Urbicide

Though urbanization trends in the last century have led to a focus on systematic violence and destruction in the context of the city, the practice of urbicide is thousands of years old.

The first recorded use of the term "urbicide" was by Michael Moorcock in the Elric novella "Dead God's Homecoming" (Science Fantasy #59, Nova Publishing, June 1963).

In the wake of the destruction of Sarajevo, the term gained more common usage, examples being found in the works of Marshall Berman (1987) and Bogdan Bogdanović.

"[3][4] Marshall Berman, an American Marxist writer and political theorist, acknowledges the relatively recent inception of the term urbicide, and the subsequent study of urban destruction as a distinct phenomenon.

"[3] Berman cites Euripides' tragedy The Trojan Women and the Old Testament books of Jeremiah and Lamentations as some of the earliest recorded musings on the nature and meaning of urbicide.

Berman also sees the breakdown of traditional norms and leadership hierarchies and a loss of meaning in life as commonalities throughout both ancient and modern literature.

Carthage was sacked and rebuilt many times, but did not remain in ruin until Muslim armies established the port of Tunis a few miles away, diverting trade and population away from the ancient city.

[9] The American cities were victims of the 1970s global recession, aggravated by the decline of government and private investment, which resulted in urban decay described as the "age of rubble".

[12] Tokyo is known as the city that, on the night of March 9–10, 1945, during a raid by the US Armed Forces, was subjected to the most destructive and deadly non-nuclear bombing in human history.

[13] 41 km² of central Tokyo was destroyed and a quarter of the city burned to the ground, leaving approximately 100,000 civilians dead and more than a million homeless.

"[19] Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art.Also notable is the fact that the total destruction faced by the bombed cities was brief, and quickly reversed.

Many symbols of the golden age where ruined or demolished in the course of the conflict and in the subsequent decades by the repeated military interventions of Israel, economic crisis, social turmoil and most recently the devastating explosion of 2020.

[22] According to urbanist Joanne Choueiri, the different factions of the civil strife modeled the city since 1975 in order to create "liminality", this is, a vacuum that the author calls "political holes" in the urban fabric to split the areas controlled by the warrying parties.

[24] The wave of destruction of the urban space spread to other areas of Northern Ireland, like Derry since the 1970s[25] and even to commercial centres of smaller towns toward the end of the conflict.

Non-parking areas, permanent checkpoints, army foot patrols, armoured vehicles, bollards, barbed wire, shop windows covered with tape and tilted surfaces placed over windowsills turned the city center into a fortified zone.

The Troubles reshaped Northern Ireland's urban landscape, as cities and towns were fortified with steel barriers, iron shutters, and "bomb-proof" buildings.

The policy of "normalisation" gradually removed military structures and defensive facilities since 1994, but the legacy of conflict is still visible, however, through urban segregation; Belfast's physical infrastructure was weaponized, with walls used to isolate neighborhoods.

Among them were schools, hospitals, churches, public institutions’ facilities, factories, the medieval Eltz Manor and the house of the Nobel laureate scientist Lavoslav Ružička.

[31][32][33] Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia also criticized the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2009 for not reaching a verdict for the destruction of Vukovar.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted four Serb officials for numerous counts of crimes against humanity which they committed during the siege, including terrorism.

[40][41] While the term "urbicide" finds its genesis in the urban destruction and targeting associated with the Bosnian Wars of the early 1990s, its meaning(s) develops historically and in the present.

Beyond the obvious violations of human rights, Operation Murambatsvina is striking in its abilities to literally unhinge the urban and rural poor from the collective structures integral to everyday, grounded existence in favor of dispersal, but without active state measures to reinstitute these people within governable spaces.

[43] In 2017, retired US Army officer and urban-warfare researcher John Spencer listed Mosul as one of the cities destroyed by violent combat, joining battles such as Stalingrad, Huế, Grozny, Aleppo and Raqqa.

It was described by the New Lines Institute as follows: "from the onset of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia has engaged in a sustained and systematic campaign of urbicide".

[53] Since March 2024, a dozen energy facilities were destroyed by Russian attacks, causing shortages of electricity and running water for millions of Ukrainians.

Fatina Abreek Zubiedat, an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University Azrieli School of Architecture said that the wanton destruction of Gaza is reducing the urban area into "an ahistorical entity, something present outside modernity and global experience".

The government forcibly removed these citizens from where they were living knowingly displaced them, leaving them without resources and access to food, shelter and health care.

The most salient example of Sarajevo, where the term urbicide partly originated, clearly demonstrates the violation of these basic human rights on the civilian population of the city.

Testimonies of the urbicide in Sarajevo, in the cultural production of confessional literature during the siege, clearly show the dramatic plunge in the standard of living, the overtaking and militarization of the public space, and the daily struggle of the citizens to get basic supplies such as food and water.

The inclusion of governments into the process is desirable, but their willingness to submit to another kind of scrutiny: particularly under the broad definitions of structural violence that often enter discourses on urbicide.