"Can the Violent Urban be Repaired?”- Exploring Kolkata’s infrastructural violence and path forward This talk will demonstrate the exclusionary nature of cities by connecting multiple forms of violence embedded in everyday lives of women and other intersectionally disadvantaged residents (in terms of religion, class, caste, physical ability) due to urban infrastructures and social norms. Based on empirical study conducted in Kolkata, India, I analyze ways the affective experiences of urban infrastructures such as public transportation, public toilets, streetlights, and forms of surveillance, intersect with internalized socio-cultural norms to limit accessibility and safety for certain groups. The study specifically explores how control over city spaces is maintained by powerful groups mostly Hindu, upper class, caste, able-bodied men through the creation of a constant climate of fear via unequal social norms/narratives such as Muslim, Dalit and/or poor men as ‘threats’, and the simultaneous emphasis on women’s vulnerability to violence in public spaces, all of which are further reified by urban infrastructural connects-disconnects. This climate of fear is continually sustained through gendered bodies and is a form of slow, symbolic and planned violence, which precedes and accompanies extreme forms of violence against women in public spaces, limiting accessibility, safety and urban rights of women and other marginalized communities. Such differentiated and limited experience of city spaces is the ‘violence of the urban’, which is intersectional, multi-natured and dispersed across space (private-public) and time. Drawing from Black geographies and post-colonial urban studies, I then try to envision how such a violent urban can be repaired. I contend paying attention to everyday acts of strategizing and resistance by women and marginalized communities to be in city spaces of the global South, can provide urban practitioners a roadmap to repair and reimagine the urban.