The Threat Of Urbicide

David Campbell, Stephen Graham and Daniel Bertrand Monk provide a lucid introduction to the Urbicide papers in their "Introduction to Urbicide: The Killing of Cities?" Drawing attention to the sheer scale of global urbanization (a majority of people live in cities for the first time in 2007), they note its corollary in the new interdisciplinary interest in cities. This is no longer the nineteenth-century metropolitan imaginary, nor the twentieth-century's doomed utopian plans for clean, safe and functional urban spaces; rather, it is the role of cities as "dominant sites of destruction, violence, insurgency and terrorism" that comes to the fore where urban violence and violent urbanism meet.

Campbell et al. sketch a helpful genealogy of the resulting concept of Urbicide, emphasizing its distinctiveness from perspectives that merely refer to the urban impact of war or that examine the city as a theater of violence. Instead, Urbicide refers to a "particular formation of purposive violence where urbanity is the strategic object of violence."