ABSTRACT
This chapter familiarizes readers with historical understandings of the concept of urbicide, drawing parallels between current and historical instances of violence against the built environment, but also focusing on the significant differences between today’s uses of urbicidal tactics and their historical equivalents. It offers a critical overview of the dominant ways of conceptualizing urbicidal violence, critically assesses these tendencies, and proposes approaching urbicidal violence as entangled with other manifestations of political violence, placing emphasis on the need to acknowledge its material-semiotic character and the consequences of this. In order to understand what is at stake in urbicide, the chapter discusses the concept of “home” and how it is situated vis-à-vis its natural, physical, social, and cultural contexts, as well as why its destruction matters. Adopting a cartographic approach, grounded in new materialist ways of thinking, it offers a topology of concepts used for referring to violence against urbanity, highlighting the material dimensions of home and community, as much as of their destruction. It is underlined that the demolition of urban spaces amounts to the annihilation, or denial, of “the right to the city,” conceived of not only as the right to shape the urban space according to inhabitants’ needs, but as the right to active resistance against state policies, manifested—among other ways—in aspirations for self-governance.
