Violent Site Effects in the City: Perspectives from Urban Poor in Hargeisa

This paper addresses geographies of violence from the perspective of people living at the urban margins. It explores informal settlements in Somaliland’s capital city Hargeisa and resettlement projects at Hargeisa’s outskirts, and draws on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘site effects’ to show how spatial arrangements simultaneously cause and exacerbate precarity. The empirical analysis of how these spatial arrangements manifest in people’s everyday builds empirically on 45 interviews. Most of the interviewees were displaced in the course of the civil war in Somalia and settled upon their return to Somaliland in the capital where they became part of a growing number of urban poor. We outline how the life of urban poor in Hargeisa, like in many other cities around the world, revolves around negotiating property, and thus access to land and housing, services, or employment. People continue to struggle every day anew for rudimentary income to pay for basic services, including housing, water, waste disposal, sewage, health or education. In a cooperative effort of the government and international organisations to provide a “durable solution” to these “urban problems”, new settlements were created at the city outskirts. The relocation of people to these settlements has improved access to land and housing (property), but it has also aggravated access to the urban economy and therefore exacerbated labour precarity. We use these experiences to analyse how layered forms of property relations evolved in Hargeisa’s poor settlements in conjunction with city-growth and the expansion of the urban economy. We show how power inscribed itself in these spaces through layered relations of property that result in various forms of precarity. The spatial inscription of precarity, however, generates effects that resemble those of direct physical violence: it harms the body, causes exhaustion and pain, and in some cases even leads to death. We capture these effects as violent site effects, and conclude by linking these effects to wider socio-spatial transformations of the global political economy