Defining Spatial Violence. Bucharest as a Study Case

Bulletin of Geography Socio Economic Series, 2007

In humanistic geography place is contrasted to space. Meaningful, magical and intimate places were conceptualised in this context. Homeliness was identified as a characteristic of place and a contrast to placelessness. On this background, the concepts of perceptual chaos, territorial indoctrination, spatial indifference, symbolic profanation, semantic usurpation and symbolic violence are developed in this paper. The empirical analysis is concentrated on Warsaw, Poland as an post-communist city. The evolution of the administrative structure of Warsaw is analysed. The notion of the administrative district of the city is contrasted to 'organic' district. The municipal information system is analysed in terms of the municipal spatial indoctrination system. Possibilities to increase the limited social integration in the post-communist city is discussed.

A city is made up by its people and by its architectural, urban characteristics. Bucharest lost most of its central historical sites during the last decade of communism. The shifts of paradigm of those days shift the entire history of a city, ripping away the historical, cultural and social center of a European capital. Even if the turnovers in Bucharest are never to be seen elsewhere in the world, the political decisions and expression that lead to a new urban landscape construction have correspondences in many other cities of the world, most of them marked by a similar history, thus totalitarian systems. In order to better understand the scale of what J.B. Jackson called the Second Landscape, at its most extreme expression, our paper will present the effects of totalitarian political systems on various urban landscape in the modern period, comparing the scale of the communist demolitions in Bucharest and the corresponding urban tragedies in cities like Berlin, Rome, Paris, or Pyongyang. The study reveals similarities between cities like those mentioned earlier and Bucharest in terms of political construction of the urban landscape, the landscape as a political tool, the impact of these politics on historical cities and their " absorption " by the daily life landscape.In order to understand the scale of the tragedy and its consequences in the future it is important to look for examples similar to the one given and to search for answers that may solve the problems that the ruins of the late communism era left to the capital-city of Romania. It is also important to understand how the daily spatial practices (de Certeau) are finally engulfing and integrating the political landscape from the collective memory.

Architectural Theory Review, 2014

New Belgrade after 1999 is associated with the transition from a socialist and single-party state to a consumer capitalist and multi-party system, with the latter perceived as an indicator of democracy. This paper asks if and how this transitional period points to NATO's 1999 bombing campaign still being in-operation through spatial violence by other means, with these means related to the negation of difference and the transformation of everyday life and social values. Might this spatial violence be even more coercive than that of the war as it manifests through the convergence of military, legal, governmental and economic entities of international "redevelopment" agencies working in the name of "security" along with the Serbian government? This paper explores this proposition by focusing on the post-1999 transformation and re-modernisation of New Belgrade as an elimination of difference through processes of de-socialisation, de-Romanisation and dehistorisation connected with neo-liberal privatisation.

Lo Squaderno, 2021

Not many topics have received the amount of (academic, cultural, political) attention that urban violence has had. In a way, since 19th century reflections on the nascent urban modernity, the discourse about ‘the city’ has always been one of violence, with remarkable consequences in the way cities are discussed, regulated, planned, policed, and lived. Reflection on what urban violence may actually be, however, has been for the most part lacking. The urban in urban violence has often been used as a mere adjective pointing at the location where a physical event of violence takes place, rather than a process, a space, an atmosphere, which may be violent in the first place. In this sense, going beyond a narrow understanding of urban violence means attending to its relational, material, and temporal complexity. This is what the following contributions do. It is neither by chance, nor because the authors featured here have not been capable of capturing the present, that Covid-19 features scantly in this collection and, in contrast, historical accounts are the most common. The epistemology of urban violence calls for extended temporalities: and while the effects of governmental health policies in terms of state violence are there to see, tracing the complex interrelations of the latter with urban violence writ large requires a distancing that is impossible for the time being.

Nowadays, when all the forms of violence have become something normal and they are part of our everyday life, mainly for the so-called developing countries, it is essential to inquire about everyday beliefs and practices, which enable coercive links or their invisibility. Dispositions are intellectual mechanisms that define trends of action for individuals in a given context and situation; they are based mainly on beliefs and the characteristics of the so-cio-spatial context. This analysis discusses the question: what are dispositions that legitimize and promote the segregated city? Our thinking is based on a review of several studies, and empirical research on the peripheral and central public spaces in large cities, especially some recent research on violence in the outskirts of Mexico City. In other words, we intend to examine it from the point of view of the groups that suffer most from the violence. But mainly it is about proposing an examination of our preferences and desires to inhabit cities in search of the mechanisms that protect us from discomfort, but which, at the same time, tend to harbour the seeds of human violence.

