The structural violence of spatial transformation: urban development and the more-than-neoliberal state in the Global South

Abstract

This Special Feature explores the socio-spatial transformations of cities in the Global South under hybrid neoliberal regimes over the last few decades, which have resulted in significant harm to poor and marginalised groups. Our focus is on identifying the nature of this harm as violence enacted through the very structures – cultural, social, political and institutional – that organise social life. We also aim to illuminate the often contradictory and negotiated responses – ranging from resistance to complicity – of the poor and marginalised populations that disproportionately face such violence. The papers presented offer case studies from four different cities in the Global South and demonstrate the emergence of a state-capitalist nexus around the pursuit of grandiose urban (re)development visions. This nexus is historically and socio-spatially specific but reveals an increased capacity, willingness, and even appetite, for enacting structural violence via diverse mechanisms over long temporalities through interplays between slow and spectacular forms of violence.

Keywords:

• structural violence
• urban development
• more-than-neoliberal state
• spatial transformation
• Global South

Introduction

Cities of the Global South have experienced significant socio-spatial transformations under hybrid neoliberal regimes in the last few decades which has caused significant harm to poor and marginalised groups. The core concern of this Special Feature is to name and elucidate that harm as violence enacted through the very structures – cultural, social, political and institutional – that organise social life. A related concern is to illuminate the often contradictory and negotiated responses – ranging from resistance to complicity – of the poor and marginalised populations that consistently face such violence. Structural violence reveals itself as ‘unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances’ (Galtung 1969, 171). Together the five papers substantiate the argument that structural violence is intrinsic to the ongoing production of space in cities of the Global South.¹

Papers in this collection pay special attention to the violence produced by the ‘secondary circuit’ of capital, or that of land and real estate, that is increasingly central to urban spatial restructuring. Southern cities experience a ‘persistent disconnect’ between capital and labour (Schindler 2017) leading municipal regimes to prioritise mega projects and infrastructure development over industrial development (Goodfellow 2018). ‘Deal-making’ around such projects emerges as a mode of hybrid state-capitalist governance that merges elite public and private actors in producing the city (Gibson, Legacy, and Rogers 2022). The papers from four different cities in the Global South reveal the emergence of a state-capitalist nexus around the pursuit of grandiose urban (re)development visions, one that is historically and socio-spatially specific but overall reveals the strengthened capacity, willingness, and even appetite, for enacting structural violence through diverse mechanisms and over long temporalities.

To understand the harm inherent in urban spatial transformations in the contemporary moment, we build on the longer conceptual history of structural violence that is rooted in the peace studies and medical anthropology literatures (Farmer 2004) but has, more recently, been extended to the fields of urban studies and anthropology. We conceive this Special Feature as building on, and extending, four strands of this scholarship. The first regards the infrastructural violence (Rodgers and O’ Neill 2012) that cuts across cities of the global North and South. The second extends Nixon’s (2011) ‘slow violence’ (violence that is incremental, accretive and less visible) to the urban fields of housing dispossession, renewal, gentrification and the urban trauma associated with such ‘wounding’, urbicide or anti-black geographical violence in cities of the global north (McKittrick 2011; Till 2012; Kern 2016; Cahill et al. 2019; Pain 2019). The third focuses on everyday state violence or institutional violence (Gupta 2012; Das et al. 2000; Cooper and Whyte 2018; Povinelli 2009) caused via bureaucratic or institutional administration that normalises suffering by withholding services or not enforcing health and safety standards. The fourth concerns state-led world-classing projects (Ong and Roy 2011; Burte and Kamath 2017), state-led informality (Roy 2011) and flexible planning (Gururani 2013) that have conventionally not been theorised as implicated in structural violence.

By drawing on these diverse strands of literature, we are able to identify and correct three discernible forms of usage that have limited the scope of the term ‘violence’ within urban studies in this Special Feature. First, violence is usually cast as a deliberate, physical, interpersonal act ignoring its structural roots as well as its specific urban and social nature. Second, state violence is usually cognised in the actions of an authoritarian state (cf. Das et al. 2000; Moser and McIlwaine 2014), associated with countries undergoing political transition, or by examining the relation of sovereignty and violence in studies of policies of war and punishment (Sarat and Culbert 2009). The structural violence of democratic states has not been adequately recognised as such. Finally, where structural violence has indeed been identified as salient in producing urban interpersonal violence, it has been limited by reading it mainly as deprivation arising out of poverty and inequality (cf. Winton 2004).

