Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Inner City investigates how structural violence and its affective dimensions have been at the heart of racialised urban experience in England, from the rise of the archetypal inner city at end of the 1960s to the more fractured and peripheral spatial forms of racial marginality that exist today. By examining the emotional experience of England’s heavily politicised and racialised inner cities, it shows how feelings and other affective states underpinned everyday lives during a period marked by repressive policing, racialised exclusions, disproportionate psychiatric detention, welfare state retrenchment, and urban ‘regeneration’. It also reveals the centrality of emotion to moments of large-scale urban rupture, including the New Cross Massacre in 1981, the uprisings of the 1980s, and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017. Drawing on life stories, oral testimonies, and a range of archives, Inner City further asks how such adverse affective terrain honed modes of endurance, survival, and resistance in impoverished city space. Through centring the affective entanglements of violence and vulnerability, it looks in particular at how a number of projects and practices of resistance in the inner city were constituted by strategies, spaces, and enactments of care.</jats:p>