Urban Destruction Research Articles

Time-series satellite remote sensing reveals gradually increasing war damage in the Gaza Strip.

War-related urban destruction is a significant global concern, impacting national security, social stability, people's survival and economic development. The effects of urban geomorphology and complex geological contexts during conflicts, characterized by different levels of structural damage, are not yet fully understood globally. Here we report how integrating deep learning with data from the independently developed LuoJia3-01 satellite enables near real-time detection of explosions and assessment of different building damage levels in the Israel-Palestine conflict. We found that the damage continually increased from 17 October 2023 to 2 March 2024. We found 3747 missile craters with precision positions and sizes, and timing on vital infrastructure across five governorates in the Gaza Strip on 2 March 2024, providing accurate estimates of potential unexploded ordnance locations and assisting in demining and chemical decontamination. Our findings reveal a significant increase in damage to residential and educational structures, accounting for 58.4% of the total-15.4% destroyed, 18.7% severely damaged, 11.8% moderately damaged and 12.5% slightly damaged-which exacerbates the housing crisis and potential population displacement. Additionally, there is a 34.1% decline in the cultivated area of agricultural land, posing a risk to food security. The LuoJia3-01 satellite data are crucial for impartial conflict monitoring, and our innovative methodology offers a cost-effective, scalable approach to assess future conflicts in various global contexts. These first-time findings highlight the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire to prevent further damage and support the release of hostages and subsequent reconstruction efforts.

Resilient cities governance when encountering external turbulence in the Greater Bay Area of China: An ESG perspective

Since the 2020’s, a series of crises, ranging from public health issues to economic recession, countries around the world have been trying to assess the impact on the social environment, and countries and regions have also actively formulated and enacted plans and policies to improve urban governance and urban regulation after the crises. How such public health, economic, and social emergencies can evoke urban resilience and self-healing capacity after urban destruction. Based on the ESG concept, this essay establishes a new model of resilient urban development, including reconstructing the model of sustainable urban development from the aspects of energy, land, education, health, digital economy and finance, to cope with the devastation resulting from emergencies. This model will also redefine a theoretical resilience framework that can be in accordance with ESG principles, offering future researchers a new perspective to assess the vulnerability and recovery capacity of a specific city.

The archaeology of decay: Ruinous knowledge and the violence of urban planning

AbstractRenewal plans for downtown Bogotá have been closely tied to “urban decay,” a notion that experts conceptualize as a natural trajectory to be reversed through demolition and reconstruction. Yet for residents on the west side of Bogotá’s city center, planning regulations and official systems of valuation deteriorated their neighborhoods long before the arrival of eviction notices and bulldozers. Drawing on the local analytic of “archaeology of decay,” I develop the concept of ruinous knowledge to explore urban dwellers’ archaeological sensibilities as they sift through the traces and remains of collapsing urban worlds. Shaped by the imaginaries of Colombia's history of warfare, such grounded and intimate knowledges point to the banal materialities and protracted temporalities of urban destruction and dispossession. Ultimately, they emerge as an ambiguous subaltern epistemology and political practice that uncovers the destructive violence at the core of urban planning, while remaining entangled with the normative orders of citizenship and belonging.

