Precarious spaces and violent site effects: experiences from Hargeisa’s urban margins

ABSTRACT This paper addresses precarity from a spatial perspective. It draws attention to how power becomes inscribed in urban space and shapes particular spatial arrangements connected with socio-economic vulnerabilities. This is empirically illustrated with a case study of Hargeisa, a city historically marked by the violence of the Somali civil war. Our analysis draws on interviews and participant photography, to foreground the ‘everyday’ experiences of residents living in the city’s marginal settlements. We point to the operations of power that produce political, economic and social deprivation but also agentic options for these residents who experience, cope with, struggle with and work against their marginalisation. Interconnecting precarity with geographies of violence, we elaborate the concept of ‘violent site-effects’ as a means to explain how power inscribed in spatial arrangements can cause harm to people. We emphasise violence as built into structures and as part of social orders that produce precarity. This, we argue, provides a basis on which to reflect on the dynamic ways in which inequality, insecurity and thus, vulnerabilities, are produced and reproduced in the processes of urban reconstruction.


Introduction
This article explores links between precarity, violence and space, and presents empirical material from marginal urban settlements in a city in the Horn of Africa. We use Hargeisa, capital of the de facto independent but internationally unrecognised Republic of Somaliland, to provide a distinctive but instructive case of how space at urban margins is generated through social interaction, and is therefore imbricated with power and imbued with meaning. 1 The context in which we approach urban margins is one of rapid city-growth, in conjunction with multiple sources of displacement, including experiences of war, violence and environmental transformation. The city of Hargeisa has been historically marked by violence. It was almost completely destroyed by bombardment in 1988, and the majority of its inhabitants fled, often to refugee camps in neighbouring countries. After 1991, the city was progressively reconstructed over the following decades. Focusing on the experiences of refugee returns to the city, subsequent further in-migration, and urban reconstruction, our objective is to explicate an analytical approach attentive to urban dynamics and show the power relations that define the livelihoods of people living in urban margins. We demonstrate how space itself, in its physical arrangements and specific morphology, reinforces precarity and particular relations of power.
Precarity is a concept that has come to denote a variety of vulnerabilities, including in relation to housing, education, health, and other forms of social infrastructure, and their links with global (urban) transformations. Sometimes described as 'camps', 'slums', 'squatter' or 'informal settlements', the creation and evolution of urban margins are important components of city-making processes worldwide. They also connect global development agendas to local, national and regional policies, as well as micro-spaces of precarious livelihoods. In spaces of precarity, urban margins are shaped by multiple agencies, practices and processes, and we identify spatial and structural dimensions that reproduce and perpetuate vulnerabilities in marginal urban settlements. Building on Bourdieu, we conceptualise the multiple forms of precarity at urban margins as violent 'site effects'. This framing foregrounds the coconstitution of social and physical space, 2 showing how the production of marginal spaces themselves cause bodily harm and therefore have effects that resemble those of physical violence. Site effects, Bourdieu explains, require a 'rigorous analysis of the relations between the structures of social space and those of physical space'. 3 In comparison with other urban centres in the region with regard to armed conflict, terrorism or crime, contemporary Hargeisa is not generally considered to be a particularly 'violent' city. However, in linking precarity with violence, we emphasise structural, physical and symbolic violence as built into structures and as part of social orders that produce precarity. These are certainly not unique to Hargeisa (or the region) but our empirical engagement with this particular city has enabled us to build an analytical approach through which to reflect on the dynamic ways in which multidimensional inequality, insecurity and thus, vulnerabilities, are produced and reproduced in space more generally.
Marginal settlements in Hargeisa were often established by people who returned from refugee camps in neighbouring countries in the late 1990s. Because of their previous socioeconomic circumstances or their inability to reclaim property, they saw no alternative but to erect makeshift huts on government-owned/vacant land or to settle in ruins across Hargeisa. Many of these settlements exist till today. Within the city, they have become increasingly densely populated and are often both spatially and discursively separated from other areas with more affluent housing and business. The evolution of their particular morphologieswhich we describe and analyse below -contributes to forms of bordering 4 that differentiate city dwellers and mark residents of these margins as distinct. However, rather than being fully contained within neat boundaries of poverty and exclusion, these settlements are very much part of the wider patchwork of the city, overlapping and at times intersecting with other urban spaces. At the same time, in both popular and NGO parlance, these settlements are often referred to as 'camps', their residents frequently classified as 'displaced' and 'poor'. These labels themselves discursively contribute to the identity and bordering of these urban margins. However, they also obfuscate the diversity of people living there and their multiple reasons for settling. We refer to these settlements as urban margins in order to emphasise socio-spatial formation as ongoing, socially complex and multifaceted. Above all, marginalisation highlights the processual character and relational embeddedness of these types of settlement and their residents in the (global) political economy of urban reconstruction and the social fabric of the city and the wider region. 5 We point to the operations of power that produce political, economic and social deprivation but also agentic options for residents who experience, cope and struggle with and work against their marginalisation. 6 We thus draw on data that illuminates 'the complexities making up marginal contexts and subjects'. 7 In Hargeisa, some of these settlements are currently at the physical edge of the city. Others, however, were established in what were -at the time -peripheral urban areas, but have since been enveloped in wider urban expansions, making their current location more central and desirable. This again highlights the relational character and constant becoming of marginality. The two satellite images below (Figures 1 and 2) taken in 2002 and 2017, respectively, show the substantial overall growth and spatial expansion of Hargeisa.
