Topophobic Terrains: Fear, Abandonment and the Affective Politics of Urban Space

ABSTRACT What does it mean to fear a place—not for what happens there, but for what it symbolises in the urban imagination? This paper examines Tuan's topophobia as it emerges through the affective textures and moral geographies of everyday life in Siliguri, a medium‐sized Indian city. Drawing on photo‐ethnography, night walks and interviews, it traces how sites—an abandoned theatre, a dim underpass, a silent corridor—become charged with dread through neglect, symbolic marginalisation and ambient threat. These are not sites of spectacular violence, but fragments rendered uninhabitable by infrastructural decay and informal territoriality. Engaging with postcolonial urbanism and affective theory, the paper argues fear here is politically assembled—shaped by uneven care, persistent neglect, and the quiet withdrawal of the state. In a city where neglect and congested spaces shape daily routes, who moves unafraid—and who must reroute or retreat through its uneven geographies of care and belonging?