Urbicide
Encyclopedia
Urbicide is a term which literally translates (Latin: urbs: city + Latin: caedere to cut, kill) as "violence against the city." The term was first coined by the author Michael Moorcock
in 1963 and later used by critics of 1960s urban restructuring in the US. Both Ada Louise Huxtable
in 1972 and Marshall Berman
in 1996, write about urban restructuring (and destruction) in areas like the Bronx, and highlight the impacts of aggressive redevelopment on the urban social experience. The term has come into being in an age of rapid globalization
and urbanization
. This rapid globalization trend has led to the focus of violence and destruction in the context of the city
rather than its surroundings. Especially after the events at Sarajevo
, recognition has begun to be given to the cases of violence specifically directed to the destruction of an urban area. The exact constraints and definition of this term continu to be debated because the limits of this emerging concept make it extremely difficult to categorize events under the heading of urbicide. The question of intent also arises when discussing the limits of urbicide. This is just one example of the many constraints that the term urbicide presents. The ability of term to cross a variety of fields such as international politics
, anthropology
, and sociology
makes it particularly difficult to set a finite definition of urbicide which satisfies all these fields.
defined genocide
as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves".Lemkin This term, however, failed to address violence not aimed at human bodies. 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 Bogdnanovic. In their 1992 publication "Mostar '92", a group of Bosnian architects from Mostar
used the term urbicide to define the violence against the city fabric, such as the destruction of the Mostar bridge, a usage consistent with Marshall Berman
's prior use of the term to describe similar acts of violence in Bosnia
. Urbicide is increasingly being used by architects, urban planners, scholars and historians to help describe and understand the contemporary and historic wars where cities can no longer be considered safe havens from war, but rather are part of the battle field.
Some people argue that urbicide should be understood as a part of genocide
, as to destroy people's homes is to destroy them. In his book, "Urbicide", Martin Coward argues along a similar line. Rather than use urbicide for all violence against the city, Coward uses the term to denote violence which seeks to annihilate difference through the destruction of the material foundation of that difference. The urban is meant to imply the material foundation of heterogeneity (being with others as being with otherness) and he interprets some instances of destruction of the city as an attempt to destroy the material foundations of that heterogeneity. Urbicide would then share the annihilatory character of genocide, but not necessarily its focus on human beings as the object of destruction.
The definition of urbicide is interdependent on the definitions of city
and violence
. In many urbicidal incidents, one or both of these definitions has been removed from the situation's context by the perpetrator. Either the "city" receiving the violence has been demoted from its status as "city" or the violent act is not considered violent. The meaning of the words city and violence therefore become highly important when classifying an act as urbicidal.
A city
is an area consisting of numerous institutions, residents, industries, and businesses supported by large infrastructure
and a dense and diverse population. A city can be framed in numerous ways. For example, it can be thought of as an economic system, in which all social relations stem from a market economy, and the city is produced and shaped by the market. A city can also be thought of as a state of mind, in which all people who live in the city share the same consciousness. Similarly, it can be seen as an aggregation of different social/cultural forms, making cities a center for heterogeneity. Finally, a city can be seen from an architectural perspective, as a conglomeration of masses and spaces. As Henri Lefebvre
states, "a city is, therefore, whatever is experienced, known, represented, constructed, or destroyed as a city."
Violence
is typically defined as, "a behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill" (Compact Oxford Dictionary). However, when defining violence sociologists, historians, philosophers and other scholars have identified other less direct forms of violence that should also be considered. Nancy Scheper-Hughes
and Philippe Bourgois
write in their book Violence in War and Peace that "Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality – force, assault, or the infliction of pain – alone. Violence also includes assaults on the person hood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim. The social and cultural dimensions of the violence are what gives violence its power and meaning."
Some of the other categories are structural violence
, symbolic violence
, and violence enacted by the government through laws or actions. Structural violence
occurs when the structure of a society
causes the violence. Examples of this include laws that create unequal access to public amenities or affect different citizens based on their status in society. Symbolic violence
concerns socially accepted norms that are ingrained over time such as the roles of different classes, genders and ethnic groups. Finally political violence addresses the harm the government can inflict by their actions either through neglect or action. All of these forms of violence can also be characterized in urbicide.
While physical destruction of a city's buildings is the most obvious form of urbicide, it can also occur in less noticeable ways. Governments redefining areas of the city as slums or "illegitimate" can lead to an unequal treatment of citizens. For people living in these areas they have been denied their citizenship
. How a government zones
a city can also generate violence. While not directly causing harm, certain zoning
combinations could increase violence, decrease the value of properties, and force poorer people into an undesirable neighborhood.
, an American Marxist writer and political theorist, proposes that Urbicide is the oldest story in the world. In his view, the Old Testament
books of Jeremiah and Lamentations appropriately cover urbicide, or mark its beginnings. In later times the Roman Empire imposed the complete destruction of Jerusalem and a similarly devastating Carthaginian peace
, though these proved less than permanent. Nonetheless, Berman's view of potential "urbicidal" events is very much within the Marxist historical telos, which suppresses the contingency of urbicide in history, or rather, its own telos.