American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates

Reviewed by: American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction by Robert Yeates Michael Fuchs Ruined Cities. Robert Yeates. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction. UCL P, 2021. ix+201 pp. $40 pbk. Open access ebk. In American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Robert Yeates sets out to show that “America has its own specific history with urban ruins in fiction” and that these “ruins have functioned in very different ways in the individual historical contexts of particular US cities and in relation to particular media formats” (16). After setting the stage by referring to studies ranging from those by Georg Simmel and Lewis Mumford to James Berger and Stephen Joyce’s much more recent Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse (2018), Yeates explores representations of post-apocalyptic American cities in six particular cultural and media-historical constellations, from fiction in the early twentieth century to the transmedia storyworlds of the early twenty-first century. The opening chapter situates Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) in the context of “the inconsistent but vital relationship between the emerging genre of sf and the magazines,” which Yeates considers a reflection “of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century urbanization and industrialization of America” (47). This chapter presents a convincing reading of The Scarlet Plague as an extension of London’s nonfiction writings about the San Francisco earthquake, epitomizing the author’s turn “towards fantastic tales of possible future catastrophes” after 1906 (36). In addition, Yeates outlines the publication history of The Scarlet Plague, drawing on archival sources and providing great insights into Gordon Grant’s simple yet powerful illustrations. [End Page 129] The second chapter moves to the 1950s, when radio became the dominant medium due, in part, to changes in urban planning and transportation. As Yeates explains, whereas “the early twentieth-century commuter look[ed] to magazines for entertainment while aboard public transport, the commuters of the 1950s pilot[ed] private automobiles” and “found in radio an indispensable source of entertainment that could hold their attention without distracting them from their drive” (51). Next to the changes in media properties, Yeates emphasizes a distinct change in the causes of imagined urban disasters, as “wilful acts of sentient forces, whether human or alien” replaced chance and natural causes (55). The chapter discusses two episodes of the fantasy-horror series Quiet, Please (1947–1949) and three episodes of the sf anthology series Dimension X (1950–1951), highlighting the particular media properties of radio plays and demonstrating how these media artifacts negotiated scientific optimism and belief in technological progress with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Chapter three continues the exploration of Cold War anxieties, this time in the medium of film. Yeates’s focus turns to aerial warfare here, which was employed as a military strategy in World War II and then became a key element of how sf films of the 1950s and 1960s imagined urban destruction. Using The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960) as his main examples, Yeates echoes Jennifer Fay’s analysis of “nuclear conditioning” through motion pictures in her excellent book Inhospitable World (2018), suggesting that sf movies of the 1950s and 1960s not only reflected the anxieties of their times but also allowed viewers to confront and ultimately overcome their fears of urban and nuclear destruction. The next chapter provides a structurally not entirely convincing yet nevertheless enjoyable detour to the Blade Runner franchise (centering on the 1982 film) that showcases “what about this franchise resonated at the different moments of its development, and how the texts’ differing contexts reveal the strengths of Blade Runner’s particular take on the post-apocalyptic American city” (91). Starting from the observation that “little has been written to situate [the original Blade Runner] film in the movement of the late 1970s and 1980s towards demonizing and policing sexuality in America’s major cities” (92), the chapter focuses on Othering and how marginalized characters “navigate the liminal spaces of the ruined city as acts of experimentation, improvisation and expression in resistance to the policing of their identities” (115). Using Wasteland (1988) and Wasteland 2 (2014) as a launching pad, the fifth chapter turns to videogames and their...

People are the target: Urban destruction in the 21st century

Urban destruction in the 21st century has already turned out to be different from 20th century experience. Aerial bombardment, which destroyed so many cities in Europe and Asia during two world wars, was based on assumptions about how cities collapse, bringing down economies and regimes with them, and about the superiority of air power as the means of destruction. Both were flawed. In World War II, the destruction of cities was intended to shorten a conflict; in the 21st century, military tactics which concentrate the increased weight, firepower, and effectiveness of military units in urban battles on the ground actually prolong conflict. Evacuation and exile appear to be the main objective: depopulation lowers the human capital of countries and depresses their economies; moreover, the increased number of refugees can be turned into an instrument to exert leverage on other countries, destabilizing regions far removed from the war zone. Cities destroyed in world wars were rebuilt; cities destroyed in today’s urban battles, often in fragile, unstable states, may be left in ruins for years, to be replaced by new cities with a change of population. Urban destruction in the 21st century raises questions about how to make cities safer, and about urban relocation and reconstruction.

