Shockwaves

Abstract

Urban conflict literature has attempted new comparisons between contested cities in conflict zones and cities with no armed conflict. This literature tends to use representational frameworks around defensive planning and normative government discourses. In this article, I propose to expand these frameworks and to engage with epistemologies of lived experience to produce new relational accounts linking “conflict cities” with “ordinary cities”. The article accounts for the lived, sensory and atmospheric in exploring the legacies of conflict on the everyday urban environments. It then reflects on the everyday and experiential effects of counterterrorism in ordinary cities. While this is designed to minimize threat, it also alters urban spatiality in a way reminiscent of urban conflict zones. It then explores the unequal impacts of counterterrorism across urban publics, and their experiential connections with practices of counterinsurgency. The article is structured around two ‘shockwaves’ entwining lived experiences across seemingly unrelatable urban settings.

Atmospheric negations: Weaponising breathing, attuning irreducible bodies

“…Importantly, with such proximity I do not intend to refer to vault-like spheric immanence indicated perhaps most clearly by the ‘bubble’ and ‘foam’ metaphors of Sloterdijk (2011, 2014, 2016). Proximity herein is neither metric but resembles the notion of aerial and material intimacy (Sharp, 2021), hence characterizing sphere-dwelling that is constituted, instead of rounding cultural environs, through vibrating ‘shockwaves’ (Fregonese, 2021; Safa, 2022), hovering ‘meteorologies’ (Mostafanezhad and Dressler, 2021), radiating ‘material fluidities’ (Nieuwenhuis, 2016), and olfactory lingering of violence. Such material and embodied understanding of atmospheric proximity thus helps in acknowledging manifold ways of weaponising the air through the necessity of the body to breathe in its aerial surroundings (Sloterdijk, 2009a), but importantly, also in avoiding masculine, techno- and Eurocentric remoteness that many (e.g.…”

Lockdown and the intimate: Entanglements of terror, virus, and militarism

“…Here, on Rue de Courbillon, police located the individual suspected of orchestrating the deadly terrorist attacks of 15 November in the French capital. The raid was successful in zeroing in on the terrorists, but it carried a host of militarised atmospherics that enveloped the area and significantly disrupted the intimate and private spaces of those innocent residents caught up in the raid – their domesticity, the bodies, and their emotions (Fregonese, 2021). While ambulances and military trucks were stationed in the street, helicopters hovered over buildings as the police raided flats overlooking a primary school, residents woke in the dark to sounds of helicopters, gunfire and explosions.…”

“…Here, the spatial and the sensorial come together to enact the embodied effects through the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of places under lockdown. The militarism of the response to the COVID-19 virus enacted through the spatial politics of enclosure and confinement has further politicized affective urban atmospheres (Fall, 2020), intensifying feelings of vulnerability much like physical partitions in conflict urban zones (Marić, 2020; Fregonese, 2021). It is important to consider these emerging feelings and affective atmospheres of control, confinement and isolation, especially in view of the significantly impaired mental health of many residents of places under lockdown.…”