Theory & Event

In the early 1990s, when the Baroque-era city centers of Vukovar and Osijek in Croatia lay in ruins, after Dubrovnik had been shelled, while the Ottoman-era Old Town of Mostar in Bosnia was being demolished, and in the midst of the siege of Sarajevo, the term “urbicide” emerged in post-Yugoslavia to describe the destruction of these cities.¹ Underlying the deployment of the term was a distinction between urban destruction and urbanism: the destruction wreaked during war was assumed to be fundamentally distinct from the life of cities during peace. As Bogdan Bogdanovic wrote in a widely-translated essay, “The City and Death,”

(T)he civilized world...will never forget the way we destroyed our cities. We Serbs shall be remembered as despoilers of cities, latter-day Huns. The horror felt by the West is understandable: for centuries it has linked the concepts ‘city’ and ‘civilization’, associating them even on an etymological level. It therefore has no choice but to view the destruction of cities as flagrant, wanton opposition to the highest values of civilization.²

The conjunction of “city” and “civilization,” famously theorized by Max Weber, poses the city as a place of civility, civics and other formations of urban culture, and the non-urban as disordered, chaotic and violent. Urbicide, in this context, is framed not only as violence against the city but also violence foreign to the city. And accordingly, accounts of urbicide easily intersected with accounts of primordial ethnic hatreds or religious conflicts in the Balkans, each also deemed alien to the city.

Since the war, the term “urbicide” has been re-inscribed in an emergent scholarly discourse on war-time urban destruction in post-Yugoslavia.³ This re-inscription has served to direct attention to the particular salience of violence against the city during the post-Yugoslav wars. At the same time, however, it has also served to re-invoke Weberian formulations of urban culture and pre- or extra-urban violence, with the former typically marked by such descriptors as “heterogenous,” “multicultural,” “cosmopolitan,” or “European,” and the latter, as “ethnic,” “ethnonationalist,” “tribal,” or “barbaric.” Thus, in one recent survey of destruction, violence against architecture and cities is described as the result of attempts to erase “the memories, history and identity attached to architecture and place.”⁴ Here, “memories, history and identity” are reserved for the city and its inhabitants, and violence and its agents are reciprocally separated from these cultural forms. In so doing, discourse on destruction reproduces idealized imaginaries of both the city and violence, leaving the intersections of urban destruction with urban history occulted.

Situated beyond urban culture, urban destruction in the post-Yugoslav wars has therefore yet to be fully analyzed, or even described. Instead, this destruction is often simply named “urbicide,” and interpretation focuses on urbicide’s supposed causes or origins: the ideological, cultural or socio-economic structures that are the usual sites of scholarly labor. Much of the scholarly discourse on urbicide, then, maps onto prevailing discourses on violence, discourses in which violence is understood as a mere effect, product, expression or mediation of “deeper” social, economic, political, cultural and/or ideological contexts, rather than as an autonomous or semi-autonomous cultural formation. As Allen Feldman has described the received view of violence,

(T)he issue of descriptive adequacy is rarely brought to bear upon the acts of violence themselves, but only on the putative origin of the irruption. Violence is denuded of any intrinsic semantic or causal character. The sociohistorical depth of the violent event is locatable in zones exterior to that occurrence. Violence is treated as a psychological artifact and surface effect of the origin.⁵

A key exception to the established disengagement of urban destruction from urban culture is Walter Benjamin’s account of Baron Haussmann’s mid 19^th century reconstruction of Paris. For Benjamin, the significance of Haussmann’s reconstruction lay not only in its urban architecture, its long and grand axial boulevards connecting nodal points in the city, but also in the destruction that preceded and allowed for those constructions. Noting Haussmann’s self-description as an “artiste demolisseur,” Benjamin pointed out...