Our approach to the ongoing production of space uncovers political economies and social structures that contribute to the socio-spatial production of suffering. This opens up a fertile space for discussing the social distribution of, and the social responsibility for, this harm and possible pathways for creating more just cities. Papers in this collection challenge liberal visions of responsibility and redress, which focus on individual-level solutions, by highlighting the state’s role as a key actor and site of responsibility for addressing complex and multi-dimensional societal problems (Rodgers and O’ Neill 2012). They highlight how the state’s production of violence violates the very basis of its legitimacy in democracies which rests on the mandate of reducing structural violence.

We choose to approach the concept of structural violence in Southern cities (although it has traction in the North, as well)² as part of an explicitly political, decolonial project along two registers. First, widening the field of what constitutes and causes violences in cities of the global South can reveal the entanglement of the north through its role in instituting and structuring globalised processes of capital accumulation. Although the focus of this collection is on how the hybrid neoliberal agenda is mediated and unrolled locally in Southern cities, the North is implicated - implicitly - in the structural, and ultimately direct violence experienced by bodies and beings in Southern cities. At the same time, recognising and undoing diverse and entrenched modalities of structural violence indigenous to Southern contexts is also an equally important decolonial agenda (Nigam 2020). Second, the collection is also explicitly built from decolonising methodologies. These are employed in each of the four cities to study structural violence by widening the field of what constitutes evidence for it, and evolving alternative, more ethical methodologies for studying and presenting its lived experience.

The interplay of slow and spectacular violence

All five papers in this collection reveal both slow and more spectacular forms of structural violence acting in concert, although the relative balance across both varies in each paper. Spectacular violence is intimately connected to active interventions usually involving acts of explosive violence and resistance to this. The evictions and demolitions for building the Olympic City in Rio de Janeiro (Novais and Lobino 2023) or for modernising the Early Morning Market in Durban (Maharaj 2023) are examples of this type. Slow violence, on the other hand, is deeply bound to the withdrawal of care over long periods of time, a process that is rendered extraordinary by its lack of spectacularness. Structural violence, thus, often manifests ‘slowly’, through acts of mundane bureaucracy and administration (Gupta 2012). This is seen in Durban and Rio, although its modalities, content and forms vary.

Bureaucracies of harm

The key move in Durban was the abandonment of an existing participatory process of redevelopment (under the progressive Reconstruction and Development Programme adopted in 1994) in favour of a top-down, non-consultative, crony-capitalist, model for redeveloping the Early Morning Market into a mall under the neoliberal Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR, adopted nationally in 1996; see Maharaj 2023). The subversion of the participatory planning process under a neoliberal democratic order threatened to inflict worse harms, costs and risks on the low-income community of traders and employees than had happened under apartheid. During the apartheid era, non-participation manifested as managed neglect. Under a neoliberal democratic government, state agents utilised ‘techniques of absence’ (Centner 2012) to divide, exclude or further the secession of select groups from the participatory process, and advance unwanted and harmful redevelopment of the market. This form of participation as tyranny (Cooke and Kothari 2001) constitutes structural violence in contemporary Durban.

In Rio, the structurality of violence is revealed in the various ways in which the state sought to bend and twist its planning, policy and legal frameworks to displace a marginalised community, Vila Autódromo, from a newly high-value location that was chosen as the venue for key events of the 2016 Olympics (Novais and Lobino 2023). Here, the state operated in the gray areas of legislation – ‘without explicit legal grounds, even if not illegally’ – to stigmatise and marginalise particular groups and spaces. It thereby helped normalise the use of harsh technologies of intimidation and coercion to discipline these communities.

The slow violence of speculative waiting

Structural violence in Mumbai’s Kamathipura (Kundu and Satija 2023) turns on the stalemate - or non-realisation of - a particular form of redevelopment policy for formal but dilapidated buildings in that inner city ‘red-light’ neighbourhood in Mumbai. The stalemate is the site where structural violence is enacted by suspending redevelopment and generating uncertainty. The violence here is slow and imposes the suffering of chronic waiting upon its inhabitants due to the calculated neglect of Kamathipura’s rent-controlled housing stock. Slow violence facilitates the commodification of space via a particular redevelopment policy and associated amendments to the city's planning regulations that in turn incentivize a series of large-scale, privately-led redevelopment proposals. While these redevelopment proposals ultimately do not materialise, the uncertainty they set off is itself ‘productive’, unleashing new forms of everyday violence not just by state actors (harassment of sex workers by the police, for instance) but also increasingly by middle-class societal actors. This enables a fracturing of the historical pact of uneasy tolerance that had made this heterogeneous, low income neighbourhood a refuge for many marginalised groups.