Over the years, these settlements have attracted large numbers of people. Some fled from violence and/or environmental shocks in Somaliland, southern Somalia or Ethiopia, while others were already resident elsewhere in the city and moved in because they could no longer afford continuously rising rents in Hargeisa. The material and spatial arrangements of the settlements have changed over time due to the length of settlement, increasing population density, but also practices of propertying and the successive marketisation of land and housing. We draw attention to how people actively engage with opportunities produced in and of space, and how they come to see certain spaces as places of opportunity, risk, danger, safety, and so on. We argue that a spatial approach to precarity can illuminate the processual and dynamic becoming of spaces as precarious, and the ways in which space itself contributes to, maintains or perpetuates precarity.
We develop our argument in five steps. First, we draw from relevant literature on precarity and geographies of violence to elaborate on our own conceptualisation of violent 'site-effects' as the concept that guides the empirical analysis. We detail our methodological approach and then introduce the city of Hargeisa. We focus on its historical experiences of violence, displacement and ongoing reconstruction, and how we study city change from the perspective of urban margins. Our findings are then presented in three analytical sections, focusing on (a) the power of the makeshift home in these settlements; (b) the ways in which people live with precarity and (c) the government of urban space through resettlement schemes and their (potentially unintended) consequences.
Although we return to methods below, we emphasise from the outset that our approach is rooted in the 'everyday' and draws on field research conducted in the context of a research project on displacement and urbanisation across multiple different cities in the Somali Horn of Africa. 8 The article primarily relies on interviews and participant photography conducted with people living in different kinds of marginal settlements across Hargeisa. Some of the photos taken by residents of the settlements (and their reflections on these images) are used to illustrate our argument. Foregrounding lived, place-based experiences and agency, this micro-perspective allows us to capture the making of places of precarity and demonstrate how the materiality of these places affects agency and shapes peoples' lives. Using a micro-lens to study the nexus of precarity, space and violence is in our view an important corrective to dominant narratives about precarious spaces as it brings forward the heterogeneous and often ambiguous experiences of precarity and contingency in the making of particular urban places. Attending to the lived experiences and agencies of people who deal daily with their marginalisation, we highlight how cities are made from the margins. Our case adds an in-depth empirical study to the emergent geography of precarity and violence literature and contributes to the project of bringing the urban margins 'to the centre of academic interest'. 9

Precarity, space, and violent site effects
Precarity emerged as a political concept to criticise the social and economic deprivation that accompanied the post-Fordist restructuring of state-society-market relations in the global North. The concept pointed to increased labour insecurity that characterised state retreat and successive labour market deregulation, and captured the effects of flexibilisation, casualisation and informalisation of work arrangements on the lifeworlds of people. 10 Early on, feminists criticised the focus of precarity debates on formal employment, which rendered informal and reproductive work-arrangements invisible and irrelevant while cementing norms of employment that were unreachable for many. The expansion of the geographical focus of workforces and labour conditions in the global South, the inclusion of research on informal and reproductive work, and a new focus on migrant labour, have all contributed to the expansion of the conceptual framework of precarity. 11 In the wake of 9/11, the notion of precarity was taken up and broadened to include general forms of existential insecurity and threat. Butler came to define precarity as 'the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks [. . .] becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death'. 12 Acknowledging feminist and postcolonial critique, Ettlinger 13 further criticised the classical political economy approach to precarity, in particular, the tendency to exceptionalise nonstandard employment and to classify other work arrangements as a-typical and as a deviation from an idealised (male, western) norm, whereas from a global and historical perspective formalised labour arrangements have been the exception. She further emphasised how the identification of groups particularly vulnerable to 'precarisation' risks their discursive homogenisation and the reification of social boundaries that perpetuate power differences. 14 In an attempt to overcome these tendencies towards essentialisation, Ettlinger suggested expanding the notion of precarity to cover uncertainty and insecurity as an 'enduring feature of the human condition'. 15 As a spacetime unbounded concept, precarity is understood by Ettlinger as a 'condition of vulnerability relative to contingency and the inability to predict'. 16 It is in this usage that precarity acknowledges vulnerability, insecurity and unpredictability as a core feature of human life, but also explains why people tend to construct and legitimise classifications as attempts to enhance certainty, predictability and security. We explore later some of the ways in which people in precarious spaces 'construct illusions of certainty' 17 around broader narratives of stability, security or the (re)construction of Somaliland in order to understand and rationalise their positions within this capital city.
We think that freeing the concept of precarity from (sometimes implicit) assumptions of its sole occurrence in particular zones and epochs can be a useful exercise. However, we also caution against a wholesale universalisation of the idea, which bears its own risks of generalisation and essentialism. Here we turn to a growing body of literature that explores multifaceted spatial dimensions of precarity. 18 The elaboration of distinctly spatial aspects of precarity is rooted in an understanding of space and place as relational, generated through social interactions, and therefore imbricated in power and imbued with meaning. 19 Here we follow Wacquant who has called for more complex and more differentiated pictures of the wretched of the city' to more accurately capture these people's social predicament and elucidate their collective fate in different national contexts'. 20 Our contribution to this effort is to explore how people understand and actively engage with both constraints and opportunities produced in and of space. We show how spatial arrangements themselves can gain productive power as they form and shape peoples' agencies and enable some actions while constraining others. 21 The decision to focus on processual dynamics in micro-spaces and study everyday experiences at the urban margins stems from an attempt to avoid the essentialisation of precarity as located only in particular world zones or time periods. At the same time, we must disentangle how (global) structures manifest locally -through space and social processes -and come to shape precarity. Drawing on a relational approach to space, precarity is therefore approached with the aim to explicate particular socio-spatial arrangements that shape it in one context, and to explain the wider structural logics at work in these arrangements. Our interest in precarious spaces and their violent site effects is also inspired by more recent work on spatial aspects of violence and the relation of city and violence. 22 In this debate, violence is characterised as 'confounding' 23 and 'slippery', 24 subject to normative assumptions and debates across various academic fields. Violence has both easily recognisable physical dimensions as well as features hidden in the mundanity of everyday life that occur through encounters with institutions and structural aspects of social orders. 25 The distinctly spatial production of precarity through private property can serve as illustration for such a concern with structures that manifest locally in different ways. Property thereby serves as a link to bring in and clarify the relevance of violence for the discussion of precarity in this article. Blomley conceptualises property as 'an important means by which we assign order to the world' as we categorise and code spaces and people according to their relation to it. 26 The effects of the delineation of space as the property of someone, the organisation of relations between individuals owning, renting, using property in particular ways, and the regulation of access and exclusion to propertied space comprises a number of (often violent) processes of socio-spatial ordering that can influence people's ability to make a living. In the context of precarity, property is a resource with which to produce and perpetuate contingent relations to the market, to infrastructure, to welfare and to security. However, property relations can both enable and constrain agencies with regard to precarious living conditions. Property provides a basis for both material and social power, while at the same time, poor housing conditions or lack of basic infrastructure can be manifestations of other forms of dispossession that are inscribed in space and can be difficult to escape. We discuss the latter phenomenon below with reference to 'resettlement' schemes for 'displaced' people in Hargeisa.
