This article was downloaded by: [Columbia University]On: 08 December 2014, At: 16:19Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Genocide ResearchPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgr20

Urbicide: The Politics of UrbanDestructionHannibal Travis aa Florida International UniversityPublished online: 26 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Hannibal Travis (2011) Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction, Journal ofGenocide Research, 13:3, 382-387

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2011.595591

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Urbicide: The Politics of Urban DestructionMartin CowardLondon: Routledge, 2008176 pp, $39.95 (pbk)

In Urbicide, Martin Coward argues that the deliberate destruction of buildings byviolence is best understood as an assault on the human condition known as ‘urban-ity’ or ‘urbanism’ (pp. 14–15). Urbanity is said to be a lifestyle characterized bythe heterogeneity of available beliefs or identities (pp. 39, 50–51). Urbicide is aconcept or logic that helps to mount a ‘condemnation of the destruction of build-ings’ (p. 51). It therefore does not require an attack on a city, on civilization or onpublic life (or on the republic as a res publica) (pp. 50–53). The author argues thatit is sufficient, for the concept of urbicide to come into play, that a ‘destruction ofheterogeneity through destruction of the buildings’ takes place (p. 53).

The book introduces urbicide with several disparate examples that some readersmight find difficult to classify as similar: the Roman assault on Carthage; thebombing of German or Japanese cities such as Dresden or Hiroshima during theSecond World War; the shelling or demolition of buildings in Sarajevo andBanja Luka during the Bosnian Muslim insurgency in Yugoslavia of 1992–1995; Soviet and Russian ‘rubbleisation’ in Afghanistan and Chechnya as a‘scorched earth policy’ in the 1980s and 1990s; and Israeli destruction of Palesti-nian Arab homes and businesses from about 2004 to 2007 (pp. 8–10, 101–106).All are said to represent a policy of deliberate targeting of the built environment(p. 8).

Coward’s purpose is conceptual and theoretical, rather than historical or docu-mentary (pp xii, xiii). He argues that only in the post-Cold War era did buildingsand cities make heterogeneous identities possible in a ‘historically and culturallyspecific’ way (p. 128). Some prominent philosophers of the post-Cold War eraemphasize the critique of metaphysics in the tradition of Martin Heidegger,including Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, and Coward follows them inthis (pp. 72–94). He applies the critique of metaphysics to contend that theWestern liberal ideal of the subject as prefiguring community and entering intoit with other beings having a shared substance is flawed, and should be opposedby a deconstructive view of the self that sees its meaning as being constitutedat the point of differentiation from the other, and therefore at the point of relationwith the other (p. 94). Urbicide attempts to restore the independence of the indi-vidual or national subject after a threat of dependency or corruption caused by theclose relationship with the other in public space (pp. 89–90, 99). As two of thebook’s quotes suggest, the city is attacked because it is ‘open for all’ (p. 91)and a ‘collective experience’ (p. 11).

There are several gaps in this rather short work that remain to be filled by futurecontributions. First, the book provides little context, drawn from premodern warsand imperial campaigns, for the centrality of urban destruction to certain ways ofwar, and to specific forms of destroying populations. Second, it presents an incom-plete genealogy of the concept and critique of urbicide as violence against cultural

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heritage. Third, its account of the Balkan wars in particular is rather truncated intemporal and geographic terms, despite the advantage in terms of time and per-spective that this book has over others published in the 1990s. Finally, the norma-tive implications of urbicide as a method of analysis need to be made moreconcrete.

Future works on ‘urbicide’ might profitably trace the practice throughoutvarying periods of history, regions of the world, types of practitioner andeffects on the ‘victims’—the latter regarded either as the cities themselves orthe human individuals and groups that make and are made by them. RobertBevan masterfully attempted just such a historical survey in his 2005 The Destruc-tion of Memory: Architecture at War, igniting spirited debate on the topic inBritain and the United States. Rebecca Knuth gave compelling accounts ofmore dramatic and complete cultural destruction than Coward describes, in her2006 Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and CulturalDestruction and her 2008 Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction ofBooks and Libraries in the Twentieth Century.1 Compared to her examples—the plunder of occupied Europe by the Nazis, of Afghanistan by the Taliban, ofChina and Tibet by the Maoists and of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge—someof Coward’s case studies are less thorough in their attempts to disrupt intersubjec-tivity in its constructed environment.