Entrenching violent city-level regimes

The final two papers elaborate on the structural violences flowing from the city-level implementation of urban land-rent extracting and slum redevelopment policies in Ankara (Bayırbağ, Schindler, and Penpecioğlu 2023) and Mumbai (Bhide 2023), respectively. In contrast to the other three articles, these represent the scaled-up enactment of structural violence across the city through a single policy but one that is selective in its treatment of different neighbourhoods and social groups. In both, the authors powerfully assert that rather than analysing them as single policies, they need to be understood as regimes that entrench a new and oppressive social and spatial order.

Four of the five papers in this Special Feature build on the results of a three-year, collaborative, multi-sited South-South research initiative co-located in Mumbai, Durban and Rio de Janeiro. The collaborative process enabled the cross-fertilisation of concepts, languages and literatures across diverse colonial-to-neoliberal histories. The paper on Ankara (Bayırbağ, Schindler, and Penpecioğlu 2023) enriches the complexity of this field of comparison by illuminating cognate dynamics in a context radically different from that of societies that have undergone colonisation by Western powers - that of an imperial Islamic society. Collectively, the articles reveal strikingly similar mechanisms and outcomes by which violence is encoded structurally into spatial transformation across very different contexts, especially in relation to the role of the contemporary state.

In the next section we discuss how the range of violences - from the slow to the spectacular - are enacted by elaborating on three linked concepts and contentions that together form the theoretical framework of this collection as a whole: structural violence, the more-than-neoliberal state and the spatial moorings of structural violence.

Structural violence of spatial production by the more-than-neoliberal state

Structural violence

Farmer et al. (2006, 1686) offer one simple description of structural violence as:

 … social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people (typically, not those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities).

The entrenched legitimacy of these arrangements ensures that structural violence hides in plain sight. As the articles in this collection explain, it is embodied in the very initiatives and instruments of achieving social goods (including plans and laws) that are legitimately available to the democratic state. Here, it is crucial to make an important distinction from commonly discussed forms of direct, physical violence: in its structural form, violence need not be enacted intentionally or knowingly for it to work as such though it may also be so deployed. But though distinct from bodily and direct violence, structural violence is not necessarily disconnected from them. In fact, as Paul Farmer has long argued, structural violence underlies public health crises worldwide. Worse, consciously directed physical violence often accompanies the structural version, and lurks in the background of the papers here, making it deadlier still.

Structural violence manifests as two prominent, contrasting, and connected forms of lethality in the spatial restructuring of contemporary Southern cities featured here: spectacular violence (‘state killing’) and slow violence (‘letting die’). Spectacular violence we argue is brought about by actions of ‘state killing’ (Povinelli 2009) – active intervention on the part of the state and agents of capital in service of urban (re)development usually through perceptibly violent events involving coercion and then resistance to it. Slow violence on the other hand, drawing on Nixon’s (2011) formulation, involves actions that constitute either the withholding of care or the quiet violation of the barest rights and entitlements. These actions are so dispersed into the background conditions of everyday life that it is hard to call them events at all. This is a quieter and slower form of abjection, organised abandonment and impoverishment with no spectacular manifestation. Not surprisingly, with long dyings attributable to ‘natural causes’ a potential ethical response remains unformulated.

However, the delayed destruction of slow violence often creates the condition of possibility for spectacular and even direct violence – for instance, the imminent collapse of inhabited but poorly maintained, rent-controlled ‘cessed’ buildings in Mumbai ‘s Kamathipura – that then requires strong intervention in the form of redevelopment. In other cases, withdrawal of care is facilitated by intervening to amend planning bye-laws – e.g. diluting planning codes on light and ventilation for slum redevelopment in Mumbai, while in Rio, the state reveals violence by alternating between treating marginalised groups as citizens within the law and then as subjects outside the law that warrant exceptional treatment. The common pattern is that the strong face of the state typically involved in directing large redevelopment projects is deeply intertwined with the ‘weak’ face of the state that focuses on withdrawal of care (Burte and Kamath 2017).