Many cities are in some sense imperial cities, having created an empire
(Babylon
, Rome
), or been created by one (Persepolis
, Cairo
, Philadelphia) or greatly expanded (Byzantium
, Delhi
) or have become the capital of one (Peking, London
) or received special privileges from an empire, for example as Free Imperial Cities. Thus there are perspectives that see urbicide as part of broader imperialist goals, for example in the elimination of cities by Communist Cambodia
. Writers and geographers such as Mike Davis
, Nurhan Abujidi and Stephen Graham
represent some of these currents. The Siege of Sarajevo
, which led to the "coining" of urbicide, stands as the most symbolic historical event representative of urbicide. Recent events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
, Zimbabwe
, post-Katrina New Orleans, and Iraq
also stand as significant urbicidal examples, and can be taken as a broad spectrum of "violence against the city," indicating the fluidity or multi-faceted discourse of urbicide.
n city of Vukovar
led by the Yugoslav People's Army
(JNA), supported by various Serbian paramilitary
forces between August and November 1991 during the Croatian War of Independence
. Indiscriminate bombardment of Vukovar, in which up to a million shells were fired on the city, led to destruction of three quarters of all neighborhoods.
Among them were school
s, hospital
s, churches, public institutions’ facilities, factories, medieval Eltz Castle and house of the Nobel-winning author Lavoslav Ružička
. Several sources, like the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia (YIHR), described the systematic destruction of the city as urbicide. YIHR also criticzed the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) for not reaching a verdict for the destruction of Vukovar. Slobodan Milošević
was indicted for, inter alia, "wanton destruction" of the city, but died before a verdict was reached. Goran Hadžić
was also indicted in the same category and is on trial.
Violence in Sarajevo
was a product of the Bosnian War
, which lasted from 1992–1995 and came as a result of the breakup of Yugoslavia
following the end of the Cold War
when Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from the Yugoslav federation. This region was very ethnically diverse, providing homes for both Serbs
and Muslim Slavs. The violence is sometimes referred to as ethnic cleansing
because it involved civil, political disagreements between the Serbs
and the Muslim Slavs which ended in some of the worst violence this region has ever seen. Ultimately, urbicide resulted in the complete annihilation of Sarajevo's built environment
. This broke down the city's infrastructure
and denied thousands of civilians food, water, medicine, etc. In the wake of this violence, Sarajevo's Civilians also became victims of human rights
offenses including rape, execution, and starvation. The Bosnian
government declared the Siege over in 1996.
Wars of the early 1990s, its meaning(s) develops historically and in the present. Recent events in Zimbabwe
, while falling under the definition of urbicide as selective violence and destruction against cities, also positions urbicide outside the dynamics of genocidal, Europe
an warfare. Operation Murambatsvina
or "Operation Restore Order" was a countrywide program of targeted violence against cities, towns, peripheral urban areas, and resettled farms, resulting in the destruction of housing, trading markets, and other "collective" structures. It was a large-scale operation, strategically resulting in the disacement of over 700,000 refuges, and "knowingly" manufacturing
a massive humanitarian crisis. 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. Clearly, Zimbabwe's Operation Murambatsvina is urbicidal, yet a more important question is whether an urbicidal framework seeks a different subtext?
in August 2005 has been interpreted as the culmination of political and policy-driven urbicide that has been played out over many years. While natural disasters such as Katrina cannot be considered urbicidal in and of themselves, such disasters can, due to biased governmental legislation, affect particular racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups disproportionately. In the case of New Orleans, the areas of the city that were hit hardest were overwhelmingly neighborhoods housing members of the lowest socioeconomic classes, and also tended to be areas dominated by African-American citizens. It has been argued that this racial and poverty-based concentration is directly due to conscious governmental legislation such as the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956
, which prompted white flight
in the later decades of the 20th century, and other preferential allocation of urban security by the Federal Housing Administration
, based on class and racial identity. Essentially, funds for security were disproportionately allocated to higher income (white) neighborhoods, leaving impoverished, largely African-American neighborhoods vulnerable to disasters such as Katrina. According to urbicide scholar Andrew Herscher, "Katrina's effects…were but the last and most visible traces of a chronic disaster, an urbicide fabricated not by military action but by policy and ideology."
(Merriam Webster): rights (as freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution) regarded as belonging fundamentally to all persons; helpful in defining rights of groups of persons, a.k.a. communities.
Human rights
discourse provides another lens in which we can view urbicide, especially through the use of The United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
. Using the term urbicide, usually refers to violence and destruction of buildings and architecture, but when using the UN's Declaration along with urbicide, the focus is instead on people. Looking at violent acts and observing how they affect people, their culture and their safety inevitably centers on human rights and may often carry more validity for these urbicidal acts to also be cases of human rights
violations.