Urban Destruction and Redevelopment as Counterinsurgency: The Void, The Limbo and New Face of Sur

This commentary explores the relationship between counterinsurgency strategies, urban destruction, and redevelopment via their impacts and manifestations on urban space through an ethnographic case study in Sur, the old town of Diyarbakır. Sur has been home to working class, marginalized and low-income Kurdish families, thousands of which have been displaced during and after the urban warfare between the Turkish state and the PKK in 2015-16. I discuss how urban destruction and redevelopment are used as counterinsurgency strategies under the AKP regime to subjugate the Kurdish cities, which have been the center of collective resistance and grassroots opposition. My grounded conceptualization follows the physical fractions in Sur: The void focuses on flattened and emptied areas of Sur. The tools for emptying involve curfews, deliberate destruction of the built environment, depopulation of the area, urgent expropriations, and the extension of horizontal and vertical visibility in the redevelopment process for security purposes. The limbo focuses on parts of Sur where all land and properties are urgently expropriated but not demolished yet and unveils the temporality of displacement as a constant threat for the residents. It also discusses the everyday life of the displaced people who still couldn’t be able to establish a stable life. Lastly, New Face focuses on the newly built environment in Sur and exposes the tools of state-led tourism/commercial gentrification; securitization; and depopulation during the neoliberal redevelopment process.

How to narrate urbicides? Lidija Ginzburg’s and Miron Białoszewski’s portrayals of urban destruction

Cities are relationally produced social spaces and in constant flux due to the ever-changing everyday spatial practices that produce and condition them. At the same time, they can become concepts abstracted into symbolic, monolithic ideas, pawns in political or historiographic narratives. Consequently, their death or survival in states of exception can become a substitute for the victorious or unsuccessful struggle for certain values or political orders. In this article, I explore how such symbolic connotations of death or survival of a city relate to the concrete experience of losing personal urban spaces and communities and how this interrelation can be represented in literature. In two case studies, Lidija Ginzburg’s Notes from the Blockade (1984) and Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1970), I show how literary texts have the potential to turn away from an abstracting view on cities and how they show the complexity of urban life in a state of exception. Consequently, I demonstrate how Ginzburg’s and Białoszewski’s texts narrate the death of a city not as the death of a specific concept, but as an irreversible loss of concrete urban spaces and practices, bringing to the fore the relational aspect of urban space and its decay. Implying such a relational understanding of urban space, these texts constitute apt representations of urbicides – a term which also presupposes the Lefebvrean notion of space being a relational product of building fabric, spatial practice and symbolic spatial attributions. The article thus shows how both Ginzburg’s and Białoszewski’s texts, through their specific perspectivization and narrative structure, subvert the institutional, abstracting memory discourses about the events they address by focusing on the concrete, subjective experience of spatial alienation during the Blockade of Leningrad and the Warsaw Uprising.

Columbia / New York: The Ruins of the Civil War

This essay explores the political aesthetics of visual and textual representations of ruins following episodes of urban destruction during the Civil War. Although ruins were long held to be lacking in the nineteenth-century US landscape—and their absence deemed a sign of America’s newness—ruins were ubiquitous throughout the nation, in particular in its growing urban centres. These antebellum ruins spoke to America’s uncanny historicity, spelling out its premature growth as well as the risk of its untimely extinction. Their presence, however transient, thus provided Americans with a language to make sense of the devastation caused by the Civil War. The essay then turns to two instances of urban destruction: the burning of Columbia, SC, in February 1865 and the New York City draft riots of July 1863. Their representation in the periodical press, as well as in personal and literary accounts, archives the destructiveness of the war even as it shapes its collective memory. While the ashes of Columbia became a climactic episode in the narrative of the Lost Cause, the burning of New York City indexed the problematic memorialization of antistate and anti-Black violence.

The Problem of Densification of Large-Panel Housing Estates upon the Example of Cracow

