Urbicide
Urbicide is a term which describes the deliberate wrecking or "killing" of a city, by direct or indirect means. It literally translates as "city-killing". The term was initially used by urban planners and architects to describe 20th century practices of urban redevelopment in the United States. Writers like Ada Louise Huxtable and Marshall Berman highlighted the impacts of aggressive redevelopment on the urban social experience.
Especially after the siege of Sarajevo, the term has increasingly been used to describe violence specifically directed to the destruction of an urban area. At the conclusion of the Yugoslav Wars, urbicide began to emerge as a distinct legal concept in international law. The exact constraints and definition of this term continues to be debated, and because the study of urbicide intersects with a number of disciplines including international politics, anthropology, and sociology, it has been difficult for scholars and policymakers to set a definition which satisfies all these fields.
The term has come into being in an age of rapid globalization and urbanization, and although the scholarly focus on systematic violence and destruction in the context of the city is relatively new, the practice of urbicide is thousands of years old.
In premodern times
, an American Marxist writer and political theorist, acknowledges the relatively recent inception of the term urbicide, and the subsequent study of urban destruction as a distinct phenomenon. However, Berman asserts that urbicide has existed as long as cities have, calling it "the oldest story in the world." Berman cites Euripides' tragedy The Trojan Women and the Old Testament books of Jeremiah and Lamentations as some of the earliest recorded musings on the nature and meaning of urbicide. He cites themes such as the breakdown of everyday life, the inability to care for oneself, and the suffering of one's children and inability to care for or comfort them as persistent themes in urbicides of all eras. Berman also sees the breakdown of traditional norms and leadership hierarchies and a loss of meaning in life as commonalities throughout both ancient and modern literature.Classicists Sylvian Fachard and Edward M. Harris suggest that while damage as a result of conquest was common in the ancient Greek world, instances of urbicide were rare and that "With the means available for antiquity, it would be surprising to record destruction rates superior to 20–30 percent".
In later times the Roman Empire imposed the complete destruction of Jerusalem and a similarly devastating Carthaginian peace, though these proved less than permanent. Carthage was sacked and rebuilt many times, but did not remain in ruin until Muslim armies established the port of Tunis a few miles away, diverting trade and population away from the ancient city. In the case of Jerusalem, a small Roman colony was established on its ruins a few decades after the Jewish war, but the city only surpassed its pre-war size eighteen centuries later, in the 19th century.
In 1156, William I of Sicily captured Bari in southern Italy. After its capture, William ordered the destruction of the city and gave its inhabitants two days to leave. Archaeologist Giulia Bellato argues that while the destruction of the city may not have been comprehensive "when combined with forced exile, the targeted destruction of a few significant buildings would have been sufficient to dismantle the local political and social networks that were deeply ingrained in the city’s residential fabric".
Other authors have cited the destruction of Tenochtitlán and Moscow as examples of premodern urbicide. The Mongols under Genghis Khan's leadership destroyed many cities, including Merv in Central Asia.
Modern examples
The American cities were victims of the 1970s global recession, aggravated by the decline of government and private investment, which resulted in urban decay described as the "age of rubble". This situation led to ghettoization and exodus in large areas like the South Bronx. Frank D'Hont mentions a number of cases in late 20th century Europe, and criticises how Europeans urban planners neglected the preservation of the urban fabric "in times of war and conflict" under the assumption that conflict was not a problem in modern Europe. D'Hont included the Balkans, Derry, Belfast, Nicosia, and even ghettoized areas of Paris.The Second World War
The Second World War saw some of the earliest and most extreme examples of the aerial destruction of cities such as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The development of air warfare and aerial bombardment and nuclear weapons made cities and their infrastructure into targets of war in a new and devastating way.Tokyo
is known as the city that, on the night of March 9–10, 1945, during a raid by the US Armed Forces, was subjected to the most destructive and deadly non-nuclear bombing in human history. 41 km² of central Tokyo was destroyed and a quarter of the city burned to the ground, leaving approximately 100,000 civilians dead and more than a million homeless. By comparison, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, resulted in the deaths of approximately 70,000 to 150,000 people.Stalingrad
During the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the German Army destroyed several cities in the Soviet Union, causing a deliberate destruction of vital civilian infrastructure, including in Stalingrad. The city was firebombed with 1,000 tons of high explosives and incendiaries in 1,600 sorties on 23 August 1943. The aerial assault on Stalingrad was the most concentrated on the Ostfront according to Beevor, and was the single most intense aerial bombardment on the Eastern Front at that point. At least 90% of the housing stock was obliterated during the first week of the bombing, with an estimated 40,000 killed.Warsaw
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Nazi Germany deliberately razed most of the city of Warsaw after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The uprising had infuriated German leaders, who decided to make an example of the city, although Nazi Germany had long selected Warsaw for major reconstruction as part of their Lebensraum policy and Generalplan Ost, the plans to Germanize Central and Eastern Europe and eliminate, ethnically cleanse, or enslave the native Polish and Slavic populations.The Nazis dedicated an unprecedented effort to destroy the city. Their decision tied up considerable resources which could have been used at the Eastern Front and at the newly-opened Western Front following the Normandy landings. The Germans destroyed 80–90% of Warsaw's buildings and deliberately demolished, burned, or stole an immense part of its cultural heritage, completely destroying Warsaw's Old Town.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the extremes of the new levels of destruction made possible by modern military technology. Five square miles of Hiroshima were destroyed in seconds, with 90% of the city's 76,000 buildings destroyed. The urban fabric of Nagasaki faced a similar fate. A notable characteristic of the atomic bombings was the totality of the destruction; the way that "the whole of society was laid waste to its very foundations."Also notable is the fact that the total destruction faced by the bombed cities was brief, and quickly reversed. Though total recovery took time, water and power were restored within a week and the population of Hiroshima surged from 89,000 to 169,000 in the six months following the bombing.