Light violence at the threshold of acceptability

Abstract

This paper shows how residential high-rise developments in London deteriorate the living conditions for existing residents and set a legal precedent for distributing harm unevenly across the population. The paper unpacks the contentious decision-making process in one of several local planning applications in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets that ended in a spur of high-profile public planning inquiries between 2017 and 2019. The Enterprise House inquiry shows how, among other things, a loss of daylight, sunlight and outlook, and an increased sense of enclosure, affect already marginalised residents in neighbouring buildings disproportionately, elevating light to a legal category for assessing harm and addressing social injustice in the vertical city. The paper adopts a forensic approach to interrogate four instances during the public inquiry, in which numerical evidence of material harm resulting from a loss in daylight, sunlight and outlook was made to appear and disappear. The translation of scientific evidence into legal evidence is performed through the act of claiming ‘truthful’ representations of ‘real life experiences’ of light in digital visualisations. By revealing how material harm resulting from vertical development is normalised and thus naturalised in the planning inquiry, the paper demonstrates how ‘light’ violence is exercised in vertical development.

Mumbai’s differential verticalisation: The dialectic of sovereign and technical planning rationalities

“…As elsewhere (e.g. for London, see Ebbensgaard, 2024), then, vertical-horizontal relationality, a key concern of a thoroughly volumetric urbanism (Graham and Hewitt, 2013;Harris, 2015) was thus sacrificed -and through it, residents' health -in the name of economic efficiency.…”

“…Those differentials may lie on vertical or horizontal axes, institutionally – thus, regional or national government may dominate local authority, and bureaucratic rationality may overrule the technical. They intersect in the adjudication of ‘light violence’ in London, for instance (Ebbensgaard, 2024). The next section outlines a general conceptual framework for attending to a related situation in Mumbai.…”

“…Of course, sovereign planning rationality regularly overrules technical and local authority to enable private accumulation through verticalisation even in the West (e.g. see Ebbensgaard, 2024).…”

Introduction: Verticality, radicalism, resistance

“…Across the contributions, power verticals emerge in myriad guises in the form of power asymmetries which seem to overdetermine forms of urban development; but are often accompanied – and challenged – by forms of vertical, horizontal or transversal resistance. From the regulatory schemes that are written into planning law to curtail urban development (see Burte, 2024) or encourage high-rise construction with detrimental effects on residential populations (see Ebbensgaard, 2024), the power verticals on display throughout this special issue find expression in policing strategies, legal proceedings and evacuation procedures (see Adey, 2024). By drawing attention to the subtle workings of power in and through crooked vertical and horizontal planes, the papers in this volume direct attention towards manifestations of resistance in the everyday lives of those bodies that refuse to evacuate according to standardised safety procedures (see Adey, 2024), that mitigate the limitations posed in over-crowded, dense migrant enclaves (see Sheehan, 2024) or which inhabit vertical landscapes in ways that contradict or pervert hegemonic habituses of verticality (see Filiz, 2024; Harris and Wolseley, 2024; Roast, 2024).…”

“…The attention that urban scholars have paid to the power dynamics sustaining vertical warfare and high-rise construction has been as much concerned with the technical procedures that give shape to volumes (Elden, 2013; McNeill, 2020; Weizman, 2002) as with the conditions of possibility for social life to unfold within them (see this volume, Adey, 2024; Burte, 2024; Ebbensgaard, 2024; Sheehan, 2024).…”