The following cases are viewed here with a greater focus on the human rights aspect of them. The term urbicide can still apply, but human rights language may allow for a more familiar approach to these cases as many people are already aware of the general rights that people hold. These rights are explicitly stated here to fully demonstrate how fundamental rights are being violated as part of urbicide.
women and girls were raped by Serbs
, thousands were missing and/or executed. When using the term urbicide, human rights
should be included because atrocities like this also affect the culture and feeling of the city. These must be taken into account when examining the urbicidal affects of bombings and military actions in the region because they show that the conflict
was more than simply destroying the physical city buildings; there was destruction of people, their safety, and of their communities.
violate parts of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Palestinians were moved or kept out of areas that they identified with; they are often not allowed to freely pass between the two states for their jobs, families, access to health care and other purposes. This part of urbicide as well because it is destroying the heterogeneity. Palestinian farm lands were divided by the government imposed wall and can no longer be accessed at the owner's convenience, the checkpoints are highly regulated by the Israeli army and allow or refuse passage randomly, not on any pre-determined rule set. Article 13 of the Declaration of Human Rights states: Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state and everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Palestinians are being denied these rights as Israel
builds its wall along the West Bank
border.
, the rights of 700,000 Zimbabweans were violated as they were forced from their urban homes and were left to create new lives for themselves during Operation Murambatsvina
in May 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/5032156.stm. Clearly this breaks the UN's Article 25 which says: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. 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.
and urbicide, however, are synonymous terms, as some theorists propose, it could be argued that urbicide is already prohibited by international law
. It can also be argued that urbicide, as destruction of urban spaces and human habitations, is made illegal under international law and humanitarian law through the effects of other laws dealing with destruction of human-made environment and people's dependency upon it. Such laws are the rights to adequate housing, the right to life and privacy, to mental integrity, and to the freedom of movement. 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. In other cases, such as the Porta Farm evacuation and demolition of settlements by the Harare Local government, there is evidence of violation of these basic human rights as specified by the International Law and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engafr460042006. Despite the specified violations, however, it might be useful to apply, as with genocide
, the umbrella term urbicide for these and other cases of urban destruction.
The prospects for a codified prohibition of urbicide might benefit from differentiating the term's legal articulation from human rights
law, just as urbicide conceptually separates itself from human rights
. With the city as the site of urbicide, the traditional nation-state parties to international legislation might not suffice alone as stake-holders in any legal process–customary or otherwise. But over localizing the criminalization of urbicide risks exonerating by inaction the governments often implicated as aggressors against the city and its citizens. It is often against their power interest to prosecute urbicide or to establish any form of judicial framework that deals explicitly with violations of such nature. The inclusion of these 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, and could presumably make their way into the legal discourses, as well–is unlikely.
Due to the lack of explicit terminology that would address the destruction of cities in legal terms on the international level, it seems unlikely that the international courts will take the issue more seriously. The problem is also with the enforcement of these laws on the international level, which have previously failed to enforce even the human rights laws already in place.
Decisions of the International court
, such as the case of reparations to Bosnia
by the Serbia
n government for crimes against humanity, in which the court, in February 2007, acquitted Serbia
of the duty to give reparations, perhaps demonstrate the further need to distinguish between urbicide and genocide
. In the case of Sarajevo
, where the case of genocide
, as legally understood, could not be unequivocally applied to cases such as the Siege of Sarajevo
, the concept of urbicide might provide a better interpretive framework for the violence inflicted upon the Sarajevo
populace and their urban environment, such as the shared public space and the architecture of the city. The goal of such violence may have not been to destroy a minority population and their cultural and symbolic space, as in cases of genocide
, but rather to fragment the heterogeneous population of the city into homogeneous enclaves based on the ethnicity of the population. Thus, the violence is not directed towards an ethnicity per se, but towards the city as a heterogeneous space where different cultural identities can live and interact without antagonism.
Michael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels....
in 1963 and later used by critics of 1960s urban restructuring in the US. Both Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for "distinguished criticism during 1969."...
in 1972 and Marshall Berman
Marshall Berman
Marshall Berman is an American philosopher and Marxist Humanist writer. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching Political Philosophy and Urbanism.-Biography:An alumnus of...
in 1996, write about urban restructuring (and destruction) in areas like the Bronx, and highlight the impacts of aggressive redevelopment on the urban social experience. The term has come into being in an age of rapid globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
and urbanization
Urbanization
Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change. The United Nations projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008....
. This rapid globalization trend has led to the focus of violence and destruction in the context of the city
City
A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
rather than its surroundings. Especially after the events at Sarajevo
Sarajevo
Sarajevo |Bosnia]], surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of Southeastern Europe and the Balkans....
, recognition has begun to be given to the cases of violence specifically directed to the destruction of an urban area. The exact constraints and definition of this term continu to be debated because the limits of this emerging concept make it extremely difficult to categorize events under the heading of urbicide. The question of intent also arises when discussing the limits of urbicide. This is just one example of the many constraints that the term urbicide presents. The ability of term to cross a variety of fields such as international politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
, anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, and sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
makes it particularly difficult to set a finite definition of urbicide which satisfies all these fields.
Terminology
The term "urbicide" has its roots in the Latin word urbs, meaning "city", and occido, meaning "to massacre". In 1944, Raphael LemkinRaphael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos and -cide...
defined genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves".Lemkin This term, however, failed to address violence not aimed at human bodies. The first recorded use of the term "urbicide" was by Michael Moorcock
Michael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels....