2012

Violence is a confounding concept. It frequently defies explanation and lacks an agreed upon definition. Yet geographers are well positioned to bring greater conceptual clarity to violence by thinking through its intersections with space. In setting the tone for this special issue on Violence and Space we highlight some of the key lines of flight that have shaped geographical thinking on violence. While there are a significant number of geographers interested in the question of violence, the field of ‘geographies of violence’ remains an emerging area of research that deserves greater attention and a more rigorous examination. By emphasizing the spatiality of violence, this special issue aims to contribute to a more sustained conversation on the violent geographies that shape our daily lives, our encounters with institutions, and the various structures that configure our social organization. This introduction is but an initial sketch of what we believe needs to be a much larger and unfolding research agenda dedicated to understanding violence from a geographical perspective.

Procedia Engineering, 2018

Bucharest, Romania's capital city, the 1977 earthquake, with more than 1900 victims and 2 million $ in economic loses, was used by the communist regime as a pretext for razing the urban tissue with a lot of monuments, followed by a large-scale remodeling project as a strategy for risk reduction. After 1980, more than 1450 hectares of the old land of Bucharest were demolished and the new East-West axis of the city and the headquarters of the communist public institutions were built. This is presently a large area of Bucharest Civic Center, with the Parliament Palace as a central item. For a while, part of the area was not rebuilt and in time it became junk space, just because of other priorities. The case of Bucharest as a huge urban trauma was approached, in the past, as a desperate appeal to the entire world (Giurescu, 1989) [1]. After the political changes of the 1990's, the factories occupying a huge area were left partly as ghost-towns, although private property was regained. The case of Bucharest was studied in comparison with Paris, Moscow, Berlin and Rome, in the ages of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, where the major heritage was partly or totally affected (Cavalcanti, 1997) [2]. Succession of anthropic aggressions on the built area is identified, generated by an ideology that has ignored the heritage values, by resorting to: demolition without selection criteria, lack of maintenance due to abandonment or excessive use, value damage caused by interventions which have modified components or by destruction of the initial context caused by owner interventions. The real estate pressure acted randomly. The destruction of the perceptual-formative landmarks of space has lead to the dissolution of memory and of the "mental map" each of us is carrying. (K. Lynch, 1960, 1989 republished) [3] Conservation of the heritage values and their surroundings remains a dimension of stability with serious consequences on the development of the human being. This research aims to propose a methodology of evaluation for the built space and to identify intervention strategies for the reduction of the risk in protected areas posed by this anthropic hazard, to recover and preserve the stability of the communities.

Geopolitics, 2023

This introduction to the special section explores geopolitical dimensions of conflict and violence in cities, pointing at the need to continue learning from marginal urban settings. It broadens the scope across differentiated approaches, such as the francophone and anglophone urban geopolitical traditions. By opening up a wider perspective, the emphasis is not on cities as part of a matrix of global hierarchies of geographical power but on the multiscalar relational significance of urban geopolitical inquiry. The introduction positions the special section articles within a wider review of urban geopolitical provocations outlining a new political vocabulary of urban conflict and violence. It concludes with a general call for a methodological and empirical broadening of the field of urban geopolitics as part of a broader de-colonial social and spatial science research agenda bridging the disciplines of political geography, urban studies, architecture and planning.

Political protest is the expression of the non-acquiescence about a decision or a set of political decisions, or the non-acknowledgement of the legitimacy for the decision making process. The political intervention is assumed to be, in that case, extremely relevant for the political and social awareness. – Felgueiras Sérgio. Geração á Rasca . Chiado Books , 2017 The theme “urban violence” appears, therefore, as an interdisciplinary study proposal, in a nucleus integrated by several areas of social sciences (Sociology, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Anthropology, Economics, Psychology, Communication, Law, History and other related areas), with the purpose of understanding, through research and scientific work, the various aspects of urban violence, and directing socio-ideological changes that will guide public policies aimed at the causes and consequences of violence in this environment. Contexts of violence The hyper concentration of metropolises, over information and communication and information technologies in the centres of power and economic life, hyper-specialization and the increase in job insecurity produce an increasing number of excluded people who are left on the fringes of the labour market. Employment and social and informational inclusion, exposed and vulnerable to unconventional, marginal, anomic and criminal forms of survival.