Peace in cities, peace through cities? Theorising and exploring geographies of peace in violently contested cities

ABSTRACT This special issue explores geographies of peace in violently contested cities – cities where the socio-political order is contested by actors who use violence and repression to either challenge or reinforce the prevailing distribution of power and political, economic, and social control. The articles within the special issue theorise and explore where, when, how, and why urban conflicts manifest themselves in the context of contested cities. Together, they also uncover strategies and mechanisms that can break dynamics of violence and repression, lead to urban coexistence, and generate peaceful relations in cities, grounding their analyses in rich case studies of different violently contested cities. The special issue thereby advances the research front on violently contested cities by studying their previously underexplored constructive potential. Bringing together different disciplinary perspectives, the special issue speaks to broader issues of conflicted and conflict-driven urbanisation, political violence in cities, and wider processes of urban change.


Introduction
Numerous research outputs highlight the centrality of cities -as multifarious and distinct interconnected political arenas, 1 as territorial anchors in wider processes of political and economic restructuring, 2 and as sites where local dynamics of peace and conflict have a wider impact beyond their own fluid urban borders and physical structures. 3Cities shaken by violent contestation -e.g.Medellín (Colombia), Beirut (Lebanon), and Kidal (Mali) -underline these dynamics.When violently contested cities such as these are analysed, the emphasis is frequently on violence along entrenched conflict lines, everyday lives riddled with (economic, social, ontological, and personal) insecurities, and segregated cityscapes.These cities also often suffer from failed reconstruction, reintegration, and reconciliation efforts, depressed economic development, and political entrenchment CONTACT Ivan Gusic ivan.gusic@statsvet.uu.se 1 Ash Amin, 'Spatialities of Globalisation', Environment and Planning A 34, no. 3 (2002): 385-399; and Manual Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-regional Process (Blackwell, 1989). 2 Neil Brenner, New State Spaces.Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, 2004). 3Castells, The Informational City.
between antagonists, potentially creating an explosive status quo that risks sending both the city itself and its wider context into a spiral of violence. 4uch portrayals are neither inaccurate nor strange, given that the aforementioned dynamics often prevail.Yet what such analyses -whether in media, by involved political or policy actors, or through academic research -do not account for is that there is more to these cities.In addition to highly destructive realities, violently contested cities also hold significant -yet untapped and rarely materialised -constructive potential through which antagonists might find common ground and the cities themselves might become examples of coexistence.The potential to bring people together, develop dynamic political, economic, and social cooperation, and provide inspiration for change is often overshadowed by the destructive realities of violently contested cities.Yet this constructive potential is nevertheless still there -both in theory and practice.
Collectively, this special issue explores the dynamics which utilise this constructive potential to foster peace in the midst of urban contestation.Peace here refers to actions and visions that break away from destructive confrontation and violence, establish new relationships across polarised lines, and enable cooperation that improves everyday lives.This broad conception of peace resonates with the notion of everyday peace -i.e. a grounded understanding of peace that is based on the experience and practices relevant to specific local contexts and the actors who live there. 5The specific nature and degree of violence in any given city depends on a mix of attributes including physical size and structure, history, economic development, political power, and governance. 6Violence in cities also has not only direct spatial implications at the local level, but it is inhabited at various interconnected political and geographical scales: global, state-wide, regional, and human. 7Challenging the oversimplification of urban violence, there is a growing demand to merge urban studies and peace research to generate a more relational and plural analysis of violence in contemporary urban space. 8The articles in this special issue uncover interrelated strategies and mechanisms that can break dynamics of violence, lead to urban coexistence, and generate peaceful relations in cities, grounding their analyses in rich case studies of violently contested cities spanning different world regions and geopolitical contexts.Exploring in-depth how this constructive potential works, as well as what hinders and facilitates it, is the principal aim of this special issue.
This introductory article is structured as follows.It begins by situating the special issue in wider scholarly debates and outlining central research gaps.It then moves on to some collective theoretical points of departure, before identifying key theoretical and empirical insights from the collection of individual articles.The article concludes by summarising how the special issue advances the research front on violently contested cities and on urban peace and conflict more widely.