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 Bogdnanovic. In their 1992 publication "Mostar '92", a group of Bosnian architects from Mostar
Mostar
Mostar is a city and municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the largest and one of the most important cities in the Herzegovina region and the center of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton of the Federation. Mostar is situated on the Neretva river and is the fifth-largest city in the country...
used the term urbicide to define the violence against the city fabric, such as the destruction of the Mostar bridge, a usage consistent with Marshall Berman
Marshall Berman
Marshall Berman is an American philosopher and Marxist Humanist writer. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching Political Philosophy and Urbanism.-Biography:An alumnus of...
's prior use of the term to describe similar acts of violence in Bosnia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...
. Urbicide is increasingly being used by architects, urban planners, scholars and historians to help describe and understand the contemporary and historic wars where cities can no longer be considered safe havens from war, but rather are part of the battle field.
Some people argue that urbicide should be understood as a part of genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, as to destroy people's homes is to destroy them. In his book, "Urbicide", Martin Coward argues along a similar line. Rather than use urbicide for all violence against the city, Coward uses the term to denote violence which seeks to annihilate difference through the destruction of the material foundation of that difference. The urban is meant to imply the material foundation of heterogeneity (being with others as being with otherness) and he interprets some instances of destruction of the city as an attempt to destroy the material foundations of that heterogeneity. Urbicide would then share the annihilatory character of genocide, but not necessarily its focus on human beings as the object of destruction.
The definition of urbicide is interdependent on the definitions of city
City
A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
and violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
. In many urbicidal incidents, one or both of these definitions has been removed from the situation's context by the perpetrator. Either the "city" receiving the violence has been demoted from its status as "city" or the violent act is not considered violent. The meaning of the words city and violence therefore become highly important when classifying an act as urbicidal.
A city
City
A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
is an area consisting of numerous institutions, residents, industries, and businesses supported by large infrastructure
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...
and a dense and diverse population. A city can be framed in numerous ways. For example, it can be thought of as an economic system, in which all social relations stem from a market economy, and the city is produced and shaped by the market. A city can also be thought of as a state of mind, in which all people who live in the city share the same consciousness. Similarly, it can be seen as an aggregation of different social/cultural forms, making cities a center for heterogeneity. Finally, a city can be seen from an architectural perspective, as a conglomeration of masses and spaces. As Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for his work on dialectics, Marxism, everyday life, cities, and space.-Biography:...
states, "a city is, therefore, whatever is experienced, known, represented, constructed, or destroyed as a city."
Violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
is typically defined as, "a behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill" (Compact Oxford Dictionary). However, when defining violence sociologists, historians, philosophers and other scholars have identified other less direct forms of violence that should also be considered. Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of Anthropology and director of the program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, psychiatry, madness, social suffering, violence and genocide...
and Philippe Bourgois
Philippe Bourgois
Philippe Bourgois is a Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology & Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as founding Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco from 1998...
write in their book Violence in War and Peace that "Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality – force, assault, or the infliction of pain – alone. Violence also includes assaults on the person hood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim. The social and cultural dimensions of the violence are what gives violence its power and meaning."
Some of the other categories are structural violence
Structural violence
Structural violence is a term first used in the 1960s commonly ascribed to Johan Galtung. It refers to a form of violence where some social structure or social institution harms people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentrism, classism, racism,...
, symbolic violence
Symbolic violence
The concept of symbolic violence was first introduced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to account for the tacit almost unconscious modes of cultural/social domination occurring within the every-day social habits maintained over conscious subjects....
, and violence enacted by the government through laws or actions. Structural violence
Structural violence
Structural violence is a term first used in the 1960s commonly ascribed to Johan Galtung. It refers to a form of violence where some social structure or social institution harms people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentrism, classism, racism,...
occurs when the structure of a society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
causes the violence. Examples of this include laws that create unequal access to public amenities or affect different citizens based on their status in society. Symbolic violence
Symbolic violence
The concept of symbolic violence was first introduced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to account for the tacit almost unconscious modes of cultural/social domination occurring within the every-day social habits maintained over conscious subjects....
concerns socially accepted norms that are ingrained over time such as the roles of different classes, genders and ethnic groups. Finally political violence addresses the harm the government can inflict by their actions either through neglect or action. All of these forms of violence can also be characterized in urbicide.
While physical destruction of a city's buildings is the most obvious form of urbicide, it can also occur in less noticeable ways. Governments redefining areas of the city as slums or "illegitimate" can lead to an unequal treatment of citizens. For people living in these areas they have been denied their citizenship
Citizenship
Citizenship is the state of being a citizen of a particular social, political, national, or human resource community. Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and responsibilities...
. How a government zones
Zoning
Zoning is a device of land use planning used by local governments in most developed countries. The word is derived from the practice of designating permitted uses of land based on mapped zones which separate one set of land uses from another...
a city can also generate violence. While not directly causing harm, certain zoning
Zoning
Zoning is a device of land use planning used by local governments in most developed countries. The word is derived from the practice of designating permitted uses of land based on mapped zones which separate one set of land uses from another...
combinations could increase violence, decrease the value of properties, and force poorer people into an undesirable neighborhood.
