Geographical Imagination and Experiences of Violence and Violence Prevention in Post-Soviet Space

Institutional actors in urban areas in Latvia are increasingly concerned about reducing violence on multiple scales and temporalities. Imagining such achievements, however, often too easily focuses on the aesthetics of security and infrastructure in public space that obscure the social causes of violence and effects this has on unequal development and social marginalization. Drawing on fieldwork on practices of domestic violence prevention in three Latvian urban areas during the autumn and winter of 2019, this paper examines how the geographical imagination of where violence resides connects violence prevention and spatial development as projects of European modernisation in post-Soviet space. We identify four spatial fields most often associated with violence: (1) neighbourhoods and infrastructural elements, (2) dark and isolated spaces, (3) spaces associated with intoxication, and (4) private spaces. We analyse the most common individual and institutional strategies for violence prevention in each of these fields, noting the logics of dispossession, surveillance, and connectivity behind them. We show how gendered practices and disciplining are emphasised on an individual level, while spatial fixes to violence in public space often focus on men’s violence against men. All in all, we show how violence prevention figures in imagining living in ‘European’ spatial and institutional infrastructural regimes.