Violently contested cities in urban peace and conflict
The starting point of this special issue are the inherent ambiguities of violently contested cities -which we understand as cities where socio-political order is contested by actors who use violence and repression to challenge or reinforce the prevailing distribution of power and political, economic, and social control. 9Violently contested cities are often embedded in war-torn contexts.Examples include Jerusalem (Israel-Palestine), Beirut (Lebanon), Kidal, Gao, and Mopti (Mali), and Medellin (Colombia), all of which are addressed in this special issue.Other cities are violently contested despite the absence of recent domestic warfare.Such examples, also studied here, include Manama (Bahrain)a city which has experienced ethno-sectarian protests and repression connected to the monarchy's statebuilding project 10 -and Grenoble (France) -where residents have borne the brunt of a 'war on crime/terror' and police brutality has triggered violent protests. 11iolently contested cities are often unstable flashpoints where antagonists clash and focal points of repressive measures, something which tends to make them dysfunctional or divided as urban governance systems as well as potential breeding grounds of conflict and unrest extending beyond the city borders across multiple scales. 12Beirut attracts high levels of violence between the previously warring parties in Lebanon, 13 Medellin features fractured governance where city institutions compete with criminal organisations over control of the city, 14 while Jerusalem's future status constitutes a seemingly impassable obstacle in a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. 15Violent contestation tends to have detrimental effects on everyday safety and livelihood, practices of urban coexistence, and economic development.In Jerusalem, urban violence has been unstable yet ever-present, contributing to a divided geography of fear, in which many Jewish residents avoid entering Palestinian neighbourhoods, and Palestinian residents reduce their presence in Jewish areas during violent periods to a minimum. 16et in addition to having destructive consequences and playing conflict-generating roles, violently contested cities are simultaneously sites of creativity, mixing, accommodation, experimenting, and diverse forms of mobility and connectivity between people and ideas, in trade and culture, across ideologies and religions. 17These dynamics give cities such as Beirut, Medellín, and Grenoble a constructive potential which can lead to improved relations or even reconciliation between antagonists, shared socio-political rule permeated by cooperation and interdependence, and new ways of dealing with conflict and incompatibilities non-violently.Violently contested cities can thus also be arenas for constructive outcomes and conflict-transformative dynamics. 18Exploring and theorising this constructive potential is the common thread across the articles in this special issue.
This focus is motivated by the substantial need for both theoretical and empirical knowledge about the role violently contested cities play in both peace and conflict.Recent scholarship points to major shifts in global and local geopolitics giving cities an increasingly central role. 19Research has highlighted the urbanisation of warfare, 20 the surge of violent events in several of the world's major cities, 21 and the role of violently contested cities as both urban frontlines in major conflicts 22 and stumbling-blocks in wider peace processes. 23These dynamics underline that cities occupy central roles in conflict-affected societies across the globe, and suggest that this centrality will only continue to increase in an ever-urbanising world. 24nderstanding how urban violence, repression, and marginalisation can be prevented and managed, as well as how urban coexistence and peaceful relations in cities can be achieved, will thus be of utmost importance in the decades to comenot only for everyday life of residents in the cities per se, but also for peace and stability in their wider contexts. 25As noted by Cockayne, Bosetti, and Hussain: 'the future of violent conflict is urban -because the future of humanity is urban.If we want to prevent future violent conflict, we must prevent violent urban conflict'. 26ur special issue recognises this need and therefore seeks to contribute to the growing literature on violently contested cities and urban peacebuilding. 27It particularly seeks to address the research gaps which exists on the constructive potential of these cities.Research on violently contested cities from within political geography, 28 peace and conflict studies, 29 anthropology, 30 urban studies, 31 and planning 32 has advanced our knowledge on the challenges experienced in violently contested cities.However, this research has almost exclusively focused on how these urban areas became violently contested, the destructive consequences and conflict-generating roles their contestation has, and why different efforts to generate coexistence in them have failed.These studies have uncovered how urban residents end up as 'intimate enemies', 33 how their cityscapes are built apart through defensive architecture, 34 how their spatial layout reinforces contestation, 35 how they both attract and generate violence, 36 and how their politics tends to become entrenched. 37Whilst important, this focus on destructive dynamics has resulted in far fewer studies on the constructive peacebuilding potential of these cities. 38 As a result, we have limited in-depth knowledge on what dynamics are at work when citizens are reconciled, when shared socio-political rule emerges, and when new forms of coexistence are discovered. 39Our focus on theorising and exploring how and why violently contested cities are able to play constructive roles therefore makes this special issue a novel endeavour into sparsely explored academic terrain.