The destruction of cities for various purposes goes back many millennia. Someof the earliest historical and literary texts relate to the destruction of early Meso-potamian cities and city-states such as Assur and Babylon by the Elamites andMitannis of present-day Iran.2 Moreover, few ‘built environments’ were quiteas devastated as the Asian cities razed centuries ago by the Mongol armies ofGenghis Khan, Hulagu Khan and Tamerlane, such as Smyrna, Urgench,Baghdad and Isfahan.3 The Mongol armies of Genghis Khan and his successorsdeserve a unique place in the history of urbicide, for few if any campaigns priorto the Second World War approach theirs in the obsessive destruction of citiesfor no good purpose.4 The assaults of the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks on Byzantinecities such as Arzen and Constantinople proved to be nearly as devastating, even-tually bringing a virtual end to Byzantine society.5

The study of urbicide should distinguish between city-hating zealots likeTamerlane, religious fanatics bent on destroying pagan civilization and enslavingits members on missions, and the more selective deployment of mass murder as anethno-military strategy by the Nazis and their allies. The Spanish Empire turned itscity-leveling conquistadores loose on the Americas, claiming countless works ofarchitecture and literature to the extent of contemporary near-amnesia regardingthe affected civilizations.6 Turning to more recent history, the Nazi blitzkriegconsumed many cities in fire and rubble, particularly those at the tip of theirunprecedented military spear.7 However, the Nazis left other occupied citieslike Prague and Paris relatively unscathed, while exterminating large swaths ofthe local population, especially Jews and Roma.8

The term ‘urbicide’ lies at an ambiguous crossroads between internationalcriminality and local economic policy. The first reference to ‘urbicide’ in public

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discourse apparently came in 1968 in an op-ed, with particular reference to thedemolition of Penn Station to build a new one along with Madison SquareGarden.9 Coward notes that New Yorkers experienced ‘the bureaucratic destruc-tion of substantial sections of the built environment in order to clear space forprojects such as Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway or the World TradeCenter’ (p. 10). The Village Voice expanded on the theme, discussing thelooming depopulation of New York City due to abandonment rather thanbureaucratic destruction, with whole neighborhoods seeming to be ‘bombedout’ or virtual ‘ghost towns’.10 These connotations of ‘urbicide’ make it somewhatunsuited to describing incidents such as the massacre and enslavement of theCarthaginian population by the Romans and the leveling of their homeland.

The charge of ‘urbicide’ next gained traction as the Croatian Defense Counciland Mostar’s Association of Architects organized an exhibit of urban destruction,focused on Mostar and Sarajevo.11 Croatian architect Bogdan Bogdanovichargued that the Yugoslav Army was deliberately leveling cities such asVukovar (p. 37). Although Coward describes Bogdanovich as condemning theacts of ‘city haters’, Bogdanovich also referred to such acts as ethnic cleansing,contemporary sources reveal, suggesting that human groups were the target.12

As the Balkans form the inspiration and analytical focus of Coward’s text, hehas a clear obligation to describe the history of that region accurately and indepth. On this point, his labeling of these events as ‘the 1992–95 Bosnian War’is questionable. For one thing, the war extended well beyond Bosnia to Croatiaand Serbia, and featured numerous other countries in important roles. The experi-ence of the Croatian or Kosovar Serbs, or of the Serbian Croats for that matter,deserves greater attention. Until at least 1993, it was common for the UnitedNations, the European Union and the United States to refer to the war as occurringin Yugoslavia or the former Yugoslavia.13 In 1994, testimony before the US Con-gress revealed that in Vojvodina, in northern Serbia, along with the killing ofCroats, the civil war brought ‘severe beatings, harassment, [and] throwingbombs into courtyards of non-Serbs living there’.14 During the Croatian-led‘Operation Storm’ against Croatian Serbs starting in 1995, thousands of homeswere looted and burned, and up to 200,000 Serbs and Roma people fled after14,000 people were killed.15 In 1999, US National Security Adviser SandyBerger confirmed that 80 Serbian Orthodox churches in Kosovo had beendestroyed, and that Serbs continued to be killed and kidnapped.16 In 2002, theUS State Department asserted that the destruction of ‘Serbian Orthodox churches,presumably by ethnic Albanian extremists, continued’, as ‘ethnic Albaniansattacked the last remaining Serb village in the Dukagjin Valley (Rahovac/Oraho-vac)’.17 The State Department also reported that in 2004, 30 Serbian Orthodoxchurches, nunneries and monasteries ‘and more than 900 homes and businessesof ethnic minorities were burned or damaged’ in ‘ethnically motivated attackson Serbian Orthodox churches and shrines and on the Serbian Orthodox popu-lation of Kosovo.’18 In 2007, the Serbian Orthodox Church claimed that 150churches and monasteries had been ruined in the Kosovo region.19

