ABSTRACT
This opening chapter seeks to clarify the commonalities, differences, and intersections between urban safety and peacebuilding practice. The authors explore how the symbiotic relationship between the public sphere of urban government (urban safety) and the generally more informal processes of conflict prevention, mitigation, and transformation (peacebuilding) can be harnessed in conjunction rather than in contradistinction to each other. Building on insights from semiotics, the chapter seeks to offer minimalist ideal-type definitions of urban safety and peacebuilding – conceptualizations that benefit from the medical differentiation between curative and palliative care. It constructs a heuristic typology of urban safety and peacebuilding initiatives vis-à-vis their levels of analysis, models of intervention, institutional foci, and the problems they deal with, before ending on a discussion of the level of aggregation (or granularity) of urban interventions as well as the level of politicization to which such activities are subject.