A historicised spatial view of urban settlement patterns in Hargeisa shows how experiences of harm come in multiple forms and this sharpens our view of structural and symbolic forms of violence. Different forms of violence shape space, and violence can become constitutive of spatial dynamics that produce and reproduce vulnerabilities. 27 Violence manifests in coercion as a result of direct, physical force, while at the same time, coercive effects of institutions and structures are experienced by people in spatial assemblages in the city. This approach to violence, precarity and space therefore contributes to an understanding of the ways symbolic systems of distinction materialise while naturalising and disguising relations of power that create inequality in the first place. 28 In Hargeisa, we illustrate how this 'naturalisation' takes place through popular narratives that foreground stability and security in the city. These often belie patterns of (clan and class) segregation that are historical products of different phases of urbanisation, destruction and violence in the city, and reflect everyday experiences of violent 'site effects' of gentrification and property relations.

Approaching site effects through lived experiences of marginality
Our research conducted in Hargeisa was part of a broader, comparative research project that explored the nexus of displacement, migration and security in Somali cities between 2017 and 2019. For this article, however, we zoom into the place-based experiences of people in Hargeisa, where a total of 42 interviews were conducted by the authors and locally resident researchers. 29 Nine of these interviews were conducted with officials, local and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and land-owners involved with displacement and resettlement in the city. The remainder of the interviews (including 2 group interviews) was conducted with 45 residents of quite different, but all marginalised neighbourhoods of the city: Statehouse, Cakaaro, Daami, Mohammed Mooge, as well as resettlement areas (such as Digaale) on the city outskirts. There was a gender balance across the interviews and the participants ranged in age from under 20 to over 70 years old. The majority of interviewees had returned to Somaliland from refugee camps in the late 1990s, and thus lived in Hargeisa for two decades.
Supplementing these interviews, 10 of the previously interviewed residents (from Statehouse, Daami and Cakaaro) were provided with cameras, and over 10 days were asked to take photos to illustrate their everyday experiences. These photos were then presented and discussed by the participants with us in small groups, which were recorded, translated and transcribed. The photos and photovoice discussion provided a different means and setting for participants to share their experiences. 30 It allowed us to visually observe the everyday in a still photo while listening to explanations of the photographer. Participants here had space to influence the course of our interaction in that we could not predict what types of photographs they would take and share with us. We subsequently arranged the exhibition of selected photographs and testimonies in Hargeisa and an accompanying public debate. This also provided an opportunity to reflect on the meanings of the data to various audiences and participants in these discussions, for instance the research informants/photographers themselves and local policy-makers or international humanitarian actors who we invited to this event.
The methodological approach was guided by the aim to foreground lived, place-based experiences and agencies. 31 Such a micro-perspective allows us to capture the making of places of precarity and to explore how the materiality of these places affects agency and shapes peoples' lives. Using a micro-lens to study the nexus of violence, space, and precarity is considered an important corrective to dominant narratives about precarious spaces as it brings forward the heterogeneous and often ambiguous experiences of precarity and contingency in the making of particular urban places. 32 However, the analysis also requires some critical distance, 33 and there is a periodic necessity to move beyond the 'face value' of informants' testimonies in order to account for relations of power and structuring forces manifest in these experiences and reported perspectives. The powerful popular narratives around Somaliland's reconstruction were important to consider in relation to how interviewees framed their experiences. Their emphasis on peace may be rooted in a comparison with previous experiences of mass violence and displacement, but also with the ongoing violence in Somalia. A downplaying of contemporary forms of insecurity, points to further silences and meanings expressed through what is not mentioned. We consider these framings and omissions in specific relation to socially segregated settlement patterns below.
Overall, our chosen research design attempted to be attentive to nuance and able to account for the flexibility, agency and change expressed through participants' stories and photographs. We use some of these images and testimonies to illustrate our argument. All interviewees and photographers are anonymised here, and their testimonies have been copyedited for clarity in their use in the public exhibitions we facilitated as part of the research.