Cases
The hybrid nature of the term urbicide suggests that it is either a radical framework through which to view the historical destruction of cities, or something appropriate only to the "now" and has mandatory qualities in the present. Whereas in its first modern manifestations the targeting and destruction of cities was seen as something new, outside the traditional rules of European warfare, Marshall BermanMarshall Berman
Marshall Berman is an American philosopher and Marxist Humanist writer. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching Political Philosophy and Urbanism.-Biography:An alumnus of...
, an American Marxist writer and political theorist, proposes that Urbicide is the oldest story in the world. In his view, the Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
books of Jeremiah and Lamentations appropriately cover urbicide, or mark its beginnings. In later times the Roman Empire imposed the complete destruction of Jerusalem and a similarly devastating Carthaginian peace
Carthaginian peace
Carthaginian Peace can refer to two things: either the peace imposed on Carthage by Rome in 146 BC, whereby the Romans systematically burned Carthage to the ground, or the imposition of a very brutal 'peace' in general.-Origin:...
, though these proved less than permanent. Nonetheless, Berman's view of potential "urbicidal" events is very much within the Marxist historical telos, which suppresses the contingency of urbicide in history, or rather, its own telos.
Many cities are in some sense imperial cities, having created an empire
Empire
The term empire derives from the Latin imperium . Politically, an empire is a geographically extensive group of states and peoples united and ruled either by a monarch or an oligarchy....
(Babylon
Babylon
Babylon was an Akkadian city-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which are found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq, about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad...
, Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
), or been created by one (Persepolis
Persepolis
Perspolis was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire . Persepolis is situated northeast of the modern city of Shiraz in the Fars Province of modern Iran. In contemporary Persian, the site is known as Takht-e Jamshid...
, Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
, Philadelphia) or greatly expanded (Byzantium
Byzantium
Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC and named after their king Byzas . The name Byzantium is a Latinization of the original name Byzantion...
, Delhi
Delhi
Delhi , officially National Capital Territory of Delhi , is the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest by population in India, next to Mumbai. It is the eighth largest metropolis in the world by population with 16,753,265 inhabitants in the Territory at the 2011 Census...
) or have become the capital of one (Peking, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
) or received special privileges from an empire, for example as Free Imperial Cities. Thus there are perspectives that see urbicide as part of broader imperialist goals, for example in the elimination of cities by Communist Cambodia
Democratic Kampuchea
The Khmer Rouge period refers to the rule of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Khieu Samphan and the Khmer Rouge Communist party over Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge renamed as Democratic Kampuchea....
. Writers and geographers such as Mike Davis
Mike Davis (scholar)
Mike Davis is an American Marxist social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.-Life:...
, Nurhan Abujidi and Stephen Graham
Stephen Graham
Stephen Graham may refer to:*Stephen Graham , British travel writer and novelist*Stephen Graham , British actor*Stephen Graham , American NBA basketball player...
represent some of these currents. The Siege of Sarajevo
Siege of Sarajevo
The Siege of Sarajevo is the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Serb forces of the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People's Army besieged Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 during the Bosnian War.After Bosnia...
, which led to the "coining" of urbicide, stands as the most symbolic historical event representative of urbicide. Recent events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is wide-ranging, and the term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Jewish and Zionist yishuv and the Arab population living in Palestine under Ottoman or...
, Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...
, post-Katrina New Orleans, and Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
also stand as significant urbicidal examples, and can be taken as a broad spectrum of "violence against the city," indicating the fluidity or multi-faceted discourse of urbicide.
Vukovar
The siege of Vukovar was an 87-day military campaign aimed against the eastern CroatiaCroatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
n city of Vukovar
Vukovar
Vukovar is a city in eastern Croatia, and the biggest river port in Croatia located at the confluence of the Vuka river and the Danube. Vukovar is the center of the Vukovar-Syrmia County...
led by the Yugoslav People's Army
Yugoslav People's Army
The Yugoslav People's Army , also referred to as the Yugoslav National Army , was the military of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.-Origins:The origins of the JNA can...
(JNA), supported by various Serbian paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
forces between August and November 1991 during the Croatian War of Independence
Croatian War of Independence
The Croatian War of Independence was fought from 1991 to 1995 between forces loyal to the government of Croatia—which had declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia —and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People's Army and local Serb forces, with the JNA ending its combat...
. Indiscriminate bombardment of Vukovar, in which up to a million shells were fired on the city, led to destruction of three quarters of all neighborhoods.
Among them were school
School
A school is an institution designed for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is commonly compulsory. In these systems, students progress through a series of schools...
s, hospital
Hospital
A hospital is a health care institution providing patient treatment by specialized staff and equipment. Hospitals often, but not always, provide for inpatient care or longer-term patient stays....
s, churches, public institutions’ facilities, factories, medieval Eltz Castle and house of the Nobel-winning author Lavoslav Ružička
Lavoslav Ružicka
Lavoslav Ružička FRS born as Lavoslav Ružička was a Croatian scientist and winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry who worked most of his life in Switzerland...
. Several sources, like the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia (YIHR), described the systematic destruction of the city as urbicide. YIHR also criticzed the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991, more commonly referred to as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY, is a...