The paper focuses on the phenomenon of intense, uncontrolled densification of large-panel housing estates in Poland. Despite the fact that such housing estates as a legacy of the Modernist concept of segregation of functions are often burdened with problems, they still have considerable potential, which results predominantly from their urban advantages, such as functional and spatial logic, large amounts of open public space, and abundance of greenery. Unfortunately, this potential is being destroyed by introducing new buildings, ignoring the existing urban layout of the housing estate along with its original compositional assumptions. This type of densification results from—without limitations—the pressure exerted by developers in the free-market economy, and it often leads to problems such as the devastation of urban layouts of these housing estates, breaking the continuity of public spaces, appropriation of green areas, strengthening of monofunctionality, etc. This problem is becoming noticeable in the scientific debate, although it is still difficult to obtain reliable data illustrating the densifications of such housing estates. The goal of this paper is to present the scales and character of such densifications of the large-panel housing estates, which pose a threat of devastation of their urban layouts often considered as urban heritage. The paper proposes a method of a quantitative analysis of the housing estates with reference to the increase in the built-up area and a qualitative analysis of the character of development with reference to its distribution. This method comprises a sequence of subsequent steps with relevant criteria. In the results, it demonstrates the scale of the problem, which in many cases is already big and still growing. The resultant threat of devastation of the urban layout and its consequences are presented upon selected examples of housing estates in Cracow, Poland. This paper is a voice in a discussion devoted to the current status, but most of all to the future of large-panel housing estates, particularly in terms of their protection as valuable achievements of urban planning of the second half of the 20th century, and to stopping unfavorable tendencies of urban destruction.

The Long-Run Impact of the 1968 Washington, DC Civil Disturbance

This paper studies the urban development impacts of the civil disturbances that took place in Washington, DC following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. We collect novel archival data that allow us to compare lots destroyed during the disturbances to neighboring properties on the same block. Though these lots exhibit no ex ante differences, destruction in 1968 led to large and persistent disinvestment. Destroyed properties were more likely to remain empty for 30 years and remain 20 percent less capital dense today. This finding, which contrasts with rapid rebuilding that has occurred after urban destruction in other historic episodes, highlights the stigmatization that resulted and the challenges that city leaders faced in taking on the redevelopment effort themselves.

The Destruction of Amsterdam

Abstract This article examines representations of urban destruction and of rising waters in Pieter Boskma’s Tsunami in de Amstel (2016) and in Guido van Driel’s De ondergang van Amsterdam (2007). It foregrounds the ways in which these texts reflect productively on visualisations and narrative frames of catastrophe, and how they propose alternative temporalities (in the case of Boskma) and alternative visual perspectives (in van Driel) for imagining possible urban end-times. At the background of this article is an increased tendency in ecocritical approaches to read representations of destructive climate change (in prose literature, in particular) in terms of their implications for understanding real-world radical climatological and environmental change. Such perspectives are complemented here with an examination of allegorical readings of flood in a poetry collection and graphic novel.

Antimicrobial and iNOS inhibitory activities of the endophytic fungi isolated from the mangrove plant Acanthus ilicifolius var. xiamenensis

BackgroundAcanthus ilicifolius var. xiamenensis (Acanthaceae) is an old world mangrove species and has long been used as a folk remedy for treating various ailments in traditional medicine. The nature source of A. ilicifolius var. xiamenensis is now in short supply because of the urban development and habitat destruction. To better utilize this resource, biodiversity and bioactivity of endophytic fungi isolated from A. ilicifolius var. xiamenensis were investigated.ResultsA total of 168 fungal isolates were cultured from leaves and stems of the mangrove plant collected in January (winter) and July (summer) 2014 at Kinmen County, Taiwan. Spent culture extract of 28 isolates were found to have bioactivities against one of the following pathogenic microorganisms: the bacteria Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus (Gram-positive) and Escherichia coli (Gram-negative) and the fungi Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans. These positive extracts were mostly active against the Gram-positive bacteria and C. albicans. Corynespora cassiicola NTOU4889 and Xylaria sp. NTOU4900 inhibited growth of all 3 test bacteria whereas Phellinus noxius NTOU4917 inhibited both test fungi. A further anti-inflammatory study of culture extracts of these 28 isolates revealed that extracts with a high iNOS inhibition caused a low viability of cells, and those with a low iNOS inhibition had a high cell viability. Three extracts showed low cytotoxicity (i.e. > 100% cell viability) and high iNOS inhibition (< 15% of NO production) of cells and they were Phoma sp. 2 NTOU4338, Nodulisporium sp. NTOU4868 and Guignardia sp. NTOU4871.ConclusionThese results indicate that the endophytic fungi associated with A. ilicifolius var. xiamenensis can be a potential source of novel natural active substance.