The articles in this special issue make important theoretical and empirical contributions by theorising the constructive potential of violently contested cities and exploring how urban actors are able to harness this potential through different strategies that make everyday life safer and improve the city's internal and external functioning.The broader relevance of such insights is high given that these cities also tend to be central in their wider contexts (regions, states, and continents), 40 meaning that their constructive potential is not limited to urban life but can improve the wider geopolitical contexts of these cities as well.Without denying that the long-term stability of Jerusalem or Mostar is dependent on the general state of affairs in Israel-Palestine or Bosnia-Herzegovina, we thus argue that positive changes in, or learning constructive ideas from, these violently contested cities might affect the trajectories of their wider contexts.
We also make contributions to the wider everyday peace literature as well as the literature within urban studies that focuses on urban coexistence.The everyday peace literature has emerged from widespread critique in the last decades towards different mainstream approaches -within practice, policy, and academia -aimed either at facilitating or understanding how peace and coexistence is generated. 41The critique levelled at these approaches is that they understand peace as an inherently universal and objective concept, concern themselves with abstract matters without paying much (if any) attention to the realities of societies transitioning from war, and envision peace to be implemented through technical top-down processes. 42In contrast, the collective argument within the everyday peace literature is that peace is a contextually bound and therefore plural and subjective concept, whose materialisation is highly concrete and reached through messy and mundane but inherently political processes between those who have to live the generated peace. 43Consequently, to understand how peace is built and coexistence generated, we must study the different contexts and the political, economic, and social everyday processes through which these concrete forms of peace and coexistence materialise. 44This special issue contributes to this literature through the analysis of how messy, dynamic, complex, creative, and informal urban processes generate different forms of coexistence in violently contested cities.
The literature on urban coexistence in turn recognises the challenges inherent in urban dynamics and analyses how diverse groups and interests can coexist in the city without generating destructive outcomes.Cities bring together a multitude of groups, ideologies, political organisations, economic interests, and cultural expressions, which by 40 Indeed, this centrality is often why these cities are violently contested to begin with (see Gusic, 'Divided cities'). 41 definition are engaged in conflicts in dense and interconnected urban spaces. 45longside current and future urbanisation trajectories that imply an ever-urbanising global population, this literature stresses additional trends that underline the importance of understanding how urban coexistence can be achieved.One is that global patterns of migration, connectivity, and economic networks are turning cities more diverse than ever before, thereby intensifying the challenges of urban coexistence. 46At the same time, contemporary and future threats from climate change and global health crises bring particular urban challenges and risk destabilising cities. 47 We argue that the insights from this special issue also advances our knowledge on urban coexistence per se.On the one hand, problems found in violently contested cities are often similar to those found in all cities.While amplified by the conflict setting, the nature of these problems -e.g.segregation, political entrenchment, competition over resources, ethnic and religious frictions, and social and spatial inequality -does often not differ that much between these cities and more 'ordinary' cities. 48On the other hand, the setting of violent contestation makes these cities 'least likely cases' of urban coexistence.While this makes their problems qualitatively different, we also argue that whatever solutions generate coexistence in these cities are likely to be relevant in cities without overarching violent contestation.

