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.

Communal violence was a frequent occurrence in many of the territories of the British Empire, especially in urban contexts. Essentially, these riots were a consequence of British imperial policies and perceptions of religious identities with their presumed localisation in urban space and association with (colonial) temporalities. The collective violence became the subject of several royal commissions of inquiry. Taking Belfast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and Jerusalem during the Mandate era as two cases in point, this chapter studies the riots in both cities from a spatiotemporal perspective. Working with commission reports, archival sources and newspaper articles, the author argues that the transformation of the spatiotemporal configuration of both cities was a main precondition for the riots. Based on Lefebvre’s idea of rhythmanalysis, the author focuses on the practices of urban violence and analyses how they were shaped by the (re-)configurations and the rhythms of the city. The author especially highlights how violence was synchronised with the annual urban calendar as well as daily and weekly religious and everyday rhythms and in which ways it disrupted them. Both cities underwent significant transformation processes, which permanently altered both the physical spaces as well as their symbolic meaning, and during which a new calendar emerged that included religious holidays and political commemorations with the purpose of fostering nationalist aspirations. The author argues that during the successive riots, spatiotemporal patterns of violence evolved in both cities, introducing an urban pulse to which the historical actors perform their violent actions up until the present day.

There is a consensus among academics, activists and journalists that decades of urban violence in Brazil have resulted in entrenched residential segregation: whereas elites live in affluent walled enclaves and centrally located upper-class neighbourhoods, the urban poor are confined to overpopulated slums and the periphery of cities where living conditions are cramped and services lacking, and where they are subject to endless turf wars between heavily armed drug gangs, vigilantes, the army and police. It would be virtually impossible for residents to remap this spatial configuration, due to the lack of accountability of those involved in violence and their investment in its perpetuation. Following up on recent studies of urban violence which suggest that urban ecologies need to be understood as emergent, heterogeneous, context-dependent and socially constructed, this chapter challenges such static understandings of city-space in Brazil. Based on an ethnographic case study of a Catholic base community in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, it explores how religious actors work to challenge established topographies of violence by furnishing alternative imaginaries. The chapter highlights the dynamic relationship between conceptions of space and time in structuring experiences of urban violence. Religion’s capacity for hope and remembrance reveals temporality to be a crucial axis of opposition to violence-driven processes of urban segregation, yet temporality itself is not static but co-evolves as violence becomes more entrenched.

This chapter examines the palimpsest of violence that has imprinted Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, for a protracted time period. The palimpsest is used as an investigative tool to unravel the spatiotemporal, interlocking layers of violence. Beirut’s geopolitical position and form of government, along with its history of embedded differences, have resulted in perpetual turmoil, which in 1975 led to the outbreak of the civil war. This fifteen-year long war left tangible and intangible violence markers. On the one hand, the markers manifested at different scales including Greater Beirut, administrative Beirut, but also its districts, sectors, neighbourhoods, streets and buildings. On the other hand, violence scars resurface through collective memory and postmemory, which affect residents’ daily lives while navigating through the city, and making choices of where and how to move. This chapter is an attempt at linking spatiotemporally the violence markers, to investigate their role in Beirut’s history as well as present. It uses chronological mapping of violence events, places and narratives. The violence markers resulted in, or are reflected by, divides and frontiers; urban dynamics including population displacement, destruction and expansion; memories and memorials. The chapter concludes with possibilities for dissociating from violence by emancipating from postmemories, re-establishing links among divided communities through cultural and civic projects, and providing neutral platforms for dialogue. These efforts are crucial in a city where violence remains immanent.

In this chapter, Allen presents the road as a social actor participating in a community traditionally defined exclusively by humans as commuters. Her study centres on when roads are in disrepair or have suffered ‘street-breaking’ (stretbreche), to use the earliest legal wording, whether through the action of wear and tear, weather, vandalism, or neglect. The word ‘break’ offers a conceptually useful critical term for a process that affords environmental reconfiguration and new social grouping even as it refers to rupture within the commuter system. In particular Allen studies the interventions and modifications necessary to maintain paved surfaces and how they were funded—usually through bequests, charitable gifts, and tolls. In this solicitude for surfaces she analyses the interaction of environment with human action: how open fields affect the definition of loitering; how increasing density of urban traffic and enclosed road space structure civic consciousness; and how caring for the road fashions one as a member not only of the local community but also of the realm. The mentalité that emerges out of the collectively shared labour of road care demonstrates how thought organizes itself around and in relation not only to habitual actions but also to the shaped contours of an environment that acts as assertively as humans do.

This chapter opens by noting the growth of towns and trade in England in the medieval period, which required a fully functioning transport system, of which roads must have been the backbone, supplemented by river and sea-borne trade. It then looks at the different sources available to attempt to describe the national medieval transport network. The first step is to see which Roman roads were still in use, and which later Anglo-Saxon and medieval roads had ‘made and maintained themselves’. Documentary evidence is limited and place-names need to be used with care. The best evidence lies in itineraries (notably those of the kings) and maps (principally the Gough Map). Archaeological evidence is also assessed.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries English royal lawyers developed new doctrine to reverse a process that had undermined the status of highways. They sought to preserve the highways' utility and assert their connection to the king. The new doctrine drew from Roman law and allowed the royal government to take practical steps to clear roads of obstructions (known as "purprestures"), dismantle illegal tolls, and require landholders to perform maintenance. These new rules may be traced in such treatises as Glanvill, Bracton and Fleta, in the court rolls, and in statutes. By the end of the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), the idea "once a highway, always a highway" was established as an enduring legal principle.

This chapter addresses writing about the street with a particular focus on the City of London between about 1385 and 1425. Using sources as diverse as the literary works of Chaucer and the proceedings of neighbourhood courts it pursues ideas about the use of the street in the creation of elemental social bonds. In particular it focuses on the window as the porous place of interaction between domestic interiors and the public street. An influential elite discourse showed a particular interest in matters of sexual intimacy. By contrast popular conversation about the street at neighbourhood level was more dynamic and developed around a pragmatic range of interests, which nevertheless provided an opportunity for political criticism of government officials.

This chapter examines the extent and importance of river transport in England as demonstrated by the extensive use of boats to convey goods and people to and from London. It studies the use of the Thames to connect London to the wider countryside and the evolution of passenger services. It also examines the development of boats and the cargo trades, how the industry operated and the price of services. There was extensive regulation, both by the crown and parliament as well as by the mayor and aldermen and this paper considers whether this was constructive or reactionary in nature. It questions whether this changed in the early sixteenth century when the increase in population brought about higher prices, an influx of inexperienced men into the industry and more frequent accidents.