Urban violence still has a peculiar standing within social and urban research. This book works to unpack the link between urban, violence, and security with three main arguments. The first is that urban violence is under-theorized because long-term theoretical problems with both of its elements (‘urban’ and ‘violence’). The second is to answer these questions: (1) how can violence be conceptualized in a way that opens to an understanding of the specificity of urban violence? (2) What is the urban in urban violence? And (3) How can ‘urban’ and ‘violence’ be articulated in a way that makes urban violence a category with both analytical and strategic power? The third, and central, argument of this book is that, through a genealogy that articulates political economic and vital materialism, urban violence can ultimately be framed as a precise category shaped by three interlocking trajectories: the process of (capitalist) urbanization, the spatio-political project of the urban, and the concrete urban atmospheres in and through which the process and the project materialize, often violently so, in the urban.

Whether aesthetically or politically inspired, graffiti is among the oldest forms of expression in human history, one that becomes especially significant during periods of social and political upheaval. With a particular focus on the demographic, ecological, and economic crises of today, this volume provides a wide-ranging exploration of urban space and visual protest. Assembling case studies that cover topics such as gentrification in Cyprus, the convulsions of post-independence East Timor, and opposition to Donald Trump in the American capital, it reveals the diverse ways in which street artists challenge existing social orders and reimagine urban landscapes.

How does order emerge out of the multiplicity of bodies, objects, ideas and practices that constitute the urban? This book explores the relation between space, law and control in the contemporary city - and particularly in the context of urban 'mega events' - through a combined geographical and normative analysis. Informed by the recent spatial, affective and material 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences, Andrea Pavoni addresses this question by pursuing an innovative and trans-disciplinary approach, capable of accounting for the emergence of order in urban space both at the conceptual and empirical levels. Two overarching objectives are pursued. First, to account for the increasing convergence of logics, techniques and technologies of law, security and marketing into novel, potentially oppressive spatial configurations. Second, to envisage a consistent ethico-political strategy to counter this evolution, by rethinking originally and in radically spatial terms the notion of justice. Forging a sophisticated and original analysis, this book offers an analysis that will be of considerable interest to those working in critical urban geography, critical legal studies, critical event studies, surveillance and control studies.

Street-Level Sovereignty: The Intersection of Space and Law is a collection of scholarship that considers the experience of law that is subject to social interpretation for its meaning and importance within the constitutive legal framework of race, deviance, property, and the communal investiture in health and happiness. This book examines the intersection of spatiality and law, through the construction of place, and how law is materially framed.

How does order emerge out of the multiplicity of bodies, objects, ideas and practices that constitute the urban? This book explores the relation between space, law and control in the contemporary city - and particularly in the context of urban 'mega events' - through a combined geographical and normative analysis. Informed by the recent spatial, affective and material 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences, Andrea Pavoni addresses this question by pursuing an innovative and trans-disciplinary approach, capable of accounting for the emergence of order in urban space both at the conceptual and empirical levels. Two overarching objectives are pursued. First, to account for the increasing convergence of logics, techniques and technologies of law, security and marketing into novel, potentially oppressive spatial configurations. Second, to envisage a consistent ethico-political strategy to counter this evolution, by rethinking originally and in radically spatial terms the notion of justice. Forging a sophisticated and original analysis, this book offers an analysis that will be of considerable interest to those working in critical urban geography, critical legal studies, critical event studies, surveillance and control studies.