This switching between two (of the many) faces of the state exemplified by spectacular and slow forms of violence is traceable in the papers to what other scholars have termed state-led informality (Roy 2011) which proceeds by differentially producing and managing spatial value, and flexible planning (Gururani 2013) where the ensemble of mechanisms used are often external to the domain of law but are mostly sanctified by the logic and practice of lawful planning. As Novais and Lobino highlight in the Rio paper, the marginal condition of Vila Autodromo residents subjects them to varied forms of state violence, often as subjects outside the law, as the state weaves between what is and is not legal thereby creating new conditions under which laws can be applied and disregarded selectively. Given the crucial role played by the state in enacting structural forms of violence, it is worth reflecting more on the nature of the state that emerges in the papers of this Special Feature.

A more-than-neoliberal state

Papers in this Special Feature collectively implicate the Southern state as being central to the production of both spectacular and slow violence in contemporary urban development. This is not a purely neoliberal state but one set at the intersection of neoliberal governance and state-capitalism. All articles in this collection reveal the disjuncture between neoliberalism’s discourse of free markets and how it works in practice – as anything but free. Papers point to the state’s substantial interventions in urban land-rent markets to shape and enable them in different ways, leading to hybrid governance configurations that reject competition in favour of deal-making that ‘melds together’ elite state and private actors (Gibson, Legacy, and Rogers 2022). Additionally, collective struggles over land, housing and infrastructure play a significant role in limiting, amending and even advancing neoliberal reforms in these cities. Southern cities thus show different variants of ‘more-than-neoliberalism’ (Gibson, Legacy, and Rogers 2022). As the papers in this collection reveal, these variants look different because of two related factors. One, they are mediated by specific historical, spatial and socio-political factors, and involve variegated temporalities of neoliberalism’s infrastructures. Two, these specificities variably condition the emergence and response of diverse configurations of actors to what are partial and unevenly felt neoliberal logics. More-than-neoliberal urban governance, then, is the assemblage of conditions that institutes structural violence.

State-led urbanisation is the fulcrum on which the violence of urban (re)development turns in all papers. The state certainly plays a strong role in deploying plans and laws that have violent consequences and in the ‘legitimate’ use of force. But perhaps more importantly, it builds symbolic consent for structurally violent schemes of urban redevelopment. For instance, by using inclusive rhetoric – urban rent posited as a ‘win-win’ in Ankara (Bayırbağ, Schindler, and Penpecioğlu 2023), or slum redevelopment as providing free housing for Mumbai’s poor citizens (Bhide 2023). Or claiming to ‘improve’ (physically and morally) hazardous living conditions of poor residents and traders, as in Mumbai’s Kamathipura (Kundu and Satija 2023) and Durban (Maharaj 2023), respectively. It also proceeds by widening participation – enlisting and co-opting other societal actors through differential techniques of incentivizing, intimidating and excluding. This simultaneously builds public sanction for violent actions and fractures the possibility of cohesive, unified resistance. State-led projects of urbanisation thus reveal assemblages of different state and nonstate actors at work in urban development projects as well as different agendas, roles, and degrees of control and legitimisation enacted by the state.

State-led projects of territorial transformation are often linked with projects of social engineering to ‘improve’ or ‘discipline’ particular social groups in featured cities, and reveal varying degrees and stages of accomplishment. The essays on urban land-rent extraction in Ankara (Bayırbağ, Schindler, and Penpecioğlu 2023) and slum redevelopment in Mumbai (Bhide 2023) reveal the increasing entrenchment of structural violence at city scale as a step towards achieving a new social order – a wider moral consensus on what kinds of city spaces, modes of inhabitation, and values are to be legitimately furthered and dismantled by state policy, planning and investment, and societal action. This sheds light on how projects of territorial transformation are being decoupled from ideas of welfare and poverty alleviation and this outcome is being naturalised. The creation of transformed physical space that encodes structural violence for some social groups is a core part of state-led projects of urbanisation, as the next section discusses.