(ICTY) for not reaching a verdict for the destruction of Vukovar. Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević was President of Serbia and Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Socialist Republic of Serbia and Republic of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 in three terms and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000...
was indicted for, inter alia, "wanton destruction" of the city, but died before a verdict was reached. Goran Hadžić
Goran Hadžic
Goran Hadžić is a former president of the Republic of Serbian Krajina who was in office during the Croatian War of Independence. He is accused of crimes against humanity and of violation of the laws and customs of war by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.The court...
was also indicted in the same category and is on trial.
Sarajevo
Violence in Sarajevo
Sarajevo
Sarajevo |Bosnia]], surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of Southeastern Europe and the Balkans....
was a product of the Bosnian War
Bosnian War
The Bosnian War or the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between April 1992 and December 1995. The war involved several sides...
, which lasted from 1992–1995 and came as a result of the breakup of Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
following the end of the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
when Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from the Yugoslav federation. This region was very ethnically diverse, providing homes for both Serbs
Serbs
The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...
and Muslim Slavs. The violence is sometimes referred to as ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
because it involved civil, political disagreements between the Serbs
Serbs
The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...
and the Muslim Slavs which ended in some of the worst violence this region has ever seen. Ultimately, urbicide resulted in the complete annihilation of Sarajevo's built environment
Built environment
The term built environment refers to the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from personal shelter and buildings to neighborhoods and cities that can often include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks.The built...
. This broke down the city's infrastructure
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...
and denied thousands of civilians food, water, medicine, etc. In the wake of this violence, Sarajevo's Civilians also became victims of human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
offenses including rape, execution, and starvation. The Bosnian
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...
government declared the Siege over in 1996.
Zimbabwe
While the term "urbicide" finds its genesis in the urban destruction and targeting associated with the BosnianBosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...
Wars of the early 1990s, its meaning(s) develops historically and in the present. Recent events in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...
, while falling under the definition of urbicide as selective violence and destruction against cities, also positions urbicide outside the dynamics of genocidal, Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an warfare. Operation Murambatsvina
Operation Murambatsvina
Operation Murambatsvina , also officially known as Operation Restore Order, is a large-scale Zimbabwean government campaign to forcibly clear slum areas across the country...
or "Operation Restore Order" was a countrywide program of targeted violence against cities, towns, peripheral urban areas, and resettled farms, resulting in the destruction of housing, trading markets, and other "collective" structures. It was a large-scale operation, strategically resulting in the disacement of over 700,000 refuges, and "knowingly" manufacturing
a massive humanitarian crisis. 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. Clearly, Zimbabwe's Operation Murambatsvina is urbicidal, yet a more important question is whether an urbicidal framework seeks a different subtext?
New Orleans
The destruction caused by Hurricane KatrinaHurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
in August 2005 has been interpreted as the culmination of political and policy-driven urbicide that has been played out over many years. While natural disasters such as Katrina cannot be considered urbicidal in and of themselves, such disasters can, due to biased governmental legislation, affect particular racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups disproportionately. In the case of New Orleans, the areas of the city that were hit hardest were overwhelmingly neighborhoods housing members of the lowest socioeconomic classes, and also tended to be areas dominated by African-American citizens. It has been argued that this racial and poverty-based concentration is directly due to conscious governmental legislation such as the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956
Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act , was enacted on June 29, 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law...
, which prompted white flight
White flight
White flight has been a term that originated in the United States, starting in the mid-20th century, and applied to the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. It was first seen as...
in the later decades of the 20th century, and other preferential allocation of urban security by the Federal Housing Administration
Federal Housing Administration
The Federal Housing Administration is a United States government agency created as part of the National Housing Act of 1934. It insured loans made by banks and other private lenders for home building and home buying...
, based on class and racial identity. Essentially, funds for security were disproportionately allocated to higher income (white) neighborhoods, leaving impoverished, largely African-American neighborhoods vulnerable to disasters such as Katrina. According to urbicide scholar Andrew Herscher, "Katrina's effects…were but the last and most visible traces of a chronic disaster, an urbicide fabricated not by military action but by policy and ideology."
Human Rights
Definition of human rightsHuman rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
(Merriam Webster): rights (as freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution) regarded as belonging fundamentally to all persons; helpful in defining rights of groups of persons, a.k.a. communities.
Human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
discourse provides another lens in which we can view urbicide, especially through the use of The United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly . The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled...
. Using the term urbicide, usually refers to violence and destruction of buildings and architecture, but when using the UN's Declaration along with urbicide, the focus is instead on people. Looking at violent acts and observing how they affect people, their culture and their safety inevitably centers on human rights and may often carry more validity for these urbicidal acts to also be cases of human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
violations.
The following cases are viewed here with a greater focus on the human rights aspect of them. The term urbicide can still apply, but human rights language may allow for a more familiar approach to these cases as many people are already aware of the general rights that people hold. These rights are explicitly stated here to fully demonstrate how fundamental rights are being violated as part of urbicide.
Sarajevo
Article 3 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person and Article 5 states that no one shall be subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. However, 20,000 MuslimMuslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
women and girls were raped by Serbs
Serbs
The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...