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The heart of Coward’s text, in my view, is revealed in his response to acritique of his work by Martin Shaw in 2004 (p. 47). Coward articulates the keydifference between genocide and urbicide in order to reply. He argues that geno-cide and urbicide may represent two sides of the same political event. Genocideexpresses the extent to which the event has the foreseeable effect of ‘the destruc-tion of a specific way of life (or population) that may be heterogeneous to that ofthe aggressor’ (p. 48). Urbicide is the intentional destruction of the built environ-ment in order to eliminate places (the public space) where plural or heterogeneousidentities are made possible (p. 48). One key element of Shaw’s critique is neg-lected, however. Shaw argued that ‘urbicide’ diverts our attention from the onlyprincipled distinction to be drawn, i.e., between legitimate war and illegitimategenocide, which was the distinction drawn in early drafts of the Genocide Conven-tion between attacking military forces and attacking social groups.20 Shaw fol-lowed this line of argument in 2007 with the observation that ‘urbicide’ invokesthe normative power of condemnation that ‘genocide’ has built up in law anddiplomacy, without necessarily resting on an equally weighty moral distinctionas that between combatants and entire nations or social groups.21 To paraphrasehis argument, the rural does not differ as much from the urban as does a nationfrom an army.

The dividing line between genocide and urbicide may command the attention offuture scholars. The purpose or effect of the destruction of a given built environ-ment may be to decimate or deport entire human groups on national, ethnic, orreligious grounds; to demolish potential bases of attack for insurgent snipers, artil-lery, or bomb-makers; to devastate the economic and military production ofenemy groups; and/or to deny certain cultural and religious symbols to theenemy or to posterity. For example, Coward describes the Russian Federationas reducing Grozny to rubble to deprive Chechen separatists of a base of oper-ations, and yet as losing the city to the same or allied separatists not long thereafter(pp. 105–106). It would seem that there may have been military reasons to bombor shell the city, which should be analyzed with reference to whether the destruc-tion of lives or property was excessive, all things considered.

One of the principal normative objectives of the book is stated as challenginganthropocentrism, or the privileged status occupied by the lives of human beingswithin the normative outlook of human scholars. Anthropocentrism is the motiveforce behind urbicide, and the critique of urbicide is the critique of the assumptionthat material objects are a ‘mere resource for humanity’ (p. 136). Coward blamesthe anthropocentric assumption of liberalism (that the choices of the human beingare independent of material reality and the social environment) for the ‘ancienthatreds’ and ‘self-determination’ of modern wars (p. 136). The idea seems to bethat the rise of globalization and ‘meta-cities’ will undermine these ‘ancienthatreds’ and indeed territoriality itself (p. 136). Why large cities with ‘global inter-connection[s]’ are less likely to invoke the ‘ancient hatreds’ of race and religionmay remain a mystery to the natives of the Americas, the peripheries of theSoviet Union or Russian Federation, the far-flung islands of the Indonesian archi-pelago or the mountains or swamps of Iraq or Sudan, chafing over the years under

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the exploitative governance of the ‘mega-cities’ of New York, Moscow, Jakarta,Baghdad and Khartoum.

A more fundamental question might be: why is the destruction of buildingsmore worthy of analysis than the destruction of other objects conducive tohuman interests or utility, such as foodstuffs, furniture, artwork, movablegoods, transportation or telecommunications infrastructure, or waterworks?Accepting the critique of liberalism and the liberal subject as too anthropocentric,why not turn to the study of quarks, atoms, molecules, rocks, plants, planets,galaxies or entire universes? Would not the volume and diversity of astronomicalentities destroyed by, say, a supernova, be more significant than anything thatoccurred in the former Yugoslavia or the Russian Federation? These questionshighlight the tendency of a thoroughgoing critique of anthropocentrism to dissolvethe reader’s very interest in historical research.

Hannibal Travis # 2011Florida International University

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2011.595591

Notes and references

1 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2007); Rebecca Knuth,Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction (Westport, CT: Praeger,2006); Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the TwentiethCentury (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).

2 See Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 149; Annie Caubetand Patrick Pouyssegur, The Ancient Near East: The Origin of Civilization (English ed., Paris: Terrail, 1998);Daniel D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia (New York: Greenwood Press Reprinting,1989). See also Leonard William King, Chronicles Concerning Early Babylonian Kings (London: Luzac &Co., 1907).

3 See Bevan, The Destruction of Memory; Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City(New York: Newmark Press, 1972); John Man, Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection (New York:St. Martin’s Press, 2007); Gabriel Oussani, ‘The Modern Chaldeans and Nestorians, and the Study ofSyriac Among Them’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1901, p. 82; Abraham Yohannan, TheDeath of a Nation: Or the Ever Persecuted Nestorians or Assyrian Christians (1916).