City growth and geographies of urban marginality
Hargeisa is a rapidly expanding city that has undergone a remarkable re-reconstruction since the 1990s. This is visible in the increasing number of tarmac roads, shopping malls, gated compounds and high-rise buildings that started to shape the urban landscape since the early 2000s. Much of the city's growth is driven by diaspora investments. 34 Hargeisa's development is, nonetheless, closely linked to experiences of war and displacement. During the 1980s, the city became a major battle ground in the struggle between the Somali National Movement (SNM) rebel group and the military government under Siad Barre (1969Barre ( -1991. The city was for the most parts of the late 1980s placed under a 'state of emergency' characterised by regular curfews, mass-arrests and extra-judicial killings by government forces. When the regime responded to the SNM insurgency, it was with increasingly devastating and indiscriminate retributions against the civilian population who predominantly hailed from the Isaaq clan family. By the late 1980s the state-based violence had claimed the lives of between 50,000 and 200,000 civilians. 35 Aside from wide-spread extra-judicial executions, many of the victims were killed in the mass bombardments, both by artillery and air power, of the two main cities in the northwest of Somalia, Hargeisa and Burco. Hargeisa was reduced to rubble in these bombings and virtually the entire city's population was forced to flee. 36 Many of them crossed the Ethiopian border to camps around Harti Sheikh, where they stayed until the late 1990s, when governments on both sides, with the support of international organisations, agreed to the organisation of mass return of refugees to Hargeisa.
The political reconstruction of the Republic of Somaliland in the 1990s and 2000s created the conditions within which these returns could occur. Somaliland boasts the successful undertaking of local and national elections and peaceful changes of executive power. 37 Although Somaliland's political development has not been an entirely peaceful process, 38 supporters of the unrecognised Republic's claim to independence would emphasise the integration of groups outside of the predominant Isaaq clan-family into institutions of the state, and the high levels of stability achieved in most of the territory, in contrast to ongoing conflict in southern Somalia.
Refugee returns have shaped the spatial development of the city since the late 1990s, including (and often especially) in the 'camps' or neighbourhoods that have come to be associated with a broad category of people lumped under the label of 'displaced'. However, signifiers such as 'internally displaced person' (IDP) are often misleading and fail to capture the wide range of different background-profiles of those who live in these areas. Statehouse, Cakaaro, Daami, Mohamed Mooge, and Digaale are settlements that are associated with this categorisation of 'displaced' people and these were the areas of the city and its outskirts where this research was conducted.
The State House area -named after the ruin of the former British Colonial administrative headquarters that still stands -is prominent among these neighbourhoods. Indeed, on the 2017 satellite image of the city featured above ( Figure 2) the area is clearly visible as a round dark patch on the west side, just north of the river(bed) that bisects Hargeisa. As unused 'government' or 'public' land the area was initially settled by returnees in 1990s who were unable to reclaim old properties elsewhere in the city. While the following section details the power of structures and enclosure to enact (ambiguous) property rights, the satellite images here show the changing morphology of the area -from improvised makeshift and mobile stick and cloth/tarpaulin shelters (the buul) to a densification of population and the construction of many more corrugated metal shacks (jiingaad). The IOM 39 estimated that 25,000 people lived in State House in November 2017. Basic infrastructure was assembled across and within compounds, such as water tanks, plastic barrels, and pipes, and in some places, electricity cables or solar lights. The ever-increasing density of houses narrowed pathways between them ( . A similar, perhaps slightly larger, settlement established on public land is Cakaaro (also known as 'Stadium' given its proximity to the sports arena). Likewise, Daami has evolved in a comparable fashion, while Mohamed Mooge is closer to the southern outskirts of the city. Although we outline some important differences between these areas, in each there now lives a mix of people with different settlement histories: 'original' returnees, later displaced people, rural to urban migrants from Somaliland or Somalia, other low-income residents of Hargeisa, who were pushed out of other neighbourhoods in the city by rising rents, and non-Somali migrants, particularly ethnic Oromo from Ethiopia. Resettlement areas such as Digaale 'village' are located just beyond the edge of the city proper and are two of a number of settlements established since the early 2010s by the Somaliland authorities, international NGOs and UN agencies. Digaale, for instance, became home to some 700 households previously living in Mohamed Mooge area.
Violence and insecurity have shaped the development of urban space in Hargeisa not only in terms of necessities of physical reconstruction and the return of refugees (or arrival of the 'displaced') but also in terms of patterns of group settlement. Despite relative ethno-linguistic    The Isaaq 'clan family' predominate in the heartlands of Somaliland and formed the core of the SNM that fought the former military regime's forces in the northwest and led the Republic to independence. In Hargeisa, districts and neighbourhoods are associated with specific Isaaq sub-clans. Tahir 42 argues that these patterns need to be understood with relation to colonial-era land management practices/segregations and continuities in state relations with clan elders in the post-colonial and 'revolutionary' (Siad Barre) era. In the post 1991-period of Somaliland state (re)construction and refugee returns, Tahir contends that these broad settlement dynamics continued due to persistent insecurity, a lack of confidence in state security provision, and the maintenance of a plural legal system that engages a fusion of statutory, customary and religious codes. In this context, people chose to settle in areas where their clan predominated in order to gain physical protection and proximity to clan elders who would be able to negotiate or mediate on their behalf.
However, clan settlement patterns are not monolithic and various groups live across these invisible boundaries. The urban areas focused on here both reflect and complicate these settlement patterns. In State House, for example, the predominant clan groups roughly correspond with those associated with the wider districts of which it is a part. Nonetheless, these marginal settlements (through their appeal to marginalised and destitute groups) are also characterised by a potentially higher level of social diversity in that they have become home to both Somali and non-Somali refugees and economic migrants, and in some cases (like Daami neighbourhood) are predominated by particular socially marginalised caste groups who are traditional thought to sit outside of the wider 'Somali' clan-linage system. In interviews, people often emphasised clan diversity in the settlements, and, when asked, rejected the existence of practices of exclusion based on clan. Interviewees emphasised that they tend to join relatives or to select settlements where relatives live, a practice that contributes to clan-based settlement practices, but rejected practices of clan-based exclusion.
