ABSTRACT

By emphasizing that the confluence of urban safety and peacebuilding practice can result from the practical need to solve problems in specific places, this chapter explores the options for achieving safer and more inclusive cities. It shows how both urban safety and peacebuilding professions can look back at a long record of driving participatory processes and working within contentious political economies. The degree of local agency for change indicates the existence of spaces that frame and provide oxygen to transformative processes aiming to reduce violence or build peace in cities. These spaces exist in different shapes or forms, but there is much expertise on how to create and maintain them as a means to drive negotiated change. This operational focus brings into the fold a series of unconventional actors, processes, and ways of working that evolve from the alignment of partisan interests on the pathways for peace. By garnering know-how about working politically, urban safety and peacebuilding professionals have much to contribute to the coproduction of safer and inclusive cities.