4 See Will Cohu, ‘The Hordes Who Invented “Urbicide”’, The Telegraph, 14 March 2004, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3613766/The-hordes-who-invented-urbicide.html (reviewing John Man,Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection [New York: Bantam, 2004]).

5 Nicolo Barbaro, The Siege of Constantinople (trans. J.R. Jones) (New York: Exposition Press, 1969),pp. 122–29; Paul A. Blaum, ‘Diplomacy Gone to Seed: A History of Byzantine Foreign Relations, A.D.1047–57’, International Journal of Kurdish Studies, January 2005, p. 18; Archibald Joseph Dunn, TheRise and Decay of the Rule of Islam (London: Samuel Tinsley, 1877); Kate Fleet, European and IslamicTrade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999), pp. 122–126.

6 See Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 109–110.7 Ibid., p. 291.8 Ibid., pp. 265–275; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press,

2006), p. 16.9 See Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘Lessons in Urbicide’, The New York Times, 22 December 1968, p. D33; Ada

Louise Huxtable, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (New York: Macmillan, 1970); John Nivala,‘The Future of Our Past: Preserving Landmark Preservation’, New York University Environmental LawJournal, Vol. 5, 1996, pp. 83, 89.

10 Henry Cohen, ‘Building Up the Human Neurosis’, The Village Voice, May 27, 1971, p 27.11 See Bill Stamets, ‘Architecture on Firing Line in Photo Exhibit,’ Chicago Sun-Times, March 14, 1994, p. 33.

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12 See Bogdan Bogdanovich, ‘Murder of the City,’ New York Review of Books, May 27, 1993, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1993/may/27/murder-of-the-city/; Sari Hanafi, ‘Spaciocide,’ in Philipp Mis-selwitz and Tim Rieniets (eds), City of Collision: Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism(Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2006).

13 See, e.g., Security Council Resolution 713, UN Doc. S/RES/713 (1991); Speech of President Delors at theSpecial Session of European Parliament Committees on the Former Yugoslavia - Brussels, August 10, 1992,SPEECH/92/77, http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/92/77&format=HTML&aged=1&language=EN&guiLanguage=en; Statement of Robert M. Gates, Director of Central Intel-ligence, US Senate, Armed Services Committee., Hearings on Threat Assessment, Military Strategy andDefense Planning (January–March 1992), http://www.loc.gov/law/find/nominations/gates/00059133123_excerpt.pdf; UN Doc. A/RES/47/147; U.N. Doc. A/RES/50/192; U.N. Doc. A/RES/51/115; TheWhite House, Office of the Press Secretary, Remarks by the President in ‘Evening With The President’(April 5, 1994), http://clinton6.nara.gov/1994/04/1994-04-06-presidents-remarks-in-tv-evening-with-the-president.html; US Department of State, Serbia and Montenegro (August 1999), http://www.state.gov/outofdate/bgn/serbiaandmontenegro/12685.htm.

14 Implementation of the Helsinki Accords, Hearing Before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe(May 5, 1994), http://www.archive.org/stream/implementation of0505unit/implementationof0505unit_djvu.txt.

15 See Bernard A. Cook, Europe since 1945: An Encyclopedia, Vol. 1 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2001), p. 239;Carla Del Ponte and Chuck Sudetic, Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals(New York: Other Press, LLC, 2009), p. 54; Lajco Klajn, The Past in Present Times: The Yugoslav Saga(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007), pp. 270–271.

16 Press Briefing by National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and UNMIK Principal Deputy Special Represen-tative of the Secretary-General, Jack Covey (November 23, 1999), http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/Europe-9911/briefings/1999-11-23a.html.

17 US Department of State, International Religious Freedom Report 2003: Serbia and Montenegro, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2003/27248.htm.

18 US Department of State, International Religious Freedom Report 2006: Serbia and Montenegro (IncludesKosovo), http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2006/71405.htm.

19 See Mark R. Amstutz, International Ethics: Concepts, Theories, and Cases in Global Politics (London:Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), p. 24; Lisa Karpova, ‘Kosovo: Soul of a Nation,’ Pravda, September 11,2007, http://english.pravda.ru/world/europe/11-09-2007/96993-kosovosoulnation-0/; US Congress, Commis-sion on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Hearings on Human Rights, Democracy, and Integration inSouth-Central Europe, Vol. 4 (2007), p. 33.

20 See Martin Shaw, ‘New Wars of the City: Relationships of “Urbicide” and “Genocide”’, in Stephen Graham(ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (New York: Wiley, 2004), pp. 152–153.

21 See Martin Shaw, ‘“Urbicide” Reconsidered,’ Theory & Event, 10, 2 (2007).

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