The structural violence of spatial transformation: urban development and the more-than-neoliberal state in the Global South

This Special Feature explores the socio-spatial transformations of cities in the Global South under hybrid neoliberal regimes over the last few decades, which have resulted in significant harm to poor and marginalised groups. Our focus is on identifying the nature of this harm as violence enacted through the very structures – cultural, social, political and institutional – that organise social life. We also aim to illuminate the often contradictory and negotiated responses – ranging from resistance to complicity – of the poor and marginalised populations that disproportionately face such violence. The papers presented offer case studies from four different cities in the Global South and demonstrate the emergence of a state-capitalist nexus around the pursuit of grandiose urban (re)development visions. This nexus is historically and socio-spatially specific but reveals an increased capacity, willingness, and even appetite, for enacting structural violence via diverse mechanisms over long temporalities through interplays between slow and spectacular forms of violence.