A brief history of the term ‘Urbicide’ Premium
The Hindu
Activists say Israel’s attack on Palestine’s hospitals, bakeries and schools counts as urbicide — a premeditated destruction of cities.
Reports said that Israel may flood the intricate network of tunnels in Gaza with seawater, in a purported attempt to draw Hamas operatives out of their hideouts. The plan envisages five large water pumps positioned near the al-Shati refugee camps, pumping thousands of cubic meters of water per hour, for weeks on end.
Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi in a report confirmed this tactic, saying they would do whatever it takes to “destroy this infrastructure,” as the Israeli Defence Forces expand their offensive towards southern Gaza. This strategy, in the long term, could destroy groundwater and aquifers and the impact could “last for several generations,” an academic told The Times of Israel. For this generation, this offensive would render water contaminated and undrinkable — in a region where more than 70% of people are drinking water that is salinated and polluted.
The scene described would fit perfectly with writer Christian Salmon’s description of his 2002 travels from Ramallah to Gaza and Rafah. Documenting ruined landscapes, lacerated hills and “scenes of destruction,” he wrote: “What is most striking in Palestine now is the violence wrought against the land...Houses are destroyed, olive trees uprooted, orange groves laid waste . . . “ Sewers, schools, roads, houses, a forensic laboratory, the Voice of Palestine radio station. “Who is to believe that these were terrorist institutions?” he later wrote in a blog. “Geography, it is said, determines war. In Palestine, it is war that has achieved the upper hand over geography.”
History finds abundant examples of architecture being weaponised in wars, a tactical approach scholars have come to refer to as “urbicide.” When public services are bombed and roads disfigured by men and machinery, it may be described as urbicide, an act of ritualised, premeditated violence on built infrastructures. Violence, Mr. Salmon wrote, pulverizes and paralyses cities, “transforming all the points within the area into a minefield, every individual into a living target or a human bomb.”
The etymology gives the meaning away: Urbicide is Latin for ‘city killing’, urbs translating to city and occido ‘to kill’. What counts as a ‘city’? Everyday technics, spaces and infrastructures of life, writers note. Think supermarkets, metro trains, water systems, computer networks, electricity grids, food systems, medical systems, education institutes, and research grids. Any built entity that “may be easily assaulted and turned into agents either of instantaneous terror or debilitating demodernisation.”
Among the first usages of the term was in June 1963, when science fiction author Michael Moorcock, in Dead God’s Homecoming, used ‘urbicide’ to describe the attack in the fictional bounds of Sequa. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that scholars like Marshall Berman and Bogdan Bogdanović coined the word “urbicide” to account for the widespread destruction of Balkan towns during the Yugoslavic wars between 1992 and 1996. Mr. Bogdanović, affected by the siege of Sarajevo, understood urbicide as the “ritualised murder of cities,” which goes beyond the simple objective of physically destroying cities, and annihilates memories, identities and cultures woven into a city’s fabric.
Up until then, ‘genocide’ existed as a framework in international conventions to articulate the deliberate killing of people belonging to a particular ethnic group. The term, however, did not account for tactical violence aimed beyond human bodies.
With a new government in place in Delhi, Singapore hopes to schedule the Ministerial Roundtable with India shortly, says Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan. In an exclusive interview, he speaks about the impact of the elections on ties, the “missed opportunity” of RCEP and the new buzz around Andhra Pradesh’s capital Amaravati.