environment can be a form of material and symbolic violence in urban spaces. Urban violence is regularly ascribed, not to cities or urbanization processes, even less to the governments who decide their progress, but to the poor. Urban planning divides the territories of cities into (rich) fortresses and (poor) slums, separated by internal boundaries, using the uncertain way of life in ordinary cities as a starting point to invent a design As an IntroductionHere we propose an analysis of urban violence through a refl ection on the violence of urbanization. This means not only violent acts but also violent sequences in the history of modern urbanization -including the symbolic violence of architecture, urbanism and urban planning. We analyse the question of violence by showing how the built urban Violence in cities, whether in the North or the South, in most cases is blamed on the 'usual suspects', namely the young people living in poor neighbourhoods. In this article, we att empt to shift this blame to the urbanization process itself. We introduce the concept of 'violence of urbanization', defi ned as the impact of the rapid and radical transformation of cities through the introduction of mega-projects into the spatial and social environment. The overall objective of this transformation is modernization (and globalization), but it results in the marginalization of the poorer population. As an example, we present Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, not because social violence is particularly high there (quite the contrary in fact), but because today Addis Ababa's urban spaces are produced by radical urban planning and not by maintaining an inclusive and peaceful urbanity. Some important public spaces in the city have been violently destroyed and then rebuilt, in order to achieve urban modernization (in line with the development of a capital city of the Global South). In the process the poor are forced to move further into the peripheries so that their former habitat may be replaced by 'a suitable environment' to accommodate the neo-globalization of urban Africa. The majority of the new, massive, and rapidly constructed infrastructure projects are fi nanced and contracted by Chinese companies. This phenomenon illustrates a process that strengthens our hypothesis of violence of urbanization: it is just another war against the poor, not a war against poverty. It is one of the hardest but also the most common forms of violence we face today and it is being committ ed in cities around the world.

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