Given the clan settlement dynamics that Tahir identifies across the city at large, the reluctance of interviewees to mention clan as criteria for settlement selection may reflect the taken-for-granted nature of settlement norms. Networks that are commonly used in (re)settlement processes may not be considered to be worth emphasising at all. Alternatively, the rejection can also be caused by a conscious effort not to express clan-based solidarities, which can be taboo to raise in public. Although class divisions are often de-emphasised by Hargeisa residents, Tahir also demonstrates how land management and hybrid judicial processes highly disadvantage poor and socially marginalised groups. 43 As highlighted from the outset of this article, inequalities are strikingly visible in the urban geographies of Hargeisa, in terms of population densities and vast disparities in types of accommodation. This is relevant to our analysis of the (multi-levelled) spatialisation of precarity in that we must consider how people use wider narratives of Somaliland's (relative) security, peace, stability or social cohesion as 'illusions of certainty' 44 that help them rationalise their place in the city and deal with material disadvantage, place-based and structural violence. The following section continues this discussion of what we may consider to be coping mechanisms in terms of manipulations and negotiations of the built environment of settlements at the urban margins.

The power of the makeshift home: housing and layered property relations
Finding a place to settle in the city is a key concern for a newcomer. Many displaced people found temporary shelter with extended families, squatted temporarily with acquaintances or learned on their move to the city about affordable settlements. Building a hut (buul) is a housing solution as it can be put up quickly in open space. The buul consists of a stick frame covered in cloth, tarpaulin, plastic bags, old milk cans, and other materials that make the construction as tight as possible, protecting its inhabitants from sun, wind and rain. It can easily be disassembled and the materials of the house brought along as the family moves on. The nature of the house thus has mobility and transience assigned to it. Residents in the State House settlement have been living in makeshift houses over years, even decades, repairing and at times expanding them when necessary resources are available. As shown in the participants' and satellite images of Statehouse above (Figures 3-5) these fabric buul have often been replaced or supplemented by corrugated metal huts (jiingaad), but remain a prominent feature of settlements at the urban margins, given their ability to fill any and all available space.
The buuls and jiingaad are also fenced, separating the space of one family from their neighbour's, and simultaneously enclosing and fixing the family's ownership of the space. This space then becomes a property, which may be shared with relatives but can also be parcelled out and rented or sold to newcomers to the camp. Compared to before, when it was possible to find an empty place and settle, Aadil (A), notes that today it is (usually) required to pay rent or to buy a place: A: A place to settle! There is no empty space to settle in the neighbourhood. If an empty space is found, it is owned by someone, so anyone who wants to settle should buy it from the owner. The relations through which property is managed and exchanged in these settlements reflect an intensified competition over access to land in the city. Quresha who has resided in the settlement since 2000, described (interview 2017) how she encircled a plot for her goats and constructed a shack in which she has a shop. This illustrates how land ownership over time has expanded stepwise through the delineation and occupation of land in the settlement. The control of property is interconnected with the instituting of social and economic power, such as in Quresha's shop ownership.
The possibilities of engaging in land-property relations in Hargeisa's marginal settlements increased with growing density. This is because more pieces of land are parcelled out and new properties delineated. This spatial alteration produces new, if ambiguous, forms of 'ownership', as the land (ultimately) remains the official property of the government. As Ugbaad explains: There is no empty land now at all, but if you are willing to pay rent fees, you can find a small Somali House available for rent, and also if you have families, relatives or friends you can also reside with them. You can also buy a land if you can afford. A sufficient plot of land can be around 800 USD inside the neighbourhood. (. . .) when poor people become tired from paying frequent rent fees, they sometimes look for the support of their extended families and save money and when it becomes enough they buy a land, because they also understand the future of this place will not affect only them, but their situation will be similar to the thousands of households who live in this area. I don't think Somaliland government (who owns the land) will drop all these citizens out without any proper plan.

Ugbaad, 2017.
Securing 'ownership', even if temporary, is thus dominant among the lived experiences people expressed. In the efforts to secure ownership of property or rent, social networks such as the extended family are pivotal both for the mobilisation of social and economic resources. Networks to which people belong represent an immaterial form of power, referred to as social capital, and is essential to economic interaction. 45 This power is defined, produced and reproduced through the continuation of interactions and sharing of information that also establish subjectively felt obligations. Thus, social capital builds trust and can also be useful for the protection of land. For example, one family member may allow another to settle on their land as a means to secure the plot by controlling its use and draw on the trust enshrined in social networks as basis for that security. This implies that spatial control and land and housing ownership can be used to generate and harness social capital.
Social networks are furthermore reproduced through everyday management of property. This happens through regular tests of the established spatial arrangements. For example, Quresha explains, a person may construct a small house in front of someone else's home, thereby claiming ownership to this space by appropriating it and 'grabbing what you thought were yours'. The boundaries are fluid between spaces in poor urban settlements such as in State House and Cakaaro, which are government land on which displaced and urban poor (officially) 'squat'. This means that land ownership remains informal, temporary and precarious. Possibilities of formalising ownership exist, and such a process requires approaching a local government office and to pay the necessary price for their services (Interview, Heybe, NGO representative, 2017). This approach to formalising ownership is very difficult to access for urban poor, and even when such formal ownership is acquired, it usually remains temporary. If it can be acquired, the advantage lies in a potential benefit that may be realised when the government decides to relocate people from government-owned land to resettlement areas. The documentation can then be used as currency on the basis of which people make claims for compensation. In anticipation of such government initiatives, some urban residents in Hargeisa have recently moved into poor settlements such as State House and Cakaaro from other parts of the city. This is a spatial strategy that rests on the anticipation that the government will (sooner or later) decide to intervene and relocate poor people from the city centre to other, planned settlements. Through such relocation strategies, it is expected, explains Burhaan (Interview, State House resident, 2017), that they will be able to secure a plot and thus improve their living conditions. While waiting, they continue as the next section illuminates, the work of mobilising various kinds of power to organise services and access work that secure their (precarious) livelihood in the city.

