Violence as a genre of urban life: Urban sustainability and (in)security in South African cities

Focusing on the urban identity of South African cities, this paper considers the merit of adopting "genre knowledges" to understand how violence shapes urban sustainability. Genre and the metaphor of unconscious "muscle memories" allow scholars, urban planners, and development practitioners to understand violence in sociohistorical and situated ways, as a systemic impediment to urban sustainability. South African residents and state actors have themselves internalized genre knowledges of violence that develop through common norms and implicate individual and collective entities. Specific instances of violence reveal how, once incarnated, genres of violence live on through muscle memories, like a phantom limb. However, genre knowledges and their physical evocations are not path-dependent: by genuinely reckoning with violence as situated cognition, and understanding its sociohistorical drivers, new practices can emerge. To realize urban sustainability in South African cities, one must engage violence as a defining genre of urban life.