, thousands were missing and/or executed. When using the term urbicide, human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
should be included because atrocities like this also affect the culture and feeling of the city. These must be taken into account when examining the urbicidal affects of bombings and military actions in the region because they show that the conflict
History of modern Sarajevo
The history of modern Sarajevo begins with the declaration of independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Yugoslavia. The city then became the capital of the new state, as the local division of the Yugoslav People's Army established itself on the surrounding mountains. That day, massive peace...
was more than simply destroying the physical city buildings; there was destruction of people, their safety, and of their communities.
Palestine
Israel's actions of pushing Palestinians into the West BankWest Bank
The West Bank ) of the Jordan River is the landlocked geographical eastern part of the Palestinian territories located in Western Asia. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel. To the east, across the Jordan River, lies the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan...
violate parts of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Palestinians were moved or kept out of areas that they identified with; they are often not allowed to freely pass between the two states for their jobs, families, access to health care and other purposes. This part of urbicide as well because it is destroying the heterogeneity. Palestinian farm lands were divided by the government imposed wall and can no longer be accessed at the owner's convenience, the checkpoints are highly regulated by the Israeli army and allow or refuse passage randomly, not on any pre-determined rule set. Article 13 of the Declaration of Human Rights states: Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state and everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Palestinians are being denied these rights as Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
builds its wall along the West Bank
West Bank
The West Bank ) of the Jordan River is the landlocked geographical eastern part of the Palestinian territories located in Western Asia. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel. To the east, across the Jordan River, lies the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan...
border.
Zimbabwe
In some ways similar to PalestinePalestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
, the rights of 700,000 Zimbabweans were violated as they were forced from their urban homes and were left to create new lives for themselves during Operation Murambatsvina
Operation Murambatsvina
Operation Murambatsvina , also officially known as Operation Restore Order, is a large-scale Zimbabwean government campaign to forcibly clear slum areas across the country...
in May 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/5032156.stm. Clearly this breaks the UN's Article 25 which says: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. 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.
International Law
As of now there is no explicit language mentioning urbicide in international and humanitarian law. As the term has been coined and interpreted only recently, during the Yugoslav war in the 1990s, it has not reached public consciousness and public discourse to such extent as to be an instantiated into international law. If genocideGenocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
and urbicide, however, are synonymous terms, as some theorists propose, it could be argued that urbicide is already prohibited by international law
International law
Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...
. It can also be argued that urbicide, as destruction of urban spaces and human habitations, is made illegal under international law and humanitarian law through the effects of other laws dealing with destruction of human-made environment and people's dependency upon it. Such laws are the rights to adequate housing, the right to life and privacy, to mental integrity, and to the freedom of movement. The most salient example of Sarajevo
Sarajevo
Sarajevo |Bosnia]], surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of Southeastern Europe and the Balkans....
, where the term urbicide partly originated, clearly demonstrates the violation of these basic human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
on the civilian population of the city. Testimonies of the urbicide in Sarajevo
Sarajevo
Sarajevo |Bosnia]], surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of Southeastern Europe and the Balkans....
, 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. In other cases, such as the Porta Farm evacuation and demolition of settlements by the Harare Local government, there is evidence of violation of these basic human rights as specified by the International Law and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engafr460042006. Despite the specified violations, however, it might be useful to apply, as with genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, the umbrella term urbicide for these and other cases of urban destruction.
The prospects for a codified prohibition of urbicide might benefit from differentiating the term's legal articulation from human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
law, just as urbicide conceptually separates itself from human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
. With the city as the site of urbicide, the traditional nation-state parties to international legislation might not suffice alone as stake-holders in any legal process–customary or otherwise. But over localizing the criminalization of urbicide risks exonerating by inaction the governments often implicated as aggressors against the city and its citizens. It is often against their power interest to prosecute urbicide or to establish any form of judicial framework that deals explicitly with violations of such nature. The inclusion of these 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, and could presumably make their way into the legal discourses, as well–is unlikely.
Due to the lack of explicit terminology that would address the destruction of cities in legal terms on the international level, it seems unlikely that the international courts will take the issue more seriously. The problem is also with the enforcement of these laws on the international level, which have previously failed to enforce even the human rights laws already in place.
Decisions of the International court
International court
International courts are formed by treaties between nations, or under the authority of an international organization such as the United Nations — this includes ad hoc tribunals and permanent institutions, but excludes any courts arising purely under national authority.Early examples of...
, such as the case of reparations to Bosnia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...
by the Serbia
Serbia
Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...
n government for crimes against humanity, in which the court, in February 2007, acquitted Serbia
Serbia
Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...
of the duty to give reparations, perhaps demonstrate the further need to distinguish between urbicide and genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
. In the case of Sarajevo
Sarajevo
Sarajevo |Bosnia]], surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of Southeastern Europe and the Balkans....
, where the case of genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, as legally understood, could not be unequivocally applied to cases such as the Siege of Sarajevo
Siege of Sarajevo
The Siege of Sarajevo is the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Serb forces of the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People's Army besieged Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 during the Bosnian War.After Bosnia...