Precarious lifeworlds: assembling work and services
These are the tankers, the vehicles that bring us water here in our camp. They usually work daily since most of the neighbourhoods in this town get water through these tankers. They serve most of the people in the town. Because the dry river beds -where you could get water -are far away, we use the trucks and hand carts. How many times it comes depends on how many family members there are, like me, I use almost five drums. When we need water to be brought, we call them on the phone. I pay six dollars per-day but in one month it is around 18 dollars. Naciimo, 2018. 46 This photograph and Naciimo's testimony depict the routine of acquiring water for the household, encompassing her husband, their children and Naciimo's mother ( Figure 6). Other basic services assembled through private arrangements are sewage and electricity, and to afford these, Naciimo explains that she carefully economises to keep costs down. For example, she controls the use of electricity by restricting the use of light, charging of the phone, and watches the metre that registers usage. Regularly she has experienced cuts in the line, but she also complains to the electricity company about over-charging and has achieved reduction in the bill as a result. While for Nacciimo the household economy is made more manageable through the regular payments she receives from a family member in Djibouti (towards care for a young boy in her family, who is blind), she and the people in the neighbourhood often organise collectively to manage the costs of sustaining basic services, as highlighted in the water-trucking example above.
Nonetheless, it remains an everyday struggle to sustain services. The inability to predict and regularise access to basic services is connected to the need to pay. This is required for all services, for instance, to maintain toilets by organising sewage-disposal and to be able to deposit garbage. International agencies have supported the establishment of more toilets to be shared by multiple households in the settlements in the city centre and for individual households in the resettlement areas at the outskirts. The issue is an inability to pay for sewage removal trucks, causing toilets to fill up, smell and produce health hazards. Toilets may be shared with neighbours until payment can be made.
Notwithstanding the efforts of problem-solving, the protracted experiences of dealing with multiple voids in everyday necessities demonstrate an infrastructure precarity that is spatially inscribed into the everyday realities of these settlements via the market-relations that are required to sustain them. Deficiencies in basic services signify precarity as characteristic of the particular spatial order of the settlement. While external actors have provided input to spatial reconstruction, these can become quickly dilapidated as households lack the market-power to sustain them. This is true in the aforementioned case of toilet provision, and also with the instalment of solar electricity panels and street lights, which typically do not remain functional for long.
This dilapidated spatial order is aggravated by the problem of narrow roads and the risks this implies for the physical security of residents. At the State House, people recollected several incidents of fire, often erupted in connection with cooking, spreading rapidly and causing several deaths. Because of the narrow roads, fire trucks are prevented from entering the neighbourhood and the dense packing of housing structures (particularly the cloth/tarpaulin buul) cause fires to spread rapidly. Understandably, the fear of fires is widespread, and the most frequent measure to remedy this risk has been to replace the buul houses with corrugated steel shacks. The settlement thus produces 'site effects' expressed in changing housing structure, demonstrating also how spatiality shapes fear and social processes of dealing with this fear as a familiar feature of daily lives.
The struggle to sustain infrastructure (water, electricity, sanitary) and changing housing structures are spatial arrangements interwoven into the social processes of everyday life. Both economic and social powers are important to manage and organise basic infrastructure and to alter housing, but through upholding access to the urban economy, such management can be feasible. Mobility is thus an important strategy for dealing with spatial effects of the settlement. The example of Yasmin, a woman who arrived in Hargeisa from eastern Somaliland around 2012, demonstrates how mobility in her everyday routine secured her means of making a living in the city: You know the toughness is something inborn and necessity will force you to do what you are supposed to do. (. . .) I board the minibus and then alight and go on foot for a while to the milk market. (. . .) I walk to the slaughter house from there. [I go there] most of the times unless I don't feel well. (. . .) I go to the market place during the day and after I brought the milk home and ensure the kids are asleep, I then go to the slaughter house at around one o'clock in the morning, together with other women, we walk and sometimes we face challenges where we meet on our way hyenas and robbers. (. . .) I only sleep for some hours at the slaughter house fearing dawn will break while you achieved nothing the whole night.
The routine of working at the slaughterhouse at night arose for Yasmin only after she had worked some time collecting gravel. Other people sold gravel on her behalf because she did not know 'how to sell it and the places where there are customers.' This was different when she started going to the slaughterhouse to collect the skin of the slaughtered animals. She knew how to remove the fat from the skin and cook it. She also knew how to separate the ghee from the milk, allowing her to access a market in which she could earn a living for her family by 'getting involved in the business of milk'. The urban economy thus became a space in which she could take advantage of multiple opportunities through mobility, regardless of the risks and uncertainties connected with moving around certain areas, especially at night.
Yasmin's story of her everyday routine of moving across the city for work is similar to that of many other women who, like her, often bear the burden of making a living for their families in the city. The stories of husbands, fathers and young men, often focused on health problems caused by exhaustion, often from physical (construction) work or from the stress of looking for work. Access to health care often featured in such stories, centring around collection of money from friends and family to pay for tests or medicine. The lack of success in the labour market leads to physical stress that requires a social network to support access to privatised health services. Across these everyday experiences, the power to organise services and work for a (precarious) livelihood in the city is mitigated through social and economic relations produced in people's social space. In the final step, the role of government in shaping the spatiality of such everyday precarity is underscored.

