Grasping the impact of violence on cities is crucial to understanding the contemporary urban condition and the possibilities for spatial justice. Over the past year, the Gaza Strip has been transformed into a landscape of debris and grief. Along with what has been recognised by the International Court of Justice, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as a plausible case of genocide, is the destruction of physical urban space and the erasure of social networks, communal spaces and collective memory of its residents. These intertwined processes, recognised by scholars as urbicide, domicide and ecocide, are employed as tools of erasure, spatial dispossession and control.

In this panel, speakers explore what can be learned about home and the urban from the calamity we witness in Gaza, and other experiences of urbicide in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. We trace experiences of resistance to spacio-cide and attempts at life and place-making to allow for the remaking, revival and restoration of urban life and home in the broadest definition, beyond visions for humanitarian reconstruction or security-controlled urban spaces.

This lecture is available in person and online.

Please note capacity is limited and seats are first come, first seated. You will need to show your ticket on entry.

For online attendance please register on our UCL event page.

Online Speakers:

Dr Nurhan Abujidi is the head of the Smart Urban Redesign Research Centre at Zuyd University of Applied Science in the Netherlands. Previously, she was chief architect for the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage (1996 – 2000), the academic coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus UII urban studies module at the VUB Brussels, senior researcher on sustainable urban development at Zaragoza University, and Vice Dean and Professor of Urban Design Theory at the Faculty of Architecture at San Jorge University in Zaragoza, Spain, where she directed multiple research projects on urban development. She has also taught Master’s programmes in several universities and research groups including COSMOPOLIS; City, Culture and Society at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She is the author of Urbicide in Palestine: Spaces of Oppression and Resilience (Routledge, 2014).

Abir Saksouk-Sasso is an architect, urbanist and co-founder of Public Works, a research and design studio that uses a multidisciplinary approach to spatial justice. The studio provides urban analysis, informs public debates, and supports advocacy around equitable cities and inclusive urban governance.

In-person Speakers:

Dr Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Ammar is the Principal Investigator of Slow Violence and the City, a research project that examines the impact of violence on the built environment at the time of war and peace. Ammar studied architecture in Homs, Syria, before moving to the UK to complete his PhD at the University of Bath. He is an editor at Arab Urbanism and a collective member of City Journal. He has written for a wide range of platforms including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New Statesman. He is the author of the publication Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Bloomsbury, 2023) and the editorial, Erased City (City, 2024).

Dr Sana Murrani is an associate professor in spatial practice with a background in architecture and urban design. She is the Arts/Health Research Lead, founder of the Displacement Studies Research Network, and co-founder of the Justice and Imagination in Global Displacement Research Collective at the University of Plymouth. She is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. Sana’s research interests are rooted in the (un)disciplined interdisciplinarity of spatial justice, informed by a creative, place-based research practice that maps built, destroyed, remembered and reimagined trauma geographies of war, violence and displacement. She is the author of Rupturing Architecture: Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq, 2003-2023 (Bloomsbury, 2024), which was associated with the online archive Ruptured Domesticity exhibited at the LSE Middle East Centre in 2023. She leads the AHRC Impact Accelerator Fellowship project, Ruptured Atlas: Creative Mapping of Yazidi Odyssey of Home, Displacement, Migration and Return. The project is in partnership with Sinjar Academy, Yazda, IOM Iraq and the LSE Middle East Centre.

Chairs: Catalina Ortiz and Muzna Al Masri

Full information: www.ucl.ac.uk/urban-lab/events/2024/oct/urbicide-and-horizons-city-re-making

Urbicide and Horizons for City Re-making