Spatial moorings of structural violence

The structural violence of neoliberal urban development, as well as the nature of the resistance it evokes, is tightly (but not exclusively) moored to the spatial dimension. Lefebvre (1991) sees space as a system of social and physical relations. The spatial includes use values of the built and networked environment - for instance, ‘good settlement quality’ in Lynch’s (1984) schema - as well as the affordances and rights of occupation, exchange and development on the one hand, and the accumulation potentials associated with them on the other. A new social space is produced as much by changing particular physical spaces and relationships - through physical, legal or policy changes, for instance - as through the stubborn persistence or transformation of specific meanings associated with them.

At a basic level, geography itself shapes how structural violence plays out, who it affects to what extent and for whose benefit, in different ways across the papers. Historically peripheral and marginal urban locations have invited the more easily discernible violences of redevelopment in Mumbai (Bhide 2023), Durban (Maharaj 2023), Rio (Novais and Lobino 2023) and Ankara (Bayırbağ, Schindler, and Penpecioğlu 2023). In each, the new desirability of particular locations for state and market actions has been secured over the history of their stabilisation and valorisation by subordinate groups (from which also derives their capacity to resist, as we will see later). However, there is more to space than such geography. The drive to redevelop is powered by twin logics of realising: a) the enormous economic potential of land not under ‘highest use,’ usually for private profit under the legitimising project of b) particular ‘aspirational’ spaces and geographies of worlding (Ong and Roy 2011). The aspirational space could be a slum-free city (Mumbai), a ‘world-class’ urbanscape that can attract investment (Durban), the event of the Olympics (Rio), or a combination of these and other such spaces. It may even turn on moral sanitisation and restructuring of a red-light area, as in Kamathipura in Mumbai. If such an aspirational space may be considered a species of Lefebvre’s (1991) ‘conceived space’, the threat of what he calls the ‘devastating conquest of the lived by the conceived’ looms across papers. In particular, the spatial practice of the more-than-neoliberal state promises spatial forms of structural violence: dispossession, displacement and the destruction of an auto-constructed lived space that simultaneously enabled household consolidation and solidarity for the urban poor. The internal contradictions of the aspirational state projects and practices as well as resistance from affected groups may thwart this violence. Yet, the experience of being under threat, and of the struggle to avert it, subject resisting groups to other forms of structural violence, like stigma.

Structural violence: mechanisms, temporalities, responses and methods

We contend in this Special Feature that the spatial transformations cities in the Global South are undergoing under hybrid neoliberal regimes inflicts structural violence on marginalised groups. What specific questions and lines of enquiry does the research presented in this collection open up for current and future explorations of urban structural violence? In this section we reflect on four substantive themes that emerge from the papers here. First, we highlight the deployment of legitimate but often illegible mechanisms of enacting structural violence. Second, we suggest that the temporal range of structural violence is wide, covering both short and longer temporalities. Third, different social groups who face these violences show a bewildering array of responses characterised by contradiction and negotiation. These three themes contribute then to the fourth: the need for new methodological approaches. This involves thinking through the methodological implications for studying structural violence,.

Legitimate and illegible: mechanisms of structural violence

One reason structural violence hides in plain sight, as noted earlier, is because the violence takes unrecognisable forms. The same is true of the processes and mechanisms that encode and realise it. Diverse mechanisms are identified across the spatiotemporal canvas of the papers here, but also in the same urban moment, as for instance, in Mumbai (Bhide 2023). Remarkable similarities across very different contexts also jump out at the reader beyond contingent differences. Both, looking the same and different contributes to their relative illegibility as mechanisms of violence, and calls for more research on this aspect.

Legitimacy is a central feature of the mechanisms of structural violence, one that cloaks the harms it unleashes. In different ways across the accounts here, structural violence is produced out of socially and legally legitimate state actions (or non-actions). Ankara’s urban rent-distribution and Mumbai’s slum redevelopment schemes were both officially framed as initiatives of a state that was particularly responsive to popular aspirations and suffering. Planning and policy channel structural violence differently within and across cities according to their varying genealogies in relation to local histories and social structures. This is true even in a single city as in Mumbai, where the slum redevelopment regime has played out differently in Kamathipura as compared to the rest of the city.³

Beyond the state’s institutional and legal apparatus, the social (and cultural) domain emerges as a key force, arena and resource for the (co)production and channelling of structural injustice and harm. Thus, state policy and elite actors co-produced a situated hope as a political resource in Ankara (Bayırbağ, Schindler, and Penpecioğlu 2023). Aspirations for a culturally legitimate imperial Islamic lifestyle were kindled to consolidate a broad constituency to thereby increase AKP’s political power. In Rio, the media deployed pre-existing stigma around informal settlements to delegitimise the resistance of Vila Autodromo’s residents to forcible displacement being caused by the state’s ‘Olympian’ megaproject (Novais and Lobino 2023).