Theoretical points of departure: drivers of peace in violently contested cities
Violent contestation tends to have extensive detrimental effects on people's safety and livelihoods, practices of urban coexistence, political stability, and economic development.Yet such destructive realities are only part of the story.Because of their urban dynamics, violently contested cities also hold a constructive potential to bring people together into improved and reconciled relations, to create shared and mutually accepted socio-political orders, and to discover new ways of dealing with conflict non-violently. 49This constructive potential stems from the constitution and functioning of cities -i.e. from how cities are composed and lived. 50 and keeping apart. 51Cities are home to police forces and criminal organisations, urban planners and private corporations, city institutions and NGOs, the socioeconomically dominant and the poor and marginalised. 52They are made up of sites with diverse purposes and usages -e.g.gated communities and upscale shops, homeless shelters and slums, infrastructural nodes, shopping districts, industrial areas, and green spaces. 53Heterogeneity also applies to roles cities play in their wider contexts, such as economic powerhouses, political centres, infrastructural nodes, cultural capitals, and social melting pots. 54Cities are furthermore dense in the sense that they concentrate and 'throw-together' 55 these heterogenous elements so that people with diverse political affiliation and identities live and operate in close proximity; city institutions, criminal organisations, and informal institutions overlap when ordering the city; and schools, homeless shelters, and banks are located in the same streets and buildings. 56Cities are lastly open and permeable in the sense that they offer contact points between which movement is possible, so that their densely located heterogenous elements have somewhere to meet -like streets, parks, cafés, and public halls -and ways of getting there -like pavements, public transport, and roads. 57n terms of how cities function, unavoidable mixing means that different urban elements are forced to engage each other. 58Cities are often understood as meeting places where unexpected, random, and spontaneous encounters and juxtapositions happen. 59et this mixing is not only made possible in the city -it is unavoidable.Density combined with openness and permeability throw together the city's elements so much that they are denied isolation from each other, making mixing something which actually is 'impossible to avoid for more than a brief moment'. 60Rich and poor communities are thus intertwined, criminals and police must constantly engage, and religious venues have to coexist with decadent clubs. 61This inevitable mixing tends to generate conflict, because when heterogenous elements engage each other in dense, open, and permeable spaces where they are forced to mix, conflicting interests and practices are hard to avoid. 62The political, economic, social, symbolic, and infrastructural importance of cities also leads to conflicts over them, 63 while causes and consequences of conflict -such as economic inequality, protests, and repression -often are most pronounced in cities. 64 This effectively makes cities 'clashing point[s]' for different segments of society. 65n the context of violent contestation, this understanding of cities implies that these cities hold, and urban life consists of, radically different antagonists who dispute the political order and are densely located, have somewhere to interact, and are forced to engage in unavoidable conflict (this is actually part of the explanation for their violent nature).Yet this conflictual geography does not mean that everything is perpetually contested in cities, that every meeting is hostile and each street a battlefront, or that cooperation is impossible.The city's spatial and social geography also leads to multiple dynamics which can transform conflict and generate coexistence.People who live in close proximity to one another in cities are able to meet 'the other' in everyday life rather than as some distant, opaque, and/or caricatured image. 66The inevitable mixing in cities can also lead to 'chance encounters' 67 and enhanced 'co-presence' 68 that make people realise that they are quite similar and share both interests and challenges.This can lead to transcended differences, the promotion of 'new kinds of social relationships' 69 and alternative ways of living, and shared institutions and networks dealing with common problems. 70The complexity of cities also leads to strong interdependency between different groups, institutions, and ways of life. 71Cities feature challenges which know no borders and therefore are shared and best addressed together (flooding, homelessness, waste management) and have almost indivisible resources (water and sewer systems, road networks, electricity grids, public transport infrastructure) that everyone needs and few can control on their own. 72his enforced thrown-togetherness -of being 'in it together' spatially, politically, economically, infrastructurally, and socially -means that the viability of city life depends on its heterogenous elements establishing at least some minimum form of cooperation through shared institutional frameworks or loose social or political networks. 73Cities are also hubs for creative networks, trade and exchange between economic clusters, new art forms, and innovations in everything from goods and services to architecture and public transport. 74hese dynamics require stability and co-presence between whatever incompatible groups, ways of life, institutions, and interests exist in the city. 75n essence, urban life thus demands coexistence.Sometimes this coexistence takes the form of cross-fertilisation where differences are transcended and new relations, groups, or norms are generated.Cities -including violently contested urban areastend to be where vibrant civil society, progressive political movements, and new notions of citizenship emerge. 76At other times, coexistence takes the form of pragmatic engagement when and where cooperation is needed or indifference towards 'the other' when only co-presence is required. 77Yet it is coexistence nonetheless.Without neglecting their destructive potential -which generates violence, inequality, and destruction 78 -cities also often do hold remarkable levels of coexistence.City life is therefore often theorised as 'the being-together of strangers' 79 and the ideologies and norms, sociopolitical orders, ways of life, sites and areas, and groups formed by this beingtogetherness.