Government through resettlement: 'durable solutions' and changing spatial relations
Technologies to govern urban space and to administer urban populations include evictions and the relocation of squatters. While squatters in other cities in Somalia currently face unprecedented numbers of often quite violent evictions, 47 the Somaliland government has undertaken a different approach: successive relocation. In this, it is supported by a number of international governmental and non-governmental organisations emphasising the need to provide 'durable solutions' to protracted displacement. New neighbourhoods have been demarcated, among them, for example, Jimcale, Ayah 1, 2, 3 and 4, and Digaale in the northeastern, southwestern and southeastern outskirts of Hargeisa, respectively. By our estimate, several thousand people from squatter settlements in the city centre have so far been relocated.
Central to this form of government is the relationship of the municipality with owners of land at the city's outskirts. Resettlement offers landowners an opportunity to not only formalise ownership but to add value to their land in the form of infrastructure development. By entering into negotiations with the authorities, landowners can negotiate support for the development of streets and other construction work. For local authorities, such negotiations imply possibilities for realisation of political interests, including the appropriation of land for public purposes. In the 1990s as the city was dealing with the immediate aftermaths of the war, IDPs and returnees who had settled in small makeshift houses across the city were located in places that the authorities deemed to be 'not in accordance with [the] town plan' (Interview former city official, 2019). It was a priority in resettlement strategies to relocate these people. Later, when such emergencies were no longer requiring urgent attention, relocation plans were organised through lotteries determining who could be moved. For example, a project could fund the relocation of 200 families and a new settlement was subdivided into blocks, which were then won as part of a lottery. Although arbitrary, winning this lottery did not necessarily represent a ticket out of precarity.
The process of resettlement is often complicated and messy, and people expressed different views on how this may (or may not) serve their interests. The two excerpts below describe a resettlement of people from a relatively urbanised part of the city (Mohammed Mooge) to a new village in a rather barren location at the city outskirts, near the airport (Digaale): 900 families were moved from Mohamed Mooge to Digaale and the clinic moved with them. Our expectation is that only Allah will help us but when they come (the government) they tell us that they are willing and ready to help us but they have nothing to give us. (. . .) They said the 900 families will move to Digaale and the rest will also be moved along with the clinic. ABC [anonymized international NGO] brought verification cards to these 900 families and they never told us the reason for their movement. For us, we haven't been given the cards and ABC said that they only have 900 cards which were distributed to the moved families. For the moved 900 families they have the clinic doctor but they don't receive any other support including food and shelter.
Actually, they moved 830 families and they are not actually from Mohamed Mooge camp. Before they moved the people, they built metal sheet houses and instead of moving these suffering people from Mohammed Mooge, they moved some people from the town because they bribed the people migrating them and only very few from Mohamed Mooge were moved. (. . .) ABC was moving the people and gave the contract to youths who were very corrupt and inexperienced and contacted with the leaders of the Mohamed Mooge camp. So, I was among the committee and so I got the card for moving to Digaale. Both Xirsi and Tawfiiq describe how resettlement processes are not straight-forward and their effects are therefore uncertain. Xirsi's testimony expresses the expectations and hopes associated with the resettlement and the disappointment when he was not selected to move. For Tawfiiq, the resettlement ensured that he acquired a new land plot, whilst also keeping his old one. This resulted in him (potentially) becoming a landlord. Their experiences highlight that resettlement practices are part of and contribute to the 'hierarchised space of capital' 48 as networks are involved and benefits are distributed through them. Tawfiiq and Xirsi's stories illustrate how resettlement can extend and reproduce power and privilege, and also sustain less privileged positions.
Resettlement has multiple effects, some of which are experienced as positive. These include potential land tenure, improved security and better access to some services -and were noted appreciatively by research participants. However, people's changed proximity to the city centre is a factor that may exacerbate some people's precarity in relation to wider urban economies. When a resettlement project moves vulnerable people further away from the places where they must search for day-to-day work or other sources of income, this can negatively affect their livelihood strategies. A long distance of travel and the lack (or expense) of transportation into the city centre implies a loss of spatial power and with it also a loss of power over the use of time. 49 When work is generally acquired anew daily, the relocation to city outskirts produces marginalisation vis-à-vis the central urban market places. With unpredictable travel, it is more difficult to access possible livelihood strategies that the urban context provides, and this may also be assessed negatively with regard to security. 50 Responding to place-based disadvantages, some people, who were part of resettlement programmes, opted to move back into the city and settle, once again, in make-shift houses in a more central location proximate to the urban economy's opportunities. In such circumstances, people would retain ownership of their newly acquired plot and rent it out, thus trying to make an additional income off of the property acquired through the resettlement programme. As such, these internationally backed resettlement programmes remain incomplete in that significant numbers of 'IDPs' remain in city 'camps'. People move back and forth to negotiate opportunities for land tenure and livelihoods, enacting multi-directional and ambiguous patterns of mobility. However, urbanisation can over time come to enclose outskirts within the rest of the city. This would increase the value of the plots and the money to be made off of them. The ongoing development of the city also implies that the value of property can change when the landuse adjacent to the new settlements is altered through upgrading. With such speculation, a profit could also be made if the plot is put up for sale, for example, to fund migration for a seller or a family member to Europe or elsewhere.
Resettlement therefore offers some possibilities for people to profit from new property ownership although not necessarily in ways intended by political and humanitarian actors. The opportunities generated from spatial and humanitarian-institutional arrangements, which often change over time, are ambiguous and contested. How these develop also depends on historical and contemporary relations between clan groups in the city, which can exert further influence on spatial segregation and contestation over urban land. 51 Further resettlements are being talked about by the Somaliland government, including the mass relocation of people from State House (Interview, National Displacement and Refugee Agency, 2018). However, concrete plans for what would be a huge undertaking have not yet been articulated.