The motive force lent by stigma and hope - as socio-cultural phenomena - to violent policy trajectories across papers raises an important possibility: the illegibility of mechanisms of structural violence may be caused partly by the convergence of multiple, often normatively opposed rationalities, structural forces and actors in the design and practice of particular policy initiatives (Watson 2004). Particular socio-cultural rationalities that foster stigma and hope converge with regulatory ones (as in redevelopment policies across papers) to sow structural violence in Kamathipura and Ankara. This also implies the tacit, and sometimes uncoordinated, convergence of diverse actors who might be opposed to each other in different situations. This is evident for instance, when Kamathipura’s middle-class residents align themselves with the state-market’s violent redevelopment regime so as to be rid of neighbourhood stigma. This, in spite of their complaints about being at the receiving end of the structural violence of neglect practiced by the state in not repairing dangerous old buildings in its care (Kundu and Satija 2023). Structurally violent mechanisms therefore need to be understood at the intersection of the regulatory, legal and the socio-cultural domains.

Temporalities of structural violence

Since structural violence manifests in spectacular - or eventful - as well as slow modes, its temporality is clearly a crucial dimension to explore further. To begin with, history itself needs to be considered a factor or context that encodes or explains the operation of structural violence in the present. All papers here reveal the accumulation of effects - or actions of recurring events - in the same location, and their long-range operation, as a hallmark of this form of violence. Several articles (Kundu and Satija 2023; Maharaj 2023; Bhide 2023) explicitly highlight the importance of temporality through Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ while recognising its entanglement with more acute forms of violence, as in Ankara (Bayırbağ, Schindler, and Penpecioğlu 2023). Others more implicitly show that temporality matters, through the drawn-out consequences of the abdication of the state from its responsibility to protect poor groups - as, for instance, in Ankara, when the Ponzi scheme of rising asset value came crashing down on the heads of the city’s poor leading to displacement and withdrawals of public safety nets with more far-reaching consequences.

Tracing the longer historical arc over which structural violence is instituted implies close attention to continuities and ruptures over time. In Rio and Durban, authoritarian military and apartheid governments transitioned to democratic ones that were initially more inclusive and promised to redress past injustices. But they turned structurally violent with neoliberalisation, seeking to commodify the space of everyday livelihoods for their worlding agendas, thereby reprising various injustices of military or apartheid regimes. These serve to unwind the modernist narrative of linear progress, spotlighting the capacity of democratic regimes for causing structural violence. Other papers reveal a smoother trajectory of continuity and consolidation of historically sedimented inequalities although the mechanisms driving these differ over time. Kamathipura in Mumbai, for instance, has been configured as a space of exception and managed decline from colonial times (Kundu and Satija 2023). Whether revealing interrupted or smoother historical trajectories, taking a longer view highlights the fact that across all city contexts some social groups and spaces face disproportionate burdens. Stigmatisation of bodies and marginalisation of spaces takes different forms in different city contexts shaped by longer histories of oppression and hierarchy.

Contradictory and negotiated responses: resistance and complicity

When faced with structural violence, communities across the featured cities engage in multiple negotiations, revealing stances of both resistance and complicity that are often in tension with each other. These contradictory and dynamic responses are conditioned by the complex and evolving histories and neoliberal entanglements (threats and possibilities) that confront different social groups. All papers therefore reveal processes of resistance and complicity unfolding dialectically in relation to state-led structural violence. Local actors appear adept at leveraging the very mechanisms through which violence is enacted structurally just as the state responds by varying the mechanism and form of violence enacted. The owners of dilapidated buildings in Mumbai’s Kamathipura (Kundu and Satija 2023), for instance, harnessed the uncertainty and endless delays that harmed them to delay and eventually deter a damaging redevelopment process. The success of traders at Warwick Market (Maharaj 2023) in averting redevelopment turned on the delay and uncertainty their multi-pronged and multi-scaled resistance confronted the shallow horizon of a neoliberal land-rent extraction project with. Time as a scarce resource, is thus revealed as a key vulnerability of neoliberal land-rent extraction that local actors can and do leverage. Notably, however, this very vulnerability prompted the state’s turn to physical violence to break resistance and get projects going fast, as with slum redevelopment in Mumbai (Bhide 2023), and the Olympic project in Rio (Novais and Lobino 2023).

