The Dictionary of Human Geography

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creatively imagine a range of alternative urban

futures’ (p. 173). At the end of the twentieth

century, expectations rose that cities would

lose their significance in a generalized

network society of flows, which would

makeagglomerationinplacean anachron-

ism. Little evidence has been forthcoming to

support such an expectation, however, even in

those parts of the world where absolute urban-

ization rates declined (Castells, 1996b;

Sassen, 2000; Storper and Manville, 2006).

It is safe to say that although urbanization

and the resurgence of urbanization in the

West are of prime significance, the main form

in which urbanization now takes place is

throughsquattingby migrant populations in

the demographic hot spots of the developing

world. Urbanization now leads to a ‘planet of

slums’ (Davis, 2004a). rk

Suggested reading

Amin and Thrift (2002); Brenner and Keil

(2006).

urbicide Literally ‘killing cities’, urbicide

refers to the intentional attempt to erase or

destroy acityor cities for political purposes.

The term has two main origins.

One lies in the critique of modern urban

planning. Building on the work of architecture

critic Ada Louise Huxtable and her ‘Primer on

Urbicide’ (Huxtable, 1970), Berman (1996)

used the term to object to modernist redevel-

opment strategies in American cities and their

violent substitution of soulless abstraction

for vibrant traditional streetscapes. Echoing

Berman, Merrifield (2004) invoked the same

concept in his analysis of thesituationists’

resistance to comprehensive redevelopment

in Paris in the 1970s.

The term was mobilized in a second sense

by Balkan scholars and architects to condemn

the way in which Serbian armed forces in the

warof the 1990s targeted the architectures

and spaces of Dubrovnik, Sarajevo and other

cities that were most visibly identified with a

history of religious, ethnic and national plur-

alism and heterogeneity in what rapidly

became the former Yugoslavia (Coward,

2004: see alsoethnic cleansing). Since then,

the analysis of urbicide through military vio-

lence has been extended both historically and

geographically. Scholars have explored what

W.G. Sebald called the ‘natural history of

destruction’, the campaign of British and

American strategic bombing of German cities

in the Second World War, in exactly these

terms (see Mendieta, 2007), for example,

while Graham (2003), Gregory (2004a),

Weizman (2007) and others have analysed

how Israeli armed forces have deliberately

destroyed the collective infrastructure of

Palestinian cities as part of their attacks on

the Occupied Territories since 2002.

The two streams of work, the economic

and the martial, forcefully collide in discus-

sions ofurbanismin the globalsouth, where

Goonewardena and Kipfer (2006) have iden-

tified a ‘post-colonial urbicide’ under the sign

of a newimperialism(cf. Schwartz, 2007).

These later studies strongly suggest that urbi-

cide is about more than the hollowing out of

urban economies, the destruction ofmemory

or the erasure of the physical traces of past

communities, important and injurious though

these are. Coward (2006; see also 2007) fol-

lows Martin Heidegger to argue that ‘there is

more to the constitution of apolisthan the

gathering ofanthropos’: in other words, the

physical fabric of the city is not incidental to,

but constitutive of the possibilities of political

community. In destroying this relational

space, urbicide targets the possibility of polit-

ical community and the very provocation of

difference– of heterogeneity – that is at its

core. Seen thus, urbicide is a version of polit-

icalviolencethat is not ‘merely’ corporeal

and material, but also profoundly existential:

‘Urbicide is a politics of exclusion aimed at

establishing the fiction of a being-without-

others’ (p. 434) (cf.genocide). sg/dg

Suggested reading

Graham (2004); Campbell, Graham and Monk

(2007).

utilitarianism A theory ofethicsoriginating

in nineteenth-century Britain, prescribing the

greatest good for the greatest number. The

good is defined by acts that promote happi-

ness, satisfaction or pleasure of the immediate

actor and those affected by the act (and

making utilitarianism part of a larger philo-

sophical approach known asconsequentialism).

Utilitarians further assume happiness is quan-

tifiable, thereby allowing calculation over an

entire population: the world is as good as it can

ever be when collective pleasure is maximized.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) developed the

theory and John Stuart Mill (1806–73) elabor-

ated it. Both intended utilitarianism to bolster

their favourite political philosophy,liberal-

ism: only when people are free to choose will

the greatest good for the greatest number be

achieved (Mill’s ‘liberty principle’). Criticisms

of utilitarianism are legion and include an

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_U Final Proof page 794 31.3.2009 9:34pm

URBICIDE