Abstract
In an era widely considered to be characterised by planetary urbanisation, intensified social, cultural and political frictions are leading to a growing trend of urban conflicts. This new ‘urban age’ has, according to Mustafa Dikeç, been accompanied by a parallel phenomenon of urban rage. Following similar themes to his previous book, Badlands of the Republic, in which he investigated the causes and contexts of the 2005 uprisings across the Parisian banlieues, 1 the author takes readers on a journey through cities across Europe and North America to explore their own stories of urban conflict.
Although Urban Rage is primarily written for a popular audience, Dikeç largely steers clear from dramatic accounts of the violence itself, preferring to focus on a careful and critical reading of the causes of riots. In telling such stories, he articulates complex geographical processes – such as segregation, displacement, demographic change, housing policy, accumulation by dispossession and urban regeneration – in terms accessible to a wider readership. For geographers wrestling with the art of popular writing, this is undoubtedly a good example. This does not mean that intellectual rigour has been compromised, however. Indeed, if there is one criticism of the writing style, it is that the depth of research and sheer quantity of statistics, quotes, policy reports and other materials condensed into the book’s short chapters can be rather disorientating.
Also notable is how Dikeç manages to draw connections and contrasts not only across geographical difference but also across different periods in the same place. Thus, rather than viewing riots solely in their contemporary context, a central argument is that riots can only be understood in relation to long histories of conflict, exclusion, stigmatisation and dispossession. Thus, London’s 2011 riots are read through those that erupted in the 1980s; Stockholm in 2013 is entangled with Malmö in 2009; and Ferguson 2015 in parallel with Cincinnati in 2001.
Substantial parts of the book are dedicated to policing – its violent and degrading articulations in particular neighbourhoods and communities – and quite rightly so. It quickly becomes apparent how central policing is to policy agendas, be they social cleansing, privatisation, austerity or the creation of a hostile environment for migrants and minorities. However, perhaps the most powerful message of the book is that ‘[a]lthough police brutality is usually the triggering incident of uprisings, a narrow focus on policing distracts from the historical and structural sources of urban rage’ (p. 53). Urban Rage thus illustrates how the everyday, ‘slow’ violences of rule-makers create conditions for uprisings through structural processes. While he never quite gets to the bottom of why these processes have become so central to the operation of urban government over the past 30 years, one can rarely fault Dikeç’s analysis of their outcomes.
For most critical geographers, the book’s conclusions are hardly surprising, namely that place-based intersections of racial and class oppression contribute to the conditions that spark urban riots, and that policy-makers seek to dismiss such uprisings as simply a pathology of ‘pure criminality’. Some consideration of the afterlives of the uprisings, a stronger critical grasp of the nature of the state itself and some stories from the Global South could also have strengthened the book further. Nevertheless, the passion and precision with which Dikeç writes is superb, as is his ability to present complex processes to a lay audience in a way that grabs the reader and inspires them to keep reading from cover to cover.