, the concept of urbicide might provide a better interpretive framework for the violence inflicted upon the Sarajevo
Sarajevo
Sarajevo |Bosnia]], surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of Southeastern Europe and the Balkans....
populace and their urban environment, such as the shared public space and the architecture of the city. The goal of such violence may have not been to destroy a minority population and their cultural and symbolic space, as in cases of genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, but rather to fragment the heterogeneous population of the city into homogeneous enclaves based on the ethnicity of the population. Thus, the violence is not directed towards an ethnicity per se, but towards the city as a heterogeneous space where different cultural identities can live and interact without antagonism.
See also
- :Category:Destroyed cities
- Structural violenceStructural violenceStructural violence is a term first used in the 1960s commonly ascribed to Johan Galtung. It refers to a form of violence where some social structure or social institution harms people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentrism, classism, racism,...
- Urban DecayUrban decayUrban decay is the process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude...
- Shrinking CitiesShrinking citiesShrinking cities are cities that are experiencing acute population loss. Deindustrialisation and out-migration are some of the common reasons that cities shrink. In the United States, this problem is most commonly associated with the Rust Belt, while parts of Eastern Europe also experience similar...
- Urban Studies
- Israeli-Palestinian ConflictIsraeli-Palestinian conflictThe Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is wide-ranging, and the term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Jewish and Zionist yishuv and the Arab population living in Palestine under Ottoman or...
- Siege of SarajevoSiege of SarajevoThe Siege of Sarajevo is the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Serb forces of the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People's Army besieged Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 during the Bosnian War.After Bosnia...
- SarajevoSarajevoSarajevo |Bosnia]], surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of Southeastern Europe and the Balkans....
- Bosnia and HerzegovinaBosnia and HerzegovinaBosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...
- Arab-Israeli Conflict
- Hurricane KatrinaHurricane KatrinaHurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
- Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act , was enacted on June 29, 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law...
- Federal Housing AdministrationFederal Housing AdministrationThe Federal Housing Administration is a United States government agency created as part of the National Housing Act of 1934. It insured loans made by banks and other private lenders for home building and home buying...
- ZimbabweZimbabweZimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...
- Robert MugabeRobert MugabeRobert Gabriel Mugabe is the President of Zimbabwe. As one of the leaders of the liberation movement against white-minority rule, he was elected into power in 1980...
- History of ZimbabweHistory of ZimbabweAt the end of the Bush War there was a transition to majority rule in 1980. The United Kingdom ceremonially granted Zimbabwe independence on April 18, 1980 in accordance with the Lancaster House Agreement...
- GukurahundiGukurahundiThe Gukurahundi refers to the suppression by Zimbabwe's 5th Brigade in the predominantly Ndebele regions of Zimbabwe most of whom were supporters of Joshua Nkomo. A few hundred disgruntled former ZIPRA combatants waged armed banditry against the civilians in Matabeleland, and destroyed government...
- Zimbabwean Fifth BrigadeZimbabwean Fifth BrigadeThe Fifth Brigade was an elite unit of specially trained Zimbabwean soldiers. The Fifth Brigade was formed in 1981 and disbanded in 1988 after allegations of brutality and murder during the Brigade's occupation of Matabeleland...
- Operation MurambatsvinaOperation MurambatsvinaOperation Murambatsvina , also officially known as Operation Restore Order, is a large-scale Zimbabwean government campaign to forcibly clear slum areas across the country...
- ZANU-PF
Further reading
- "Dead God's Homecoming", Science Fantasy #59, Michael Moorcock
- "Falling Towers: City Life After Urbicide," Marshall Berman
- "Colonization and the new imperialism: on the meaning of urbicide today," Kanishka Goonewardena
- "New Wars of the City: Urbicide and Genocide," Martin Shaw
- "The Pentagon as global slumlord," Mike Davis
- "City and Death," Bogdan Bogdanovic
- "On the natural history of destruction," W.G. Sebald
- "Planet of Slums," Mike Davis.
- "American Urbicide," Andrew Herscher. Journal of Architectural Education, 60:1 (September 2006).
- "The Destruction of Memory," Robert Bevan
- "Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics," Stephen Graham
- "Urbicide: The politics of urban destruction", Martin Coward (2008)
External links
- 'Urbicide' Overview & Conference Information
- 'Urbicide' in the West Bank-an article by Stephen Graham
- Final Report of the UN Commission of Experts on the Siege of Sarajevo
- Survival Map of Sarajevo
- Photos of the Siege of Sarajevo
- James Carrol, "Katrina's Truths."
- Alan Berube and Bruce Katz, "Katrina's Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America"
- Martin Shaw, "New Wars of the City: 'urbicide' and 'genocide'" - cities in warfare past and present.
- Marshall Berman, "Among the Ruins." - urbicide in New York's Bronx district
- Martin Coward, Community as heterogeneous ensemble: Mostar and multiculturalism. - paper on war in Bosnia and urbicide
- The Meanings of Violence and the Violence of Meanings - various discussions of violence
- Robert Gilman, "Structural Violence"-unequal distribution of wealth and violence
- Eyal Weizman's "The Politics of Verticality"
- Robert Moses' Plan for New York
- http://www.ttk.gov.tr/data/2006/awg9-2.htm) an articale on urbicide by construction and destruction, Nurhan Abujidi
- Down with the Cities! The case for universal urbicide