Tradition of Demolition: Architecture of Terror—Urban Destruction as a Political Message, or How the Destruction of the Ottoman Heritage in Early Modern Serbia

The revised Serbian history introduced by the mainstream Western scholars and media in the early 1990s developed the trope of "Serbian nationalist expansionism," which was responsible for most of the Balkan problems since the Ottoman departure in the early 20th century. The evidence of Serbian expansionism over the non-Serbian, predominantly Muslim territories was sought in the assertion of deliberately targeted Ottoman/Islamic architectural heritage in all territories they attempted to conquer. This article, following the summative timeline analysis of the changing fortunes of Belgrade's architecture between 1521 and 1919, challenges this view. The article argues that most of damage done to the Ottoman/Islamic heritage in the early modern period of the Serbian nation state (1804–1914) was through neglect of the inherited ruins from the period when the Serbs did not exercise influence over the process of urban destruction. It asserts that the occidentalization of Belgrade coincided with "the age of capital," in Hobsbawm's sense, following the struggles for liberation, which could arguably be seen as part of the great European "age of revolution." The article juxtaposes modern mainstream Western interpretation of destruction of the Islamic heritage in Serbia with well-evidenced fate of the architectural heritage in situ.

Ecological landscape in narrative thought

Abstract This study explores how 16 individuals who grew up during the four-year long military siege of the city employ language to make sense of their everyday experiences in Sarajevo following the conclusion of the Bosnian War. Narrative inquiry is employed in this work to study sense-making, a psychological process based in language and situated in interaction with extant social and physical landscapes. During the study, participants wrote responses across the three narrative contexts (1) the prewar, (2) the acute war, and (3) the postwar. Data analyses examine how participants enact ecological landscape in narrative construction through varied use of prepositions across the three narrative contexts. Significantly higher use of prepositions in the acute war narrative context indicates that growing up amidst urban destruction gives rise to thought processes that draw on spatial and temporal relations in order to make sense of radical environmental changes in the landscape of war.

Urban Catastrophe and Sheltered Salvation

The Swedish civil defence organizations have a long tradition of balancing their messages to the public through diverse media use. Over the course of the early Cold War, however, the political and technical circumstances of the civil defence organizations changed, rendering old methods from the 1930s obsolete. To keep their relevance, the narratives of the civil defence organizations had to be carefully remodelled in accordance with the current situation, obscuring some facts while stressing others more clearly. By operationalizing the concept of media system, this article examines how the Swedish civil defence organizations used the media, broadly defined, to deal with the two main narratives that their practical work was based upon: urban destruction as war unfolds, and the safety of air-raid shelters. The article shows how these narratives were constructed and connected between various media, but also their changing and dynamic character over time. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, the narrative of urban destruction changed from a concrete to an abstract mediation, while the narrative of sheltered salvation took an opposite direction.

Haunted Infrastructure: Religious Ruins and Urban Obstruction in Vietnam

AbstractThis essay examines encounters between urban infrastructure and the spirit world, or what I am calling “haunted infrastructure.” It does so through the case study of an historic pagoda in Vinh City, Vietnam, that was destroyed by US aerial bombing in 1968, leaving only the charred front gate standing. As one of the last visible ruins of war that mark a history of imperial violence to the landscape, the pagoda's remains have been designated a site worthy of remembrance and preservation as architectural heritage. For urban residents, this symbolic space of urban destruction—and subsequent myth‐making—has remained one of the most affect‐laden places in the city and the center of renewed religious practices through the spontaneous reconstruction of the pagoda and its altars. In the essay, I trace the dynamic social life of Diệc Pagoda—co‐constituted by spirits, legends, and practitioners—as it abetted and disrupted colonial, socialist, and market‐oriented urban development. Drawing on Edensor's () notion of the productive capacity of the ruin to contest state power, I argue that religious ruins, as animated materiality that channel collective energies, have emerged as powerful sites to protest the encroachment of socialist development in and through the ghosts that inhabit them. While contemporary practices at Diệc Pagoda speak to religious diversification across urban Vietnam, they do so through obstructing, rather than enabling state projects of modernization. Haunted infrastructures and their attenuating myths thus reveal deep‐seated ambivalences about the postcolonial state and the specter of foreignness in the city. [Ruins; Urbanization; Infrastructure; Socialism; Urban Heritage; Religiosity; Ghosts]

