Abstract
This chapter introduces the debate of Urbicide as a methodological and theoretical way to understand urban studies. Cities are one of many urban territories and are the most relevant, with a social and historic construction. The configuration process of cities has an origin and also an apparent end. But the urban policies and planning do not consider the process of destruction of cities and try producing utopian cities. This chapter opens the debate about the way that urbanization and urban development are conceived to cause the death of today’s cities and principally poses as a methodological theoretical framework from three central inputs: denial of denial, socio-spatial adjustments and transformations, obsolescence and destruction of the city, which then opens up into six components of analysis (annihilation, deterioration, dissolution, degradation, destruction and contraction).
If the sidewalk ends up favoring the automobile over the pedestrian, the street dies and the end of the city begins.
Jane Jacobs (paraphrasing).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Suburb is a compound word, where sub is a prefix meaning: low, below or inferiority; and urb refers to urbe, that is, less than city or, as defined by the DRAE: “population nucleus located on the outskirts of a city.
- 3.
Borja (2003) states that it is a “class” disease that reinforces a segregating and denying discourse of the city.
- 4.
Urbanism was born at the time of the industrial revolution and its object is the study and intervention in the urbs; that is, in the organization of the territory and the own services of the city.
- 5.
Urban development, also a tributary of the industrial revolution, is understood as a set of technical and administrative measures aimed at territorial planning, without ignoring the production of services (health, education) and infrastructures (mobility, energy), as well as the control of spatial and population expansion.
- 6.
Acquis: a set of moral, cultural or natural assets accumulated throughout history.
- 7.
Atrocious cases such as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, of Guernica after Franco’s fascism, or of US President Bush’s preemptive wars. The ex-mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanovic, pointed out that the wars in the Balkans were anti-urban, with the aim of undermining the cultural values concentrated in the cities.
- 8.
Human settlement is a place where population groups are established in precarious shelters. These places do not become neighborhoods or part of the city, because they lack services, infrastructure, housing and public space. They are informal or illegal, which makes public policies ignore their existence.
- 9.
The right to the city has gained ground in Latin American societies, first from the institutional perspective, when it was enshrined in the constitutions of Brazil (1988), Ecuador (2008) and Mexico City (2018). But also internationally within The New Urban Agenda (2016) and the Habitat International Coalition (HIC).
- 10.
According to the DRAE, Palimpsest is: “Ancient manuscript that preserves traces of a previous writing that has been artificially erased”.
- 11.
Civitas, from Latin, means city, that is, the organized community where citizenship is integrated and where it satisfies their rights.
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Carrión Mena, F., Cepeda Pico, P. (2023). Urbicide: An Unprecedented Methodological Entry in Urban Studies?. In: Carrión Mena, F., Cepeda Pico, P. (eds) Urbicide. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25304-1_1
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