Urbicide

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Urbicide is a term which literally translates as "violence against the city." 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 continues to be debated because the limits of this emerging concept make it extremely difficult to categories 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.

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[edit] Evolution of the term "Urbicide"

[edit] Definitions

The term "urbicide" has its roots in the Latin word urbs, meaning "city," and occido, meaning "to massacre." In 1944, Raphael Lemkin 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. In the wake of the destruction of Sarajevo, urbicide emerged as a term to describe such violence. The term urbicide was first coined in 1992 by a group of Bosnian architects from Mostar. In their publication Mostar '92, they used it to define the violence against the city fabric, such as the destruction of the Mostar bridge. Around the same time, Marshall Berman also used this term to describe the same acts of violence in Bosnia. This term's use 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.

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.

[edit] Urbicide in History

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. In its early manifestations the targeting and destruction of cities was seen as something new, outside the traditional rules of European warfare, Marshall Berman, 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. 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. There are other perspectives, that see urbicide as part of broader imperialist goals. Writers and Geographers such As Mike Davis, Stefan Kipfer,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 Israel/Palestine 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.

[edit] Sarajevo

Violence in Sarajevo (often referred to as the Siege of 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.

[edit] Palestine

The on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be traced back to its beginnings in 1948 starting with the emergence of refugees following the Arab-Israeli war and the UN mandated two-state solution. Since the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip, a colossal project of strategic, territorial and architectural planning has lain at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The landscape and the built environment became the arena of conflict.[1] Occupying territory has become the new front to squeeze out the "other"; Palestinians plant olive groves while Israelis leave their mark through the planting of pine trees in attempts to cover as much land as possible. To create a "buffer zone" between occupied territories, Palestinian villages were bulldozed, this is an act of urbicide [2]. The destruction of the physical and social framework of the Palestinian city was carried out under the auspices of Israeli military operations; however the widespread nature of leveling homes and businesses was not a strategic act to halt terrorism, but a complete erasure of Palestinian culture. The very nature of Palestinian city planning is under attack, that organic growth would be a potential breeding ground for terrorism against the planned organization of the Jewish settlements. In attempts to create a peaceful co-habitation of the West Bank, Israel has built a complex series of fences, walls and trenches in attempts to create homogenized zones separating Israelis and Palestinians. This barrier is seen as security by the Israelis, but cuts through Palestinian cities and separates many from their farm land. A complex web of roads and checkpoints is also in effect to separate the two parties.

[edit] Zimbabwe

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. 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, European 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?

[edit] New Orleans

The destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina in August of 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."

[edit] Human Rights

Definition of human rights (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 [1]. 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.

[edit] 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, 200,000 Muslim women and girls were raped by Serbs[2], 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.

[edit] Palestine

Israel's actions of pushing Palestinians into the [West Bank] 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.

[edit] Zimbabwe

In some ways similar to Palestine, 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[3]. 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.

[edit] New Orleans

Many rights of the Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans have been violated after the disaster. Not only were many people, particularly African-Americans, not given help to leave the city before the hurricane hit, but later they were not allowed to return to their homes. The aide they received has not been able to adequately address their needs. People of color feel especially marginalized and ignored in the aftermath of this disaster. Much of the rebuilding is being carried out in what used to be the white areas of the city. Also, thousands of displaced people were kicked out of the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson, MS allegedly so that a scheduled "Finding Nemo" on ice show could continue. These victims' rights continue to be set aside as they are without a place to stay, without job opportunities and without the chance to return to their homes and culture of their city. Even referring to these displaced hurricane victims as refugees implies that they have lost their citizenship, identity, and rights as Americans.

[edit] 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 genocide 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 [4]. 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 Serbian government for crimes against humanity, in which the court, in February of 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.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Universal Declaration of Human Rights
  2. ^ For First Time, Court Defines Rape as War Crime
  • Berman, Marshall. "Falling Towers: City Life After Urbicide," in Dennis Crow, ed., Geography and Identity. (Washington, 1996): 172-192.
  • Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.
  • Coward, Martin. "Urbicide in Bosnia," in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. (London: Blackwell, 2004): 154-171.
  • Graham, Stephen. "Cities, Warfare, and States of Emergency," in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. (London: Blackwell, 2004): 1-25.
  • Herscher, Andrew. "American Urbicide," in Journal of Architectural Education vol. 60, issue 1 (September 2006).
  • Kipfer, Stefan and Kanishka Goonewardena, "Colonization and the New Imperialism: On the Meaning of Urbicide Today": 1-26.
  • Shaw, Martin. "New Wars of the City: ‘Urbicide' and ‘Genocide,'" in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. (London: Blackwell, 2004): 141-153.

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

  • "Falling Towers: City Life After Urbicide," Marshall Berman
  • "Colonization and the new imperialism: on the meaning of urbicide today," Stefan Kipfer and 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

[edit] External links

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