‘Knowing how to walk’: Risk, violence and practices of endurance in urban Brazil

Violence has encroached on the city of Recife for decades and infused everyday life. This chapter explores practices of endurance under conditions that are best described as violent-ordinary. In the mid-2000s, a peripheral area of the city started to undergo state-led redevelopment that in unanticipated ways forged new spaces of violence. The chapter analyses how residents navigate the new and shifting spaces of danger, which, as residents explain, requires ‘knowing how to walk’. It argues that the sensory and quotidian practices of knowing how to walk should not be understood as residents’ attempts of seeking security, but as a way of pragmatically enduring pervasive insecurity. The analysis bridges theory on risk-taking as a state of exception with risk-taking as a mundane practice that can be routinised and normalised.