As the world has entered a decade within which the majority of the
world’s population will live in urban areas, the ‘right to the city’
for the world’s 3.5 billion urbanites has never been a more contested
political, social and geopolitical issue. As well as the more familiar
debates about migration, multiculturalism, and inequality, the
unprecedented scale of global urbanization is also directing
intellectual attention in the humanities and social sciences to focus
on the role of cities as dominant sites of destruction, violence,
insurgency and terrorism in the contemporary world.
Three converging
areas of research can be identified here:
First, in both the Global North and Global South, researchers analyzing
cities are starting to consider deliberate attempts at the annihilation
of cities as mixed physical, social and cultural spaces. Increasing
recognition is being given to the erasure of urban places, whether
through massive capitalist speculation, the destructive processes of
planned urban restructuring (associated particularly with the
‘megaprojects’ associated with neoliberal regimes of urban
development), state-backed warfare or terrorist violence.
Second, the central symbolic role of urban sites as physical targets of
terrorist, counter-terror and state terror campaigns is also gaining
increasing recognition within critical international politics research.
Such work is being motivated by the widespread realization that
‘asymmetric’, insurgent, and networkbased political violence can not be
understood through traditional nation-state based paradigms. In
addition, in the post Cold War, western militaries are carefully
transforming their doctrine, equipment and techno-scientific
orientation so that the control and destruction of urban insurgencies
in tightly built urban environments -- so called Military Operations in
Urban terrain (MOUT) -- becomes their de facto.
Finally, the emergence of cities as targets of ethno-nationalist
violence (as in the 1990s Balkan Wars) or as targets of Orientalist
violence (as in the case of Chechnya, Iraq and the Occupied
Territories) is the subject of a growing body of work in politics,
sociology, anthropology and geography.
One central concept is emerging which offers potential to tie together
all three of these areas of work: ‘urbicide’ – or the deliberate
attempt to deny, or kill, the city. Whilst the term is gaining widening
coverage in all three of the above research strands, there has, as yet,
been no attempt to organize a cross-cutting and multi-scaled workshop
to bring together the diverse research communities who are becoming
increasingly interested in both the political and policy violence
targeting cities.
The Durham urbicide workshop will do just this. Using the
interdisciplinary orientation of Durham Geography’s
Politics-State-Space group, the workshop will seek to specify the
potential and limits of this emerging inter-disciplinary concept,
emphasizing the similar logic that operates across the scale of local,
national and global. It will develop and publish a ground-breaking
interdisciplinary dialogue between key researchers in geography,
international politics, planning, sociology, architecture,
anthropology, history, and law, who are developing research into the
role of cities as sites of both planning-related and political
violence. And it will attempt to develop a cutting-edge research agenda
into the nature of urbicide that can be pursued further by both the
crossdisciplinary and cross-national research networks that will be
established at the workshop.
The organizers would be particularly interested in papers that address the following:
• Neoliberal cities, urban planning, and annihilations of place.
• War as urbicide in the 20th century.
• Place annihilation and colonial power.
• Urbicide as war on collective and architectural memory.
• Popular and media cultures and representations of urban annihilation.
• Urbicide, terrorism and the ‘war on terror’.
• Military shifts towards ‘Military Operations on Urban Terrain’.
• Military technoscience and the city.
• The relations between urbicide and other forms of political violence.
• The reconstruction and resilience of cities
function.
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