Cities of Banal Warfare: Affective Geographies in Violent Times
Join UCL Urban Lab to launch Sunčana Laketa's new book Cities of Banal Warfare: Affective Geographies in Violent Times. This event is part of the Urban Lab's 20th anniversary event series.
Cities of Banal Warfare: Affective Geographies in Violent Times
29 Apr 2025, 17:00 – 18:30
The UCL Urban Laboratory invite you to join the book launch of Cities of Banal Warfare: Affective Geographies in Violent Time with author Sunčana Laketa and respondent Kate Maclean.
This book analyses the impact of framing public emergencies and violences in Paris and Brussels as acts of war and how this normalizes militarism within urban contexts traditionally viewed as 'non-war zones'. It addresses how this process shapes urban governance agendas, constructs the notion of the 'enemy within', and conditions everyday lives. From lockdowns to states of emergency, the book considers urban citizens' agency and resistance, and how to rethink notions of urban peace.
'Banal warfare' describes the ways in which the vision of the city – ridden with conflicts, terrorist attacks and disease – infuses everyday urban life, to the point of becoming invisible.
Attendees will have the opportunity to purchase the book at the event, refreshments are provided.
This event is part of a series of activities celebrating 20 years of UCL Urban Lab.
In Cities of Banal Warfare, Laketa masterfully reveals how warfare has become normalised in the everyday life of Global North cities, challenging the conventional understanding of urban conflict as something that happens 'elsewhere'.
Sunčana Laketa
Urban and Cultural Geographer
Sunčana Laketa (MA in Psychology, University of Zagreb; PhD in Geography, University of Arizona) is an urban and cultural geographer. Her interests include different forms of urban and geopolitical conflict, as well as questions of social difference and their corresponding geographies of exclusion, focusing on how these become entangled with everyday places, lives and experiences.
Kate Maclean is an Associate Professor in Global Prosperity at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. She is a feminist geographer with a wide range of research interests – including rural credit, urban violence reduction and Indigenous fashions – and has an interdisciplinary background with degrees in philosophy, politics and women’s studies. Her regional focus is Latin America and she has conducted consultancies in Mali, Burkina Faso and Ciudad Juárez.
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