Moments of resistance and complicity are important to attend to because they shed light on the way the more-than-neoliberal state enables and enacts structural violence – both when thwarting opposition and enlisting participation from societal actors. It also reveals the internal fragmentation within affected communities as groups resist but also ‘participate’ in stretched-out moments of uncertainty. These often contradictory negotiations reveal the dialectical relationship between processes of dismantling and reassembling. Thus, the materialisation of the Olympic Park is tied to the dematerialisation of Vila Autódromo in Rio, and dismantling the basti in Mumbai enables more multi-storey commercial and residential towers to be developed.

Oppositional practice clarifies the precise content and contours of structural violence that would otherwise have remained invisible – the threat of or proposal to redevelop, for instance. The case of the Early Morning Market at Warwick, Durban, revealed that agency from below can preempt the threat of redevelopment, especially by leveraging the legitimacy of expecting participation based on precedent - in this case, that of having been formally consulted in the iTrump project.

Long occupancy in a location, and the social capital accumulated in the process, are also important sources of the power to resist, as revealed by the community of traders in the Early Morning Market and residents in Vila Autodromo. Additionally, when existing solidarities are being eroded, processes of resistance often involve a consolidation of solidarities around new collectives or imaginaries, such as the People’s Plan of Vila Autódromo or the multi-organizational coalition that had international support in its campaign against the redevelopment of the Warwick market in Durban.

When examining processes of resistance, however, we note that successes often remain contingent, localised and susceptible to reversal. In Durban, although the redevelopment proposal for the Early Morning Market was defeated by a coalition including marginalised traders, that victory remains vulnerable to being reversed. In Mumbai, the housing struggles of different poor groups played a part in housing becoming a political issue, but this then resulted in the violent slum redevelopment scheme as a political response (Bhide 2023). And even when redevelopment policy ‘fails’ in Kamathipura in Mumbai, it strengthens the consolidation of this new social order. The papers in this collection therefore provoke us to interrogate and complicate our understandings of resistance when considering structural violence. How do we measure the ‘success’ of resistance? How durable is resistance and ‘success’ under structurally violent conditions? Possibly, structural violence calls for multiple responses, often indirect ones (where direct ones are ineffective or end up pursuing decoys). Perhaps, then, developing a broader politics out of moments of resistance should be considered a necessary ingredient for confronting structural violence effectively?

Creative methodologies for unpacking the complexity of structural violence

The illegibility, slowness and legitimacy of structural violence calls for alternative and creative methodological approaches to unpack its complex pathways, and this collection makes important contributions in this regard. Authors significantly advance our methodological understanding by addressing three kinds of questions in their work: How do we study the structural violence of urban transformation? What subject-positions and research approaches and methods are necessarily called for? What counts as evidence?

Because it is often not recognised as violence nor is it always marked by ‘events’, studying the unfolding of structural violence requires a long and deep engagement in place, explicit attention to variable histories of structuration and more than one kind of expertise. Authors of this collection are all engaged in working in the geographies and with the featured communities over a long time period. This requires working in collaboration with community members, activists and others to piece together different kinds of data, and co-produce new knowledges and ways of knowing that seek to counter and expand established and official research and data. Three of the authors explicitly draw on their involvement as scholar-activists in the processes they analyse. Most authors have been/are part of larger collectives and oppositional campaigns in the cities they write about and speak from this embedded vantage point. Together this enables the analysis and representation of gradual, more illegible structural changes, while also acknowledging the need for more collaborative and co-produced methodological approaches in the study of such phenomena.

Foregrounding alternative ways of ‘measuring’ structural violence is critical to naming and analysing it. The core arguments of each paper in this collection are built up from the differential lived experiences of marginalised communities. By privileging what the sufferers of violence say about their experience and actively constructing it as violence that is socially organised and embedded, authors humanise and render tangible the tremendous human suffering that underlies the hitherto abstract domain of structural violence. Contributing authors learn from emotions experienced by sufferers – of pain in Durban or hope in Ankara – to grasp how these shape actions of agency and voice. Authors implicitly or explicitly therefore seek a more ethical engagement in their inquiry, in tune with their long-standing relations with these communities and neighbourhoods.

