Three Approaches to Urban Conflicts over Peace(s)

This chapter first argues that urban conflicts over peace(s) in the postwar city should be studied through the acts, governing, and spaces underpinning them. It then theorises negotiating agency, governmentality, and relational space as concepts apt for analysing these dimensions. Negotiating agency sees acts are the result of open-ended and constantly on-going negotiations between the subject and the world in which it exists. The key to understanding acts therefore lies neither in the subject nor the world, but in the negotiation between the two underpinning the act itself. Governmentality understands governing as about structuring the field of possible acts for collectives—effectively meaning that anything making collectives choose A instead of B is considered governing. Relational space in turn builds on the notion that space is neither given nor passive to but rather both produced by and productive of society. The chapter ends with some notes on research design

Studying the Postwar City Through Urban Conflicts over Peace(s)

This chapter theorises the postwar city in order to enable its study. It first theorises the postwar as not the given and linear transition from war to a universal and objective peace, but rather as permeated by conflicts over peace(s) in which heterogeneous and subjective peace(s) strive to socio-politically order society in diametrically different ways. The city is then theorised as constituted by heterogeneity, density, openness and permeability, and centrality within its wider socio-political context while functioning through mixing, conflict, accommodation, creativity, and fragmentation. This unique combination makes it a research object—in the sense that it affects the nature of whatever research foci might be of interest—as well as gives it potential to both transcend and reinforce continuities of war in peace. The postwar city is subsequently theorised as a city where war is over yet the socio-political ordering of society remains contested through urban conflicts over peace(s)