These urban dynamics mean that violently contested cities also have the potential to generate improved relations or even reconciliation between antagonists, shared sociopolitical rule permeated by cooperation and interdependence, and new ways of dealing with conflict non-violently. 80It is from these theoretical points of departure that the different articles in this special issue begin their exploration of how coexistence can be reached in violently contested cities and what dynamics facilitate and hinder these processes.This constructive potential largely resonates with recent research on the everyday and the ability of ordinary people to, through their routine and quotidian ways of life and interactions, re-constitute their social environment. 81Our argument, however, goes beyond most of this literature through our shared understanding that the spatiality and urban dynamics found in violently contested cities shape and conditionrather than just are arenas for -these encounters and negotiations. 82

Key insights from this special issue
This special issue consists of seven articles which are written from different disciplinary perspectives, employ a wide spectrum of theoretical and methodological approaches, and study the violently contested city through multiple empirical contexts.They comprise nuanced and grounded studies of hitherto underexplored aspects of the violently contested city, use approaches such as policy analysis, spatio-temporal analysis of satellite imagery, interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, and includes cities such as Beirut (Lebanon), Cucuta and Medellin (Colombia), Manama (Bahrain), Jerusalem (Israel-Palestine), Kidal (Mali), and Grenoble (France).
The diversity of these articles produces multifaceted analyses which explore the causes and effects of urban conflict(s) as well as how different strategies and mechanisms -like everyday mediation, reconstruction efforts, improved urban governance, and public protests -might transform conflict, deescalate violence, and generate coexistence.The articles explore and theorise different forms of violence, including direct and structural, infrastructural, criminal, insurgent, and state-led.They zoom in on the microscale of streets and homes but also zoom out to explore citywide dynamics, contextualise the role violently contested cities play in their wider contexts, and analyse the impact of peace agreements on relations in the city.They focus on 'mundane' aspects of everyday urban life but also analyse the dynamics underpinning citywide planning decisions or endemic corruption, analysing themes such as socioeconomic inequality and segregation, public protests, urban ruins and postwar reconstruction, refugee arrivals, and securitisation of urban space.
Each article thereby adds its own theoretical and empirical lens.Yet they also make a collective contribution towards theorising and exploring the same overarching issue: finding pathways to coexistence in violently contested cities.While not an exhaustive overview, we highlight four key insights generated collectively through the special issue and across the different contributions.
The first insight is that violence, insecurities, and marginalisation certainly are highly entrenched in violently contested cities.While this is hardly surprising, what this special issue uncovers is the way this violence relates to the different forms of coexistence that the articles explore.While they certainly identify both examples of and hopes for urban coexistence -as described below -such instances are often best described as constructive cracks in otherwise destructive facades, or distant hopes competing with largely bleak outlooks -as exemplified by the coping strategies of refugees in the entrenched, multifaceted, and overlapping violence(s) of Cúcuta 83 or the shared Israeli-Palestinian visions of a tolerant and inclusive Jerusalem in the midst of increasing violence, political radicalisation, and an all but dead peace process. 84he second insight, however, is that these smaller cracks and distant hopes indeed do exist -both as real examples and genuine promises -and largely due to the spatially and socially complex constitution and functioning of cities.Several articles show that the diverse nature of cities allows marginalised urban actors opportunities to resist oppression, negotiate coexistence, and find ways to cope.Smaira & Gunning show how the constitution and functioning of cities force radically different actors (e.g.people 83 See Mantilla in this special issue. 84See Lehrs et al. in this special issue. belonging to different identity groups, Hizballah members, soldiers in the Lebanese Army, Palestinian refugees) to exist together in dense, interconnected, and constantly entangled city spaces of Dahiyeh in southern Beirut.They also show how city life allows them to negotiate peace in unexpected constellations and through new networks and alliances.These 'everyday mediation' practices may be formal and informal, temporary and permanent, spontaneous and planned, eagerly or reluctantly engaged in.Nevertheless, they bring people together, allow the marginalised to make themselves heard, and force conflicting groups to compromise, largely because the density and diversity of city life demands this.Mantilla similarly shows how urban informality, interdependency, and constant mixing allow 'so-called ordinary people', 85 refugees, civil society activists, and community leaders (all of which operate in urban margins) to negotiate an uneasy but functioning coexistence with violent security forces, criminal networks, and armed groups.This is demonstrated in the border town of Cúcuta, where over the last three decades a flux of immigrants has arrived in the city, proliferating a long-fought border war between Colombia and Venezuela and a domestic 'violent peace' fraught with kidnappings, decapitations, and sporadic urban conflict by paramilitary groups.