Since structural violence unfolds differently in different places, contributing authors reveal both dexterity and diversity in adopting conceptual and empirical entry points that are appropriate for the context. In Rio, a combination of action research, participant observation and the life-history method is used. In Mumbai, the long-term trajectory of the slum redevelopment policy is traced, juxtaposed alongside an extended understanding of the city, its basti (slum) geographies and the trajectories of popular struggles around housing. In Ankara, authors relied on an exegesis of the politics of hope that promised to include hitherto marginalised populations in the city’s economy and society to grasp how structural violence was enacted. In Kamathipura, authors combined tools of mapping, archival research and interviews to devise a feminist, intersectional approach that examined the multi-layered project of spatial and moral restructuring. In Durban, three years of participant observation was combined with documentary analysis over a series of meetings, consultations with lawyers and court hearings. Overall, the Special Feature makes a strong and unique methodological contribution – authors of the essays focus on the world of relations that connect state and nonstate actors in particular places, the long drawn-out processes of making and breaking that structure state-capitalist urbanisation assemblages, and reveal a nuanced understanding of how agency is distributed across multiple actors (Anderson et al. 2021). Taken together, these papers constitute more than the sum of their individual contributions from their respective ‘Souths’.

Conclusion: widening terrains of structural violence

This Special Feature broaches the lens of structural violence as essential to the critique of the more-than-neoliberal, state-driven commodification of space and restructuring of urban social life. The articles also reveal that structural violence, operating over long periods and through multiple forces, builds the conditions for and increases the propensity for other forms of violence (notably physical and symbolic) across the state-society interface and among different societal groups. Across the papers, various harms - spatial, bodily, symbolic, temporal - are visible in diverse structural initiatives and processes that target historically marginalised and disempowered groups. Through these modalities, a chronic state of crisis (Moreno-Tabarez 2021), especially for the weakest social groups, becomes ‘unexceptional, a matter of routine administration’ (Gupta 2012). The announcement and execution of spectacular infrastructure projects and policy initiatives compound the violence of routine administration. The structural payoff of a new and more unjust social order can itself lead to the expansion of direct and symbolic violence at various scales and involving various actors. Naming diffuse harm as structural violence is an important way of calling critical attention to and consolidating it in its various guises conceptually under a single rubric. This rubric casts a sharp light on a large but largely ignored problem, and calls for an effective restorative response.

The wide terrain of impacts and outcomes revealed in relation to a single empirical theme - urban spatial restructuring - only gets a foot in the door. We hope and trust that it fleshes out the promise that the lens of structural violence holds for wider scholarship concerned with thoroughgoing critique and correction of enduring harms not only in the urban, but extending to, the critical environmental, Black, Dalit, feminist and Indigenous geographies.

Acknowledgements

This Special Feature emerged out of conference panels we convened in 2019 at the ICCG in Athens and the RC 21 in New Delhi respectively. We are grateful to the panelists and audiences for the inspiration that the presentations and discussions provided for this collaborative venture. The commitment, creativity and collegiality of the authors in this collection powered us through the challenges of putting it together. Finally, we are very glad to acknowledge the enthusiasm that the journal editors showed for this project from the outset. Their editorial feedback as well as the excellent reviewer feedback we received for individual articles has strengthened the collection and this article immensely.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Himanshu Burte

Himanshu Burte is Associate Professor at the Centre for Urban Science and Engineering (CUSE), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Email: [email protected]

Lalitha Kamath

Lalitha Kamath is Associate Professor and Chairperson at the Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

Notes

1 Please also see “MakeBreak”, a digital exhibition about the structural violence of recent spatial transformation in Mumbai: makebreak.tiss.edu (https://makebreak.tiss.edu/). It was co-created by some of the participating authors and has stories related to a couple of papers in this Special Feature.

2 Structural violence in Southern cities has family resemblance with similar processes in the north, for instance, institutional violence (Cooper and Whyte 2018) or the lack of democratic process (MacLeod 2018) underlying the Grenfell tragedy in London.

3 While the papers here do not reveal causing violence to be the main intention, these mechanisms can clearly be used to do so through discriminatory and violent legal and institutional structures as borne out in history.