Space and Violence: Elements for a Comprehensive Scheme

Abstract

This article proposes a geographical approach to violence to overcome the approaches focused on the quantitative aspects of direct violence expressions to address its conditions and mechanisms of realization as a structure-structuring of social praxis. The main objective of the article is to develop a basic scheme on the spatialization of violence, the realization of which is carried out from a combination of three mechanisms: the valorization of space through accumulation by dispossession, cultural and technological rents, and the spatial devices for social control and discipline. These mechanisms are articulated in an organization of spatial forms and functions with a strategic role in the neoliberal project of social order. The proposal to produce space and the approach to violence in its structural dimension is argued by realizing that violence implies an annulment, either through displacement or by eliminating social resources, to produce empty homogeneous times-spaces. This scheme is put into dialogue to address public spaces in the neoliberal city as the contradictory and conflictive expression between the spatialization of violence as a representation of space and the counter-topologies of power as spaces of representation.