Mabon & Nagle in turn show how the same dynamics allow urban actors to come together publicly and performatively, in large collectives, and around principled grievances -rather than informally, in small groups, and focusing on ad hoc problems as in the examples above -to protest against ruling ethnonational elites and the political realities both supporting and supported by them.What is noteworthy is not only how the density, openness, permeability, heterogeneity, and mixing of cities allow a vast number of people to gather quickly and protest in spaces of symbolic (main squares, outside parliaments, memorials) and concrete (infrastructural nodes, police headquarters, government buildings) importance and thereby pose direct threats to ruling elites.It is also that it holds the potential to bring radically different -and often conflicting -groups together.This was evident in both Beirut and Manama where groups exposed to decades of 'divide and rule' politics by elites -who exploit rather than address societal divisions and subsequently pitch these protesters against each other -transcended divisions for shared goals.The result was heterogenous protests that included people with different ethnonational, religious and sectarian identities (e.g.Christians, Sunnis, and Shias), across class divisions (e.g.immigrants and citizens), and from marginalised backgrounds (e.g.LGBTQs and ethnic minorities) fighting for equality, human rights, and political accountability and against sectarianism, corruption, and impunity.The conflict over the city was in both cases transformed from a horizontal one (between different groups) to a vertical one ('people' against 'elites').We also learn from Mabon & Nagle's article that the urban nature of these protests was key in both Beirut and Manama when forging right-to-the-city movements which demand better public services, an end to corruption and sectarianism, and recognition by the state.The claim for equal distribution of public services for marginalised groups -and the daily protests demanding human rightsunsettled the ethnic and sectarian supremacy and reproduced the right-to-the-city as part of a long-term goal for urban peacebuilding.
Hoelscher & Harboe take an 'architectural turn' and show that by opening up, connecting, and giving content to previously closed, disconnected, and 'empty/void' public spaces, aspects such as density, heterogeneity, and mixing enable these spaces to generate new constellations and networks that cooperate across dividing lines, make people meet 'others', and become safer due to being much more frequented.Through an analysis of Medellin's all-embracing socio-political action plan to reduce urban inequality and violence, the positive chemistry of politics, architecture, and urban design is exposed.Hoelscher & Harboe show how Medellín's transformative social urbanism agenda encapsulated a range of urban peacebuilding achievements by forging an inclusive political project that ties public service provision and the renovation of public space, generating mobility and accessibility for the local community.It also shows how the social, political, and economic interests of different actors in the city can be harnessed towards urban peacebuilding as well as the successes but also limitations inherent in 'branding' Medellín as a progressive global city.
Lehrs, Brenner, Avni, & Miodownik focus not so much on achieved as on potential progress.They demonstrate that urban actors in Jerusalem -both activists and the overall population -seem more open to coexistence and shared control over the city than state actors are, that they tend to value 'softer' issues such as urban diplomacy and local civil society (more common in and important to city life) and that they find 'harder' issues such as borders, territory, and formal control (of key importance from a statist perspective) less important.The result is that urban actors seem much more willing to live together than non-urban actors, and that they see the value in and are prepared to compromise extensively to do so.This contrasts with narratives often emphasised by formal negotiators, such as animosity towards and division with 'the other', predictable and one-sided dominance, rigid or even non-penetrable borders, and security infrastructure.The visions emphasised by urban actors can be understood in the context of living in a city which -to some degree at least -functions through mutual dependence, (uneasy and unequal) coexistence, and regular contact.
