Urbicide

Urbicide is a term which describes the deliberate wrecking or "killing" of a city, by direct or indirect means. It literally translates as "city-killing" (Latin urbs "city" + Latin occido "to kill"). The term was initially used by urban planners and architects to describe 20th century practices of urban restructuring in the United States. Writers like Ada Louise Huxtable and Marshall Berman highlighted the impacts of aggressive redevelopment on the urban social experience.

Especially after the siege of Sarajevo, the term has increasingly been used to describe violence specifically directed to the destruction of an urban area. At the conclusion of the Yugoslav Wars, urbicide began to emerge as a distinct legal concept in international law. The exact constraints and definition of this term continues to be debated, and because the study of urbicide intersects with a number of disciplines including international politics, anthropology, and sociology, it has been difficult for scholars and policymakers to set a definition which satisfies all these fields.

The term has come into being in an age of rapid globalization and urbanization, and although the scholarly focus on systematic violence and destruction in the context of the city is relatively new, the practice of urbicide is thousands of years old.