Urbicide - Cases

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 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. 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.