In all these cases, the theorised constructive potential of violently contested cities is there -either as attained realities or future hopes.And while many of these smaller cracks or distant hopes are located in otherwise destructive realities or bleak outlooks, they need not be.The end-result of protests is not always that they are crushed, fade away, or are undermined by internal fighting.Just as everyday mediation limited to certain groups, areas, or neighbourhoods does not need to stay like that.Nor do urban actors always have to be excluded from wider peacebuilding processes which affect them but tend to exclude, neglect, or downplay urban issues.If these limited realities and hopes can be expanded and realised, the violently contested city can spearhead rather than hinder wider peace processes.
The third insight is that the city's Janus-faced nature -an often theorised and empirically illustrated characteristic, suggesting that the same aspects of cities which give it constructive potential also drive destructive dynamics -also shows when it comes to urban peacebuilding initiatives.We just elaborated on some promising realities of and hopes for urban coexistence.Yet what also emerges from the articles is that similar settings (people living close by), strategies (everyday mediation), or mechanisms (codependence on urban resources) can -and often do -generate directly destructive results.Rather than lowering violence and building new intergroup networks and initiatives, urban dynamics theorised to promote peace can also generate violence and lead to more conflict and animosities between the same and/or new groups.Part of the explanation -as the different articles show -is that the inherent complexity and unique constitution and functioning of cities create specific challenges that any initiative for coexistence needs to be aware of and adapt to.Otherwise, the results are likely to be nonexistent or even counterproductive.
In other words, as several of the articles illustrate, strategies intended to build peace in violently contested cities need to be adapted to the idiosyncrasies of cities and urbanity as well as attuned to the complexities of issues found there, rather than having 'universal' solutions focusing only on limited aspects of any given issue. 86An example is Medellín, which is often hailed for its transformation of space and its role in the subsequent decrease of violence, conflict, and insecurity.Yet, as Hoelscher & Harboe show, the regeneration of buildings, squares, and other public spaces would have had little effect had they not tied into other problems faced by these 'regenerated' communities such as socioeconomic deprivation and inequality, which includes poor schools, transport infrastructures, public parks, and libraries. 87Only regenerating the built environment, the authors argue, would have achieved little.The articles by Danielak and Lehrs et al. in turn demonstrate the importance of adapting any given strategy or intervention to urban settings as well as the consequences of not doing so.Danielak shows that the disengagement of the United Nations stabilisation mission in Mali (MINUSMA) with urban life, when operating in cities and building massive bases next to them, has meant that the mission at times has been unable to address local conflicts or protect civilians to the extent desired or expected.Through a study of Kidal, Gao, and Mopti it is illustrated that MINUSMA has contributed to militarisation -in the form of 'super camps', social and physical distance between peacekeepers and communities, and heavily armed spaces -in these cities.
As Danielak shows, the lens of 'conflict urbanism' helps highlight how peacekeeping can inadvertently contribute to instability, broken urban dynamics, and infrastructural violence in violently contested cities.The article concludes that an inattentiveness to the urban context in which the peacekeeping troops were deployed is at least partly responsible for these problems.Lehrs et al. in turn show how the exclusion of Jerusalemites -on both the Israeli and Palestinian side -from the state-led negotiating teams has generated peace agreements which are not attuned to urban idiosyncrasies, which ignore or neglect issues important to Jerusalemites, and which ultimately result in agreements which either do not resonate with or even undermine urban life.Their argument -whose sentiment is shared across the articles -is instead that to build peace and generate coexistence in cities, we need to 'see [peace, conflict, and coexistence] like a city' rather than a state.This means including those who have to live in any given outcome of urban peace, addressing the concerns and needs they might have, as well as focusing on issues important to urban life and the functioning of cities.
