Urbicide refers to the deliberate destruction of cities and urban areas. It has taken many forms throughout history, from nuclear bombing to ethnic cleansing. Urbicide often requires extensive planning and dehumanization of target populations. It aims to annihilate not just people but symbolic places and urban infrastructure. Modern urbicide is increasingly asymmetric, using everyday technologies to forcibly disconnect populations. It is also legitimized through a militarized popular culture that glorifies destruction. However, cities are remarkably resilient, with urban areas often reconstructed even outside of conflict. Efforts should resist redesigning cities solely for security and instead focus on constructing inclusive global civil societies.

1. Exploring Urbicide
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. Urbicide as ‘Place Annihilation’
“As long as people have lived in cities, they have been haunted
by fears of urban ruin. Every city on earth is ground zero is
somebody’s doomsday book” (Marshall Berman)
“Today, wars are fought not in trenches and fields, but in living
rooms, schools and supermarkets” (Seymore Barakat)
“The days of the classical Clauswitzian definition of warfare as
a symmetrical engagement between state armies in the open
field are over. War has entered the city again” (Phil Misselwitz
and Eyal Weizman).

3. Both the informal (‘terrorist’) and the formal (state) violence, war
and terror that characterise the post Cold war and post 9/11
periods, largely entail systematic and planned targeting of
cities and urban places
In an urbanising world, cities provide much more
than just the backdrop and environment
for war and terror.
Rather, their buildings, assets, institutions, industries and
infrastructures ; their cultural diversities and symbolic
meanings ; have long actually themselves been the explicit
targets for a wide range of deliberate, orchestrated, attacks.

4. Origins of the Term: The Denial, Killing, or
Murder of the City: (a) 1945 Nuclear Urbicide

5. (b) Marshall Berman: Planning as Urbicide

6. (c) 1990s Balkan Wars

7. Seven Key Points :
(1) Urbicide Often Requires
Purposive Urban/Technoscientific Planning
e.g. Both Holocaust and Allied Strategic Bombing
required:
• Huge work forces and elaborate divisions of labour
• Dehumanisation of target populations
• Scientific rationalisation and routinisation
• A Euphemistic language to hide terrible realities
(‘dehoused workers’)
Therefore both genocidal (Markusen and Kopf)

9. Dugway Proving Ground, Utah: Eric Mendelson

10. Careful targeting of densest,
most flammable, cities and
parts of cities

11. • “Tokyo was the bestburning of them
all” (United States
Strategic Bombing
Survey)

19. Now Huge Urban and Technoscientific
Planning Going in to Support Urban Warfare : ‘MOUT’

20. Unveiling the Orientalised City

21. (2) Urbicide Often Involves Dialectics
of Construction and Erasure
• Binaried geographies
constructed : ‘us’ and
the othered ‘them’ - the
hated
• Complex urban and
bureaucratic strategies to
construct and enforce
‘pure’ spaces
• Absence and presence
constructed side by side

23. (3) Urbicide Can Also Involve ‘Civilian’ Planning
• “The war ideology of the
plan” Anthony Vidler
• “Building, by its very nature,
is an aggressive, even warlike act” Lebbeus Woods
(1995)
• Disciplinary planning in
colonial cities often used in
imperial capitals too

24. e.g. Walter Christaller and
Aryanization

25. Harare and Mugabe, 2005

26. Urbanism has Often Hidden Geopolitical Histories

29. Shrinking Cities: The
Politics of Unbuilding
“The economically,
politically and socially driven
processes of creativedestruction through
abandonment and
redevelopment are often every
bit as destructive as arbitrary
acts of war. Much of
contemporary Baltimore, with
its 40,000 abandoned houses,
looks like a war zone to rival
Sarajevo“
(David Harvey, 2003).

30. (4) Urbicide Requires a Casting Out:
Like genocide, it relies on Dehumanization-Demonisation
and the Destruction of Symbolic Places
“War mobilizes the highly charged and dangerous dialectic of place
attachment”. This involves “the perceived antithesis of ‘our’
places or homeland and ‘theirs’, an unbridled sentimentalizing of
one’s own while dehumanizing the enemy’s people and
land” (Ken Hewitt 1983)
Legitimises place annihilation
Pushes enemy beyond notions of humankind,
Agamben’s ‘bare life’ not worthy of political rights

32. Sometimes Urban Mixing and
Tolerance is the Target of EthnoNationalist Movements

33. Body-Politic Metaphors
Common
“Uncontrolled Palestinian urbanisation is a
threat of war ! The attacks against us are
not physical but are on the order of the
system. It’s an evasive threat - not
conventional or terroristic. This is very
important in the context of the global War on
Terrorism. It is destructive not through direct
damage but through its evasive
characteristics which eventually kill the order
of the host state. As of today we have the
evasive tumour which sits within the order of
the Israeli system. This is a cancerous
threat ; the cancer cell multiplies. We see a
mosque appearing there, a mass of
buildings here. We thus see order
destroyed"
(Effi Eitam, Sharon’s Infrastructure
Minister, 2002)

34. Distancing-Demonisation-Dehumanisation
e.g. Battles of Fallujah, April & November 2004
• “A huge rat’s nest that is
still festering today. It needs
to be dealt with.”
Richard Myers, Chair of the
US Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Orientalist tropes
• Glorification of war
• Verticalised, voyeuristic,
consumption

41. (5) These Days, Urbicide is Often ‘Asymmetric’
• “This is a war about the
morning’s coffee and
croissant. It is about the
beer in the evening.
About our very lives”
Adi Shveet in the Israeli
newspaper Ha’aretz in
March 2002.

44. (6) Urbicide Increasingly Involves Everyday
Technics and Forced Disconnection
• “These days if you want to hurt someone you go after
their infrastructure” Phil Agre

54. (7) Urbicide is Legitimised Through a
Militarised Popular Culture
• Susan Sontag: The
“aesthetic of destruction, the
peculiar beauties to be found
in wreaking havoc, making a
mess”
• Military-IndustrialEntertainment Complex
• Same Orientalist tropes

55. Henry Jenkins:
“in a world being torn apart by
international conflict, one
thing is on everyone’s mind as
they finish watching the
nightly news : ‘Man, this
would make a great
game!’” (2003)
• Sony ‘shock and awe’
• US Army Games
• PS2 Weapon Controls

57. ‘Joystick war’ : “at the end of the day you walk back into
the rest of life in America”

58. “Let’s start off by destroying Tokyo ! Studies show that nine out of
ten mayors begin their careers with a frenzy of destruction” Sim
City Guide

59. So, Urbicide Should Be Defined as a War Crime…
But… Cities are Resilient!
“The processes at work during and after disasters are the same as
those that account for concentrated social and economic development
in less stressful times. Yet the myth of terrible urban vulnerability
endures” (Josef Konvitz).
“The city is a kind of collective immortality – we may die, but the forms
and structures of our city live on” (Marshall Berman)
“Only in the far distant past did cities crumble into dust and not rise
again. In recent times, the extraordinary growth of cities throughout the
world seems set to override catastrophes, losses, indignities and, no
matter whether externally visited or self-inflicted” (David Harvey)

60. • Cities always sites
of continuous
improvisation,
violent
reconstruction, and
banal repair!
• Being reconstructed
even outside times
of violent conflict

61. • Must therefore resist calls to
redesign and securitise cities
in the face of war and terror!
• In ‘war on terror’must reject
both anti-urban
fundamentalisms : radical
islam vs national security
state
• Strive to construct (inevitably
misanthropic!) cities as the
key sites within emerging
global civil society

62. Further reading…