Citation

Hall T. Soc. Anthropol. 2008; 16(1): 63-76.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, European Association of Social Anthropologists, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00034.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article considers violence and the urban landscape as implicated occurrences. Urban landscapes are approached as something other, and more, than the scenes of violence – backdrops or settings for unkindness. Instead the paper explores the ways in which the terrain and fabric of the city can partake of violence, can be caught up in its delivery. This is to posit landscape as something not so easily divisible from the encounters and experiences taking place within and across it. I develop this loosely phenomenological argument by serial illustration, ranging over time and space and touching down in the cities of Manchester, London, Paris and then Cardiff, a 21st century capital city busy ‘regenerating’ its urban core. Bringing the article to a close, and following in the steps of street-level bureaucrats working with Cardiff's city centre homeless, I consider some contrary pairings of cruelty and kindness, and insist on (pedestrian) movement as constitutive of the urban landscape.