Epilogue: Rhythms and space-time of violence in and of the city

The epilogue interrogates the book chapters’ understanding of violence and the city. Both violence and the city seem to resist attempts towards conceptualisation. The authors’ thick empirical descriptions, however, allow to carve out temporal and spatial features of violence: In its direct, physical form, violence enacts space and shapes rhythms of life as it shrinks the experiential, emotional and agentic repertoires of victims, enforces docility and differentiates subject positions. In its organised form, violence unfolds enormous dynamics, sets people and things into motion, and accelerates movement. The immediacy, suddenness and speed of physical violence can be contrasted with the slow, indirect and gradual mode of violence’s sublimation into domination. This transformation materialises in technologies that control mobilities and direct movement (such as barriers, roadblocks and walls). Space is thereby contained and constituted as static and stable. Violence is therefore always inscribed in an urban imaginary that depicts the city as a spatially bound and distinct totality. In this reading, violence is neither taking place in the city nor is it of the city. Instead, it is generative of multiple material-time-space figurations that are assembled in different rhythms and speeds while differentiating lived experiences producing, among others, racialised and gendered bodies