored. ‘By focusing on the infrastructures of atmospheric violence – she writes –, we recognize terrorism as an act that disrupts an existing atmosphere and creates the potential for a new one’. This is especially the case in the context of the recent urbanisation of terrorism (cf. Fregonese et al., 2024), also taking into account the intersection between socio-technical imaginaries of security. Strategies aimed at eliminating fear often generate new fears, perpetuating a vicious circle of violence, unless the solution is the total securitisation – ultimately, the suppression – of life itself. Fear, vitality and urban space converge in the exploration of terrorism. Building on our own previous research (Tulumello, 2017; Pavoni, 2018), we believe that urban atmospheric violence provides a strategic way to address this problematic field without falling into the usual dichotomy between the paranoid fetishisation of terrorism and the naive dismissal of its danger. To put it with the Simondonian sensibility that Tedeschi (2020) develops in her own remarkable contribution to the topic, the urban is a fermenting space where pre-individual relations encounter and clash, where conflict is not necessarily desirable and yet cannot be suppressed, since that would entail suppressing that vital excess that makes urban life worth living. This excess, or what Brian Massumi terms ‘surplus-value of life’ (2019), is at the centre of contemporary urban politics, in a delicate and violent balance between its intensification for the sake of capitalist valorisation and its suppression for the sake of security rationales. This is one of the untenable contradictions that the taken-for-granted liberal principle of ‘balance’ – between security and freedom – presents us with. These contradictions are not abstract. They generate toxic frictions that urbanites increasingly breathe through. Exploring this dimension through the lens of atmospheric violence, as Drongiti suggests, appears promising.

In his commentary, Gabriel Fauveaud highlights both sides of our conceptual proposal: the reconceptualisation of violence – ontologically, epistemologically and ethically – and the suggestion to conceive urban violence beyond the limits of methodological cityism (cf. Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015). With an approach that resonates with Gabriel Feltran and his team's recent exploration of the global chain of cocaine and stolen car trade (Feltran, 2022), Fauveaud brings us to the obscure world of online scam and its violent logistics. By connecting the spatial and affective dimensions of violence from hidden compounds to the broader scale of planetary urbanisation, financial infrastructures and digital technologies, he illuminates the multi-dimensional and trans-local qualities of violence. His analysis demonstrates how urban violence is not confined to the immediate and phenomenological site of its experience as violence but reverberates through complex prolongations that shape bodies, spaces and life trajectories. We are grateful to Fauveaud for such an insightful application and expansion of our reflection, showing how his research converges with our own in ‘highlight[ing] the numerous entanglements between planetary urbanisation and the multidimensional nature of violence associated with it’. This is, in conclusion, a core element and epistemological building bloc of our proposal, namely the intention to combine political-economic and vital materialist lenses to provide conceptually, methodologically and politically sound grounds for exploring the urban/violence nexus beyond urban violence in the strictu sensu.