In cities in Somalia, such as Baidoa, Bosaaso and Mogadishu rapid, mass (and often violent) evictions are often made feasible by the fact that the majority of displaced people do not hail from dominant local clan groups. Hargeisa's different experience of initial refugee 'returns' (as the impetus for the establishment of such neighbourhoods in the first place) has meant that many people in areas such as Statehouse have clan connections elsewhere in the city, making large-scale relocation (without adequate compensation and resettlement options) more politically problematic. As such, and as noted in the previous empirical section on 'camp' property relations, it is the potential of eventual relocation (with some form of material compensation) that can drive speculation in the land and property markets at the urban margins.

Conclusion
Focusing on marginal settlements in Hargeisa, we have analysed spatial re-orderings that unfold and shape precarious lives in processes of post-war reconstruction and urban growth. As earlier camps have evolved into more permanent settlements, people have developed layered land-rent relations and organised infrastructure, social networks and work. Our methodology provided multiple angles (interview-texts, photos) and enabled us to engage narratives of urban change and everyday practices of people living in these settlements. This approach to experiences of residents in marginal urban settlements draws attention to contingencies in urban change and how it affects precarity in the everyday but also connects with processes operating at other scales. The conceptual base for our approach to vulnerabilities of people in Hargeisa's urban margins was found in the spatial approach to precarity. The spatial lens was linked to the broadening of the concept of precarity to encompass vulnerabilities in human life that reflect a political condition shaped by power relations. Our approach is reflective of multiple scalar relations of power, and we complemented the spatial perspective on precarity with attention to a spatial perspective on violence. Acknowledging how historical experiences of violence can be perpetuated in socio-spatial patterns of urban reconstruction, this is an important dimension to complement the understanding of the precarity of people living at the cities' margins. It allowed us to draw attention to the effects of urban spatial reordering that cause bodily harm expressed in the term 'violent site effects'.
As part of our in-depth empirical study, we approached the constitution of marginalised settlements in Hargeisa from a historical perspective on urban settlement patterns. This sharpened our view of multiple forms of violence manifesting in the production of urban margins. Important in our analysis of urban marginality were the ways in which people expressed experiences with establishing power over land by entering into negotiations over land ownership and sustaining the relations necessary to retain that power. Contemporary land-rent relations are thus shaped by the history of displacement and by how upon return of displaced people, the delineation of everyday space through property gradually unfolded. Displaced people, who arrived longer ago and settled on government land quite close to the city centre, have established a degree of power over these plots that they took and enclosed with fencing. With the growing population density resulting from continuous in-migration, family members or other (generally, but not exclusively, 'known') people settled within the fenced spaces over which they could exert some authority. These spaces have thus become sources of social and economic power, but are also the source of friction. The layered property-relations are challenged amidst the growing settlement density. Other effects of density are dissatisfaction with the physical impacts of rudimentary and dilapidated infrastructure and worry of fear of destructive fires.
The State and humanitarian organisations have undertaken resettlement initiatives to exert control over urban space and, ostensibly, to reduce the precarity faced by people living at the margins and lacking land tenure. However, for those people who are relocated, such programmes can negatively affect the power position of the resettled in regard to access to work and opportunities for livelihoods within city centres. The schemes may then engender unintended consequences whereby the resettled move back to their former settlements in the city proper, and rent out their peripheral plots that they originally acquired through luck or social connections. Another unintended consequence of the potential of further relocation programmes is the speculation that they fuel among those living in marginal city settlements. This intersects with an already dynamic (if legally ambiguous) property sale and rental market as people stake and exchange claims on plots of land in the hope that they will become beneficiaries of such initiatives. As such, these dynamics (combined with wider patterns of gentrification and rent increases elsewhere in the city) may further increase population density and exacerbate the aforementioned frictions, problems and physical insecurities associated with urban marginality.
In the empirical sections of this article, we furthermore illustrated how the physical and legal arrangements of particular places through property, organisation, and provision of infrastructure impact on people's lives and can cause bodily harm. Thus, they resemble the effects of physical violence. Such forms of symbolic and material violence are not necessarily intentional nor directed towards bodies or caused by a subject (a perpetrator). They are instead part of social and physical arrangements that perpetuate inequality, deprive people of basic living conditions, block social and at times also physical mobility, and entrap people in precarious spaces and lifeworlds structured by fundamental and existential insecurity. Our conceptualisation of violent site effects highlights how struggles over the control of physical space intersects with social space and result in power relations that affect people's (precarious) livelihood strategies. The effects are not necessarily intentional yet appear as structural dynamics that perpetuate precarity.
Drawing on the concept of violent site effects in Hargeisa has thus illuminated structuring logics of precarity. We have pointed towards market-relations pertaining to property and basic infrastructure, and various forms of local and international governmental intervention as structures reproducing and perpetuating certain lives as precarious. At the same time, our account has also emphasised the social complexity that is obscured in the deployment of labels such as 'camps', 'displaced' people or an undifferentiated 'urban poor', and the varying levels and types of agency that are exercised by those living at the urban margins. We have additionally accounted for the different ways in which people make sense of multiple precarities and transformation of places embedded in the city's changing morphology and history of destruction and reconstruction. This highlights some of the consequences of governmental and non-governmental interventions in these contexts: be they positive or negative for different actors, transformative or reproductive of existing power relations, intended or unintended on the part of the intervenors. Regardless of different outcomes, asking questions about 'violent site effects' can help identify vulnerabilities for people on urban margins within such complex and multifaceted transformation processes.