Peace and Planning

This semester I have a neat opportunity to take what’s called a “Directed Reading” – basically a chance to create my own syllabus around a topic I want to dive into the literature about. In partnership with a professor, I’m using this course to gear up for my eventual comprehensive exam and maybe even lay the groundwork for a future undergrad elective at the Carter School. Throughout the semester, I’ll be publishing biweekly blog posts digging into what I’m reading in the realm of “Urban Peacebuilding”.

One of the articles I read this week was Annika Björkdahl’s 2013 article “Urban peacebuilding” in the journal Peacebuilding. The author makes a compelling argument for why liberal peacebuilding is not a useful framework for divided cities. She posits that liberal peacebuilding’s focus on state-building through accords brokered at the national level does not account for the lived experiences of people living in cities where proximity and public space are dynamics every individual must navigate on a daily basis. Moreover, post-conflict reconstruction processes are generally implemented through state-level overtures rather than meaningful improvements in localized areas like housing and schooling that impact citizens’ daily quality of life.  

Likewise, Björkdahl discusses how the physical attributes of place and space inherent in urban areas – which offer opportunities for propinquity in a way more rural areas do not – can be ‘ethnified’ and how space-creation processes can be exclusionary. She also astutely recognizes that beyond serving as material assets with symbolic meaning, urban places are social spaces constituted through power relations and civic processes. 

While these discerning observations outline the limitations of liberal peacebuilding and the benefits of applying an urban lens to peace, it is important to note that Björkdahl’s theorizing is based on a city divided along ethnic lines rebuilding after violent conflict. However, it has relevance beyond this perspective; indeed, when applied to my dissertation research interests, they are quite illustrative. As we face a future threatened by climate change and grappling with disparate outcomes around public health and economic development, in cities across the US (and the world) transportation conflicts arise when the dominance of cars is challenged through policies that promote access to affordable and efficient public transportation and provide access to safe and connected pedestrian and bicyclist infrastructure.  

These conflicts emerge in different ways. They can be violent when individual drivers encounter pedestrians and bicyclists and (intentionally or not) use their vehicles to inflict bodily harm on these vulnerable road users. They can be nonviolent in more insidious ways – in the daily innumerable “close calls” when reckless drivers nearly hit vulnerable road users, when drivers verbally threaten or deride vulnerable road users, or when car owners are vocal opponents of projects that attempt to redistribute space (by taking away parking spots or traffic lanes or making streets narrower) to make streets safer for pedestrians and bicyclists or to rebalance investments to offer better public transit service – a wielding of power that is often successful as they favor those in elected office who are car drivers themselves. This power imbalance is evoked in Björkdahl’s characterization of ‘ethnoscape,’ in which “ethnic identity forms the main basis for power and resource allocation” (p. 214): 

“In the divided city, there is a constant fight over cityspace, where ethnic groups try to dominate space under their control, while excluding and/or driving away ‘the other’. Where dominant, they appropriate the city apparatus and attempt to shape the political system, the public institutions, the geography, the economy and the culture – with the goal to (sic) expanding and deepening the control over the city.” (p. 215) 

While the physical spaces of streets are shared yet contested public assets as Björkdahl envisions them, they do not necessarily exhibit an ethnic identity like we see in her examples of Mostar and Belfast. This is not to suggest that identity is not a key feature of the conflict, but rather that non-ethnic identities can fray social fabric as much as ethnic ones and that identities – particularly those that are the recipients of disproportionate public space and social power – are worth fighting for. In the excerpt above, we could easily see that a cultural identity (car driver vs. Other) is the salient framing that shows the “importance of place production in identity politics and the spatialisation of identity-based conflict” (p. 212). 

This leads us to where Björkdahl’s position on the promise of urban peacebuilding is weakest. She is careful to point out that the urban should not be romanticized, but her prescription for “grounding peacebuilding in the urban” (p. 219) does not seem to be quite grounded – but is rather quite rosy – after all. Her hopeful assertion that cities will be “sites of open access where people collectively search for a common good and change their political realities through the power of their appearance, by coming together and working side-by-side, and establishing sturdy relational networks” (p. 220) fails to consider the power of self-interest, even when that self-interest is tied to the allocation of public resources. Her belief that “urban space can unite people around shared goals, wherein private people come together as a public, and create a common civil society” (p. 220) avoids the uncomfortable truth that a public is comprised of countless individuals with their own priorities and that even when there are shared goals (e.g., safe streets), those individuals may choose policies that run counter to those goals because they are unwilling to face the trade-offs required to fully realize those goals (e.g., relinquishing public parking spots). Furthermore, her distinction of “private people” is curious – at what point does a private person become a public person…or said differently, can people be ascribed private or public identities and if so, what does that mean for our understanding of their relationship to public spaces and civic responsibility? 

Ultimately, Björkdahl opens an important conversation about what makes cities different as sites of peacebuilding, especially when compared to traditional liberal peacebuilding practices. However, her narrow view of what urban conflict looks like (violent ethnic conflict) leaves out much of the civic strife that perpetuates inequality and her unfinished (even naïve) approach to urban peacebuilding (cities will organically foster urban agency on behalf of collective action by virtue of being cities) does not seriously consider structural dynamics driven by entrenched individual self-interests.  

At the beginning of the semester, I was encouraged to bring questions with me to each of the readings I encounter. This article provided a helpful jumping off point to consider the types of questions that would be most instructive – I hope to return to these throughout the semester as a compass of sorts (and they will likely evolve as I gain familiarity with the literature). 

1. What makes cities important sites of study (as opposed to states, rural areas, etc.)? 

2. How do cities challenge – or change – our conception of public spaces, particularly street space? 

3. What is the relationship between structural power and individual agency in urban areas? 

4. How can physical spaces such as streets be objects of – or barriers to – urban peacebuilding? 

5. What is the relationship between physical and social structures – expressed through car culture – in perpetuating identity and power?