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.

To accentuate the micro-dynamics of urban violence and to advance typological and theoretical work, this chapter highlights that the different forms of violence need to be examined more closely. In focusing on forms of violence as a specific set of violent practices that a social actor routinely uses to make claims on other social actors, the chapter develops a relational understanding of violence. Within this relational understanding, time and space are crucial factors. By including the interplay of space and time, the approach grasps details of escalations and de-escalations of violence and the (re)production of different forms of violence within violent confrontations. Therefore, this chapter elaborates on different forms of violence and their spatial and particularly temporal dynamics. It scrutinises the particular entanglements of space, time and various forms of violence from a comparative perspective throughout San Salvador and Kingston. The two capital cities of El Salvador and Jamaica expose extraordinarily high levels of violence and a particular diversity of forms of violence, predominated by gang violence. In so doing, it adds a temporal dimension to an ongoing discussion on the spatial foundations of violence, shedding light on different forms of violence. This chapter emphasises that mobilising and organising violence requires the manipulation of space and time.

During the 1920s the Chinese government published lists of national ‘Humiliation Days’, dedicated to the remembrance of imperialist violence in China. Events like the May 30th Shanghai incident, or the infamous ‘21 Demands’ were to be commemorated according to this calendar, which was also intended to unify the millions of Chinese people living all over the world. In the cities of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, with their traditionally large Chinese populations, the practice of celebrating these holidays became part of the complicated framework of entangled spatial and temporal connections. The repetitive rhythm of remembering came into contact with other social or political rhythms of urban space-time, thus contributing to its constant reorganisation and transformation. The chapter investigate how the remembering of urban violence was practiced in an environment that was temporally and spatially removed from the original event. It considers how the ‘Humiliation Days’ conjured up new acts of violence or led to the expectation of violence by the governments of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies – and as such tended to occupy all three temporal dimensions of past, present and future at once. By taking a closer look at how the contemporaries dealt with these recurring events, it is not only possible to understand the temporal and spatial roots of urban violence, but also to analyse how this specific space-time changed from year to year.

This contribution draws on rhythmanalysis and the political economy of assemblage to provide a framework for understanding the productive spatiotemporal effects of physical violence on urban rhythms. The chapter explores how Buenaventura, Colombia's biggest port city, is transformed both by the growth in container turnover, and through recurring, spatial and temporal practices of violence. What role does violence play in the relation between trade-driven acceleration through the port, and the aquatic, tidal rhythm that historically shaped the city? The contribution mobilises the notion of disruption to analyse the frictions emerging between infrastructural nodes of acceleration, inhabitants’ movements and urban space. The author argues that while recurring violence provides urban rhythm itself, social movements may employ the temporal instrument of disruption as a means both of political articulation and transformation within the logics of accelerated accumulation and in a context marked by violent rhythms and forced mobility.

In late Ottoman Jerusalem, violence was common, but milder than in other areas of the Ottoman Empire. More importantly, it was not yet the expression of organised forces. The Ottoman order based on the Millet system produced a society defined by religious identity, however space was not segregated, rather it was shared. In 1917, the arrival of the British started and facilitated a number of transformation processes, including sectarianisation and segregation of the urban environment, changes of space, time and forms of urban violence. While the British Mandate was taking form, they altered the local situation in many ways, especially through their support of Zionism and immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Despite a limited number of options, Palestinians reacted in different ways to what they perceived as an illegitimate decision from an external power. During the Muslim Nabi Musa celebrations, Arab nationalists and Zionists confronted each other in the first example of organised national struggle in 1920. The outbreak of violence in Jerusalem in 1929 shows that space became a defining element and time functioned as a glue, linking various locations. Starting with the object of the dispute – the Western Wall – it marked a clear shift from early examples of urban violence, as space itself became a disputed object and a target. Neighbourhoods were mobilised and incidents followed the movement of people from one locality to another. The perception of time, its regulation through public clocks and the systematic spread of news became an essential part for the development of violence.

Cities have been more than simply ‘places’ of conflict. The intrinsic connection between space, time and violence in cities is the main theme of this volume. This introduction develops the notion of space-time, which, we argue, helps us analyse violence in ways that make prominent the intertwinement of spatial and temporal aspects in the urban context. (Re-)shaping or even fundamentally transforming space, violence can produce urban segregations or create frontiers, but it can also trigger accelerations of movement and simultaneously slow down daily rhythms of life, causing immobility or containment. The spatial configuration of a city and its rhythms also produce and shape violence in distinct ways. A spatiotemporal perspective makes visible the translocal networks and global dynamics that may link urban violence to a faraway ‘elsewhere’, and the temporal connections that foreground both the (disrupted) rhythms of everyday practices, and the longer-term processes violence is embedded in (i.e. in memories of violence). Discussing and revising literatures from different academic disciplines on space, time, violence and the city, the introduction argues for a processual understanding of the urban, rather than seeing ‘the city’ simply as the backdrop to or environment of violent practices or an imaginary of contemporary ‘violent cities’.

This chapter studies collective actions and social movements, social fears, perceptions of the state, and of its monopoly of physical force (c. 1916–20). First, in Hamburg, an urban social movement tried to establish a space-time regime organised around public democracy, rooted in working-class neighbourhoods and on the shop floor. Publicly employed acts of physical violence served to communicate elements of the newly established space-time regime to the local public. Second, the middle classes in Hamburg and in Seattle were shaken by a plethora of fears ignited by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In Germany, however, revolution and regime change made it much easier to name those deemed responsible for ending the Kaiserreich (social democrats, Spartacists). In the USA, a complex imaginary of nearly omnipresent fears focused on innumerable vaguely defined threats shaped the impression that a revolution could be triggered by any event which was defined as not ‘normal’ – as un-American. This socially deep-rooted fear-driven dramatisation, however, had a pacifying consequence: the Seattle General Strike clearly showed that even in the USA there is no inbuilt tendency for strikes in urban settings to always escalate into violent confrontations. While in Seattle massive fears of an uncontrollable revolution led all parties involved in the General Strike to act very cautiously, in Hamburg the activists of the urban social movement through their collective actions, third, challenged the legitimacy of the newly established uniformed security forces. Re-establishing an accepted monopoly of physical force was a key problem for the early Weimar Republic.

With the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, then-chief minister Narendra Modi oversaw Independent India’s single most damaging episode of Hindu–Muslim violence to date. The pogrom also marked the Hindu Right’s most recent return to the historical riot system that transformed Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s de facto capital, into India’s most “ghettoised” city. The pogrom, however, did not bring an end to the Hindu Right’s orchestration of violence in Ahmedabad. The Modi government seized control over the implementation of the Sabarmati Riverfront Project before the blood and dust of the pogrom could settle, which provoked the violent eviction of over 40,000 lower-caste Hindu and Muslim day laborers from the heart of the city. This chapter retraces the lives and movements of the Sabarmati’s inhabitants from the 1920s to the present. It thereby reveals how the unruly practices of Muslim intermediaries at the riverbed consistently brought them into the crosshairs of the different ‘violences’ that coalesced in the making of Ahmedabad’s segregated social order. By highlighting their historical and ongoing responses to these cascading forms of violence, this chapter exposes the hidden spatiotemporal connections between the forms of violence that have animated the Hindu Right’s hegemonic project in Gujarat. In so doing, it helps identify unexpected articulations of Muslim agency that could undermine this hegemonic project as Modi and the BJP extend Gujarat’s violent spatiotemporal relations across India at large.