Publication date: 29 January 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089976
Number of illustrations: 58
Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities
Multidisciplinary interpretations
Ashvin Devasundaram (Editor), Stamatis Zografos (Editor), Márcio Mattos (Editor), Zoe Holman (Editor)
Placing peripheralised people at its centre, this edited collection unpacks how urban violence must be understood from multiple points of view: powerholders, decision makers, law enforcers, built environment professionals, creative artists, and particularly from the lived standpoint of less empowered communities. It illustrates how listening to often unheard voices of the excluded, disproportionately experiencing daily precarity and violence, can inform and broaden our shared understanding of urban violence.
Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities presents a comprehensive and revealing picture of how urban violence manifests and operates in multiple and unprecedented ways, challenging the common conception of urban violence solely as criminal physical acts performed by predictable perpetrators. This volume blurs geographical borders through an equitable and representative synthesis of Global South and North interpretations, focusing on a range of marginalised communities. The chapters are inventively crafted as local-meets-global case studies, with a broad regional sweep from Brazil, US, UK and Ukraine to India, South Africa and Palestine. This is mirrored in the volume’s multidisciplinary diversity of topical themes including migration and politics, policing, law and order, built environment/architecture, film, media and performing arts.
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Andrew Feinstein
Introduction
Part I: Multipolar interpretations of migration, marginalised communities and urban violence
1 Embodied violence and passions of resilience: tracing the residues of structural violence in immigrant oral histories
Samuel Finesurrey, Thierno Diallo, Sadaf Majeed, Samantha Ruiz-Correa, Bashir Juwara and Michelle Fine, with Shaday Barrett, Tigida Fadiga, Samantha Hernandez and Holliday Senquiz
2 Asylum seekers’ struggles and forms of violence on the Greek border island of Chios (2015-16)
Ioulia Mermigka, Nikos Souzas and Jojo Hekate Diakoumakou
3 War, cities and migration-driven diversity: unravelling a complex relationship
Nick Dines
4 African soundtracks in Brazil: race, music and migration
Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji and Jasper Chalcraft
Part II: Policing, law and order amongst marginalised urban demographics
5 Unveiling the lens: exploring motivations behind body-worn cameras implementation among police leaders in Brazil
Márcio Júlio da Silva Mattos
6 The fragile governance of security in Brazil
Arthur Trindade Maranhão Costa
7 ‘The police do not keep me safe’: using participatory action research to study the harms of policing and counter their epistemic power
Brett G. Stoudt, Micaela Linder and Joshua G. Adler
8 Femicide at a Croydon bus stop – ‘knife crime’ as category error
Adrian Howe
Part III: Violent cities – multimodal appraisals of the built environment
9 Ledbury Estate: haunting tales of fire and precarity
Rosa Woolf Ainley and Stamatis Zografos
10 ‘Until we take the square’: urban violence and the erasure of difference, from the marginalised periphery towards a touristified, neoliberal Athens
Ioanna Manoussaki-Adamopoulou and Zoe Holman
11 Invisible barriers: the impact of urban development on violence in Maré, Rio de Janeiro
Bruna Ferreira Montuori, Henrique Gomes and Shyrlei Rosendo
12 Locating violence within the coloniality of planning and housing. a view across two contexts of displacement in Myanmar and Italy
*Giovanna Astolfo *
13 Navigating the maze of urban violence and housing policy failures: the case of Alexandra and Soweto in post-apartheid South Africa
Mokgaetsi Florence Koenaite and Pheladi Pearl Makena
Part IV: Framing urban violence and marginal communities – film, media and performing arts
14 The covering not the coverage: challenging media collusion in UK state killings
Ken Fero
15 Dreams and dreamlike realities in childhood: (post) memory, fantasy and fear across local, global and cinematic narratives of violence
Mahenderpal Sorya
16 Building the Barricades: violence, mental health, culture and resilience in the favela complex of Maré, Rio de Janeiro
Eliana Sousa Silva and Paul Heritage
17 Coming out across cultures: mapping male mental health in transglobal films
Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram and Dinesh Bhugra
18 Framing transgenderism: violent otherings of transgender people in urban Kashmir
Toyeba Mushtaq and Aaliya Ahmed
Epilogue: a conversation between Aline Batarseh (executive director of Visualizing Palestine) and the editors.
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800089976
Number of illustrations: 58
Publication date: 29 January 2026
PDF ISBN: 9781800089976
EPUB ISBN: 9781800089983
Hardback ISBN: 9781800089952
Paperback ISBN: 9781800089969
Ashvin Devasundaram (Editor) 
Ashvin Devasundaram is Reader in Global Cinemas at Queen Mary University of London. He has established a new research area on new independent Indian cinema. His research covers gender/caste-based violence, urban space, cultural heritage, geopolitics, soft power and subaltern identities. He is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project ‘Connecting Creative Industries and Cultural Heritage’ (2024-27).
Stamatis Zografos (Editor)
Stamatis Zografos is an architect and Associate Professor in Architecture at Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is co-founder of Incandescent Square and a founding member of the Institute of Psychoanalytic Studies in Architecture (iPSA). His research lies at the intersection of architecture, critical heritage studies and psychoanalysis.
Márcio Mattos (Editor)
Márcio J. S. Mattos is Professor at the Instituto Superior de Ciências Policiais and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Political Science, University of Brasília. He holds a PhD in Sociology and was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research focuses on policing, police culture, and public policy evaluation.
Zoe Holman (Editor)
Zoe Holman is an Australian journalist and writer, based between London and Athens.
Zoe Holman is an Australian journalist and author, based between London and Athens. She has a History PhD on British foreign policy in the Middle East from University of Melbourne/SOAS and is the author of 'Where the Water Ends: seeking refuge in fortress Europe'. She is a Creative Writing PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London.
Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities
Ashvin Devasundaram, Stamatis Zografos, Márcio Mattos, Zoe Holman,
29 January 2026
Co-production of Knowledge in Action
Cassidy Johnson, Vanesa Castán Broto, Wilbard Kombe, Catalina Ortiz, Barbara Lipietz, Emmanuel Osuteye, Caren Levy,
15 September 2025
Urban Informality and the Built Environment
Nerea Amorós Elorduy, Nikhilesh Sinha, Colin Marx,
12 March 2024
Co-designing Infrastructures
Sarah Bell, Charlotte Johnson, Kat Austen, Gemma Moore, Tse-Hui Teh,
27 April 2023
Co-curating the City
Clare Melhuish, Henric Benesch, Dean Sully, Ingrid Martins Holmberg,
24 May 2022
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