Awakening in ruins: The virtual spectacle of the end of the city in video games

Abstract With reference to Walter Benjamin’s work on nineteenth-century Paris, and Debord’s work on the spectacle, this article argues that the depiction of ruined cities in video games – as virtual ruins of the present – simultaneously reproduces the empty novelty of the commodity (the phantasmagoria of progress-oriented civilization), and offers a vision of failed progress through counter-spectacle. One means of understanding Benjamin’s dreamworld of modernity is through ruins and rubble – not only as material remnants, but in other visual or artistic forms that might reveal the illusion of progress as a fallacy, particularly in contrast to an urban-focused commodity capitalism. With an emphasis on Fallout 3, Hellgate: London and The Last of Us, and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series this article argues that, if cities can be read as dreamworlds, and films, art and ruination as the means for awakening, then urban destruction in the virtual sphere can provide a counter to the collective dream of eternal progress.

Detecting urban destruction in Syria: A Landsat-based approach

The Syria conflict is characterized by ongoing human rights violations, a disregard for international law, and little fear of accountability. The Syrian government has repeatedly violated international law by employing punitive barrel-bomb and missile attacks and demolitions of neighborhoods accused of supporting opposition forces. Documentation efforts using high-resolution satellites have fallen short in this widespread and long-running conflict, providing poor precision for when attacks take place and reducing their evidential strength in International Courts. By capitalizing on the Landsat constellation's systematic observations and historic archive, we present an approach that examines affected areas as little as every eight days to identify when urban buildings are destroyed. Using a pre-conflict baseline of six years, we model the daily expected surface reflectance for every urban pixel in Aleppo and Damascus and compare pixels recorded during the first year of the conflict with this expected value. Leveraging high-resolution satellite documentation efforts, we create a composite band sensitive to urban destruction. This approach is accurate within 74% of the ground-reference dataset, providing the international community way forward to monitor and document urban destruction in arid environments.

VertVersusVerre: Vegetal Violence in Huysmans'sEn Rade

In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1887 novel En rade , Jacques Marles and his wife Louise, beset by financial troubles, flee Paris to find safe harbour in a dilapidated rural chateau. At first glance, this country setting seems to display all the stereotypical features of pastoral fantasy; however, Huysmans uses implicit urban rhetoric and imagery to create a wry subversion of the natural idyll. The comforts of nature are denied to the male subject as the countryside is stripped of its promise of escapism. This article examines, firstly, Huysmans’s use of signifiers of urban unrest to turn nature’s exuberance into a corollary for human, revolutionary violence. Secondly, it focuses specifically on glass and glass-breaking at the hands of an aggressive Mother Nature, evoking memories of urban destruction and Parisian civil strife. The association of nature with violence culminates in the invasion of the chateau and its looking glasses by green, the colour of nature, forcing this distressing natural world between man and his own narcissistic reflection. Huysmans reveals that the natural world is no more an ally than the unruly urban masses, and confronts the reader with the inexorable violence of vegetation.

Traversing the fantasies of urban destruction: Ruin gazing in Varosha

This paper explores the relationship between the imagination of urban destruction and a personal experience of a particular urban ruin: the former resort town of Varosha in Cyprus, abandoned since 1974. I draw out the connections between my experience of Varosha's ruined spaces and three imaginative tropes that emerged out of and influenced that experience: first, the fantasy of urban annihilation (or urbicide), an enduring trope of apocalyptic cinema and actualized in modern aerial warfare; second, the fantasy of being the first/last witness in a post-apocalyptic ruined world; and, third, the fantasy of disanthropy, or the imagination of the world as post-human. The result is to open up a space of dialogue between the experience of being in urban ruins, the contested histories of those ruins and the imagination of urban destruction in order to address the wider questions of how large-scale ruins might be remembered and reconstituted in ways that promote inclusivity, hold together contradictions and maintain the hope of healing.