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.

Sentiment and ‘the spirit of life’: new insights at the fin de siècle The 1890s were marked by a general mood of pessimism and frustration in the animal protection movement, but also by an upsurge of utopianism symbolised by Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League. The new generation of activists took their lead from vegetarian and theosophical thinking, but equally from progressive politics and feminism, for example, Katharine Glasier and Nessie Stewart-Brown. Louise Lind-af-Hageby and Mona Caird in particular situated their opposition to vivisection and other cruelties in the context of resistance to patriarchy, while the novelist Ouida saw the persecution of animals and destruction of the environment as baneful aspects of the authoritarian, industrialised and militaristic nation state. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, founded by a group women in 1889–1890, crystallised this new concern for threatened wild creatures, but even here concepts of gender were contested through the Society’s campaign against the use of birds’ feathers in ladies’ millinery. As leadership of the RSPB was gradually taken over by men, tension between male ‘rationality’ and female ‘sentiment’ once again became an issue, and the book concludes with reflections on the value judgements involved in this ancient but still operative antithesis.

The fifth chapter contextualizes the work in the wider social relations of care. In a work context in which companies exploit workers’ labour but withdraw from any responsibility for risk, repair or recuperation, access to care is pivotal for understanding urban precarities. The analysis decentres social security from the welfare state, and instead analyses care practices more broadly, either as kin or in professionalized support relations (e.g. with state agents). The chapter compares the ways young dwellers use the sale of airtime or food delivery as ‘distributive labour’ (Ferguson 2015), to be able to make claims on resources in support relations. It shows variations in the ways kin and friendship ties are used to confront socio-material insecurities, and explains this by contextualizing how, historically, a particular separation of the public and domestic spheres has been institutionalized and used in mechanisms of secondary exploitation (Dörre and Haubner 2018).

The conclusion embeds the relevance of economies of symbolic goods in the debate on value making in the platform metropolis: capitalist accumulation extracts value from everyday life in cities. More specifically, how can we understand the intermingling of symbolic resources, the ‘non-economic’ with the market-like accruing of value, especially in contexts of commodification of labour and the workforce? The making of urban livelihoods fundamentally relies on favours, symbolic gestures and gifts, as illustrated by the practices of urban youths interviewed for this project. Technological change and the emergence of digitally mediated work does not make such ‘smoothing’ irrelevant. On the contrary, symbolic resources and relational mechanisms of honour and reputation also organize access to resources in the gig economy. The book argues that looking at the entanglement of economic practices makes it possible to see the implicit use of labour power, veiled in metaphors of a game, or of gifts, in urban digital economies. Moreover, the digital transformation in cities challenges urban dwellers’ opportunities for social reproduction. In a context of ‘permanent temporariness’, the importance of work as a means to construct status, reputation, honour – of building person value – remains fundamental, even if not bound into long-term careers as self-accruing individuals. The urban youth at the centre of this research, and their longing to bring themselves into play (with others), working, searching and collaborating, show that work is more than making a living: in the end it is about making oneself living (Ferguson and Li 2018).

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.

In the 1870s, information about the growing practice of vivisection, especially in physiological research, prompted a public outcry, and led to crisis and division in the animal protection movement. Women in particular, led by Frances Power Cobbe, opposed vivisection, leading to a battle with scientific and medical opinion that took on a strongly gendered element. Cobbe as virtual leader of the Victoria Street Society, resorted to many oppositional strategies, including a notorious poster campaign, which was replicated in images published in the Illustrated Police News, and also prosecution of a scientist who infringed the terms of the 1876 Act regulating vivisection. Failing in these gambits, Cobbe went on to attack the practice at the philosophical level, raising ethical issues that were also pondered by the writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Vivisection came to symbolise the materialism, misogyny and oppressive patriarchy of the age, and in this light it was anathematised by two early women doctors – Elizabeth Blackwell and Anna Kingsford – the latter a visionary who opposed vivisection as a spiritual blight on society.

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.