ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights peacemaking as a political-spatial iterative process involving national political reform but also urban socio-spatial changes that must embed peace in everyday life. It investigates peacemaking as a political-spatial process involving both political institutional restructuring and urban social and spatial changes that embed that peace in everyday life. In this conceptualization, political institutional change that occurs as a result of diplomatic and negotiated peacemaking at the national and international level is necessary but not sufficient for effective and genuine change in society to take place. Such peacemaking must be able to change the urban and spatial dynamics of the city in ways such that peoples' attitudes and behaviours have the opportunity to evolve over time. Urban spatiality can produce significant blocks and rigid obstructers to improvements in inter-group relations or it can create places of affordance and increased tolerance.
