Last week the Lab spent three days at AMPS's 16th annual Livable Cities conference, hosted by the University of Salford under the theme Critiquing the Urban Renaissance. Across dozens of sessions, one idea kept surfacing without anyone quite naming it: much of the harm cities do to people is slow. It does not arrive as a single event. It accumulates — over decades, in particular postcodes, on particular communities — until it stops looking like damage and starts looking like the way things are.
The scholar Rob Nixon calls this slow violence: harm that is gradual, attritional and largely invisible, falling hardest on those least able to refuse it. It turned out to be the sharpest lens for the week.
The slow violence of improvement
The most unsettling example came from Zainab Alhajji, whose study of Manchester's own Piccadilly Gardens traced how layers of defensive security — concrete planters, heavy bollards, smart CCTV — are added in the name of safety, yet produce what she calls an “architecture of fear.” Daytime crowds absorb it; at night that cover collapses, and the most vulnerable are pushed to the edges of the space in search of natural “eyes on the street.”
An intervention sold as protection can itself be the harm.
Drue Sahuc (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) showed the same logic at urban scale. His work on “transportation redlining” traces how mid-century highway projects in New Orleans and Las Vegas were routed straight through African American neighbourhoods, using eminent domain to sever communities and strip out public and green space. It raises a question worth sitting with: when green and public space is destroyed, is that itself slow violence — harm we fail to see because it unfolds too slowly to photograph? A complementary paper from Fahad Alharbi, on shade and walkability in hot-arid cities, sharpened the same idea from the other direction: street trees, arcades and canopies are not decorative extras but essential walking infrastructure. Strip the shade and you strip people's ability to move through their own city.
Travis Fried (University of Washington's Urban Freight Lab) made the harm measurable. As e-commerce reshapes cities, the warehouses and last-mile depots feeding it increasingly land in lower-income and minority neighbourhoods — communities his research finds absorb far more delivery traffic and pollution than they generate in orders. He contrasts two models: the US pattern of vast distribution sheds dropped into deprived areas, and a compact European one (Paris as the reference point) where logistics is smaller, mixed-use and green-roofed. A “fair share” lens turns an abstract siting decision into a question of justice.
From harm to repair
The hinge between the week's diagnosis and its more hopeful register was the keynote from Heatherwick Studio, presented by Ricardo Sosa-Mejía around the studio's Humanise campaign. The argument is bracing: monotonous, characterless buildings are not merely an aesthetic problem — there is growing evidence they raise stress and erode wellbeing, which makes bland building its own quiet slow violence. And Heatherwick draws the same line the housing work does: buildings nobody loves get demolished and rebuilt over and over, generating waste and carbon. The studio's stated ambition — places that are “radically more joyful, engaging and human” — reframes care as climate policy.
Geraldine Dening (Architects for Social Housing) showed what that looks like in housing. Her London-to-Hong-Kong work on alternatives to demolition reframes “regeneration” as a double harm: knocking down sound social housing displaces settled communities and wastes enormous embodied carbon, while the replacement rarely rehouses those moved out. The alternative — retrofit, infill, rooftop extensions — keeps both the community and the carbon in place.
Two Manchester anchors showed repair as practice. At the University of Salford, Energy House 2.0 — a roughly £16m facility opened in 2023, with chambers that run from about −23.5°C to +51°C and recreate the conditions experienced by 95% of the world's population — is where low-carbon homes and retrofit technologies are tested at scale. It is the engineering that makes “retrofit, don't demolish” buildable.
And Venture Café Manchester, the evening's host, offered the social half. Echoing a paper by Chi-Hui Chen on livability produced “from the bottom up” by ordinary residents, the real argument of the night was that the antidote to slow violence is not only better buildings and fairer logistics — it is the everyday connection, the mission of “connecting innovators to make things happen,” that lets a city repair itself. Isolation, as the hosts put it, is the real enemy.
Slow harm, slow repair
Urban harm is slow, uneven and easy to look past — but so is repair. Both are the product of choices about who a city is for, made one planning decision at a time.
And the conversation does not stop in Manchester. It is being carried at city scale through London Climate Action Week and networks like C40 Cities and the Breathe Cities initiative — where the slow violence of dirty air, and the question of who is forced to breathe it, is finally being treated as the public-health and justice issue it is.