The fourth and concluding insight is that there is much to be gained by broadening our scope and contrasting different cities and their often shared challenges and opportunities.The different articles focused on radically different settings, trajectories, and issues.Yet what becomes obvious is that these cities have a multitude of commonalities while neither their challenges nor their opportunities respect theoretical or empirical dividing lines.This applies to the distinction between cities affected by war and cities whose experiences of war -if any -are generations away, with Djikema & Mouafo showing that these distinctions often do not make much sense: the French government's involvement in the 'war on terror', its militarised police forces, and its vilification of the (mostly immigrant) disenfranchised suburban populations has both brought the war 'over there' home and generated similar violence(s), traumas, and grievances as war zones do.In contrast to most studies of violently contested cities -which they argue are predominantly focused at non-Western cities ravaged by 'conventional' war -Djikema & Mouafo demonstrate that Grenoble (France) has many things in common with such cities.It is a violently contested city which is not at peace and whose citizens experience different forms of violence including state-based police brutality, local crime, global terrorism, anti-terrorist campaigns, and anti-Islamic harassment.The article thus challenges distinctions between war and peace as well as between 'ordinary' and 'violently contested' cities. 88 Everyone might not agree with the collapses of this distinction.Yet their article demonstrates that many of the problems associated either with 'ordinary' or 'violently contested' cities in fact are shared problems -be it segregation, marginalisation, or direct and structural violence. 89These different cities have many fundamental dynamics in common, due to the contested nature of urbanity as well as the theoretical and empirical collapse of the war-peace distinction. 90Similar dynamics can be found in most (if not all) cities around the world.While the violently contested nature of the cities explored here might dissolve, worsen, or alter these problems, they are neither unique to these urban areas nor exclusively tied to or caused by their violent contestation. 91As illustrated throughout the different articles, this applies to cities that are controlled by one faction as well as those divided or shared by several contending ones.
These commonalities, however, are not only found in challenges, violence(s), and insecurities.Many of the aspects with constructive potential in violently contested cities can also be found in other cities.This goes for the ability of urban areas to bring diverse people together as well as to force interdependent groups to cooperate; the role of cities as sites for protest movements that can alter the political trajectory of any given society; and the need for (uneasy, spontaneous, flexible, innovative, and shared) everyday negotiations to sustain urban life, everyday mobility, and accessibility.These shared aspects and blurred boundaries do not remove the need for contextualisation and paying attention to the particular trajectories of each and every violently contested city. 92But it does mean that insights and inspiration, warning signs and failures, breakdowns and joint achievements can be drawn from across the board from cities that are violently contested as well as not.

Conclusion
This special issue theorises the constructive potential of violently conflicted cities and explores how urban actors are able to harness this potential through different strategies that make everyday life safer and improve the city's internal and external functioning.By placing analytical focus on urban geographies of peace in the midst of violent contestation, the different contributions add to the growing literature on violently contested cities and urban peacebuilding.The principal aim in this special issue has been to uncover strategies and mechanisms that can break the dynamics of violence and repression, lead to urban coexistence, and generate more peaceful relations in cities, across different world regions and geopolitical contexts.The articles show how urban citizens are able to use different dimensions of urban dynamics to push for more inclusive urban politics, create new relationships and networks, and create new and shared visions of coexistence.While often overshadowed by the destructive realities in these cities, such examples of non-violence, coexistence, and reconciliation are significant and hold the possibility of broader transformative opportunities.
Several of the articles emphasise the agency and ability of ordinary urban citizens to navigate the violently contested city and create coping strategies, informal networks, and everyday practices that help them increase their own security and quality of life in the midst of violence.In many cases, these everyday practices also go further, putting pressure on governments and violent actors to facilitate and promote local collaboration and peace initiatives, either in a more metaphorical sense such as in the case of Jerusalem, or more practical and concrete urban actions as in Medellín.Such findings resonate with the everyday peace literature, by uncovering dynamics of grassroots resistance to militarisation and exclusionary governance structures with urban planning and architecture as well as transformative agendas taking precedence.
By illustrating how urban dynamics can create opportunities for peace in violently contested cities, the findings also speak to the broader literature on urban coexistence.The specific strategies and practices emphasised in this special issue -informal mediation, youth collectives, right-to-the-city mobilisations, and socio-spatial transformationcould arguably be applied to strengthen urban coexistence and everyday peace in other cases where rapid urbanisation, environmental stress, and economic hardship risk destabilising cities.