Introduction to Marjaa: examining and representing violence, urbanisation and resistance through creative methods

In this Special Feature for City: Scenes Sounds Action, we bring together a series of multimodal essays by academics, artists, and activists who are experimenting with creative methods to examine and represent violence in and to urban places, and through urban development. The contributors have taken Mayssa Jallad’s 2023 concept album, Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels, as inspiration for this collection. Marjaa tells two parallel stories of urban violence in Lebanon: the weaponisation of architecture during the civil war, and the violence of post-war urban reconstruction. In this introductory essay, we also use Marjaa as an entry point into current debates about how to record and examine violence in and to the urban, and how to make violent acts legible, so they can inform resistance. We therefore also speak back to the notions of structural and slow violence, in relation to urban planning and development, their entanglements with direct violence, and the challenges they pose to understanding and representing violence. To frame this diverse collection, our framing essay expands on three intersecting themes: the materiality and immateriality of violence (what violence feels, sounds and looks like, and how it is enacted through urban material and immaterial entities); the temporalities and rhythms of violence (the histories and futures of violence, and the (dis)continuous, (un)expected and disruptive rhythms of violence); and the resistances and solidarities that respond to violence (including the connections that emerge between authors, authors and collaborators, and between people in violent contexts). Since writing about violence is itself a political act, we discuss these recurring themes in relation to the contemporary urbicide enacted by the Israeli regime on Palestine and Lebanon, before connecting them to the particular cases of violence across diverse geographies dealt with in the Special Feature.