“Si la calle termina privilegiando al automóvil por sobre el peatón, la calle se muere y allí comienza el fin de la ciudad” (MARCOS,2016, p.2).

The United Nations signalized this is the century of the cities, given that the majority of the world’s population (3.980 million people) lives in them and that cities have reached such a leading role that, together with States and great world corporations, they have become the most important actors in a global level. However, paradoxically, they have never been destroyed in such a massive and selective manner, and in a great diversity of forms and situations that can be understood within the concept of “urbicide” (CARRIÓN, 2012, 2017).

With the concept of Urbicide, one attempts to understand urban processes in a different fashion - that is, by generating a change of method, shifting emphasis from how the city is produced to how it is destroyed, and from memory to oblivion. It makes a case for understanding the city focusing on the causes for its destruction, showing critically how hope of a new urban reality can be found within the prevailing model of city, restoring the (utopic) sense of good place to the city.

Urbicide is formed by two words: “urbs”, which is city, and “cide”, meaning death - hence, the death of the city. Not a natural deceasing or a general homicide, though, but truly a murder. Urbicide is the liturgical murder of the city, a premeditated and ordered one, with an explicit form. It is the result of actions that wipe out systems of common life’s meaningful places (squares, monuments, libraries - the agora), ravage the city’s material basis (infrastructure, services - the “urbs”), exterminate society and citizenship (the civitas), and annihilate institutional marks of the government (privatization, deregulation, centralization - the “polis”). This type of murder arises in diverse situations fitting into three types: natural, anthropic, and symbolic.

• Urbicide might arise from aggression from nature, which is most often produced by the city itself, such as: hurricanes (Quebec, Canada; Piura, Peru), fires (Valparaiso, Chile; Guayaquil, Ecuador), earthquakes (Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Osaka, Japan), eruptions (Antigua, Guatemala; Armero, Colombia), and droughts (Cape Town, South Africa; El Alto, Bolivia). Most of these phenomena are related to climate change, cases in which the city is simultaneously the cause (victimizer), is the space suffering most of the effects (victim), and besides is the space that should be converted into the solution (prevention). That means cities are not merely passive victims of such facts, but part of their explanation and exits. Hence, current definitions of “resilient cities” or “climate adaptation” do not approach the causes of the problems, but only seek to accommodate the city to a problem supposed natural, not making cities change their ecological footprint (indicator for ecological impact), but adjust to it, producing more problems. New York City has a 900.000 square kilometers footprint, three times the surface of Ecuador. Is it viable, then, to ask this city to be resilient or adaptable, or to ask it to Chicago, Guangzhou, Berlin, Seoul, or Tokyo? Would it not be better to ask for a change in their highly energy-consumptive and waste-productive model of urban development? Instead of proposing that the Global South cities be resilient or adaptable, why do we not face the discussion of the cities in the Global North?

• Urbicide can also be the result of entirely anthropic reasons, such as military conflagrations (Bagdad, Iraq; Aleppo, Syria), terrorism (Lima, Peru; New York, USA), common violence (Caracas, Venezuela; San Pedro Sula, Honduras), or drug-dealing (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Medellin, Colombia). Additionally, it can stem from the embedment of market logic in tourism (Venice, Italy; Barcelona, Spain), gentrification (London, England; Santiago, Chile), closed neighborhoods (Buenos Aires, Argentina; San Paolo, Brazil), centrality of automobiles (Miami, EUA; Lima, Peru), and contempt for the city’s self-government facing the centralization and privatization that eliminate urban planning, conceived as an urbanism of projects, that stimulates real estate businesses.

• A third modality of urbicide comes from symbolic constructions or imaginaries. In Latin America, the greatest imaginary in cities is fear (SILVA, 2004) converted in an urbanistic principle that liquidates the public space (agoraphobia), producing closed or walled urbanization (CALDEIRA, 2007) and the loss of communitarian life. It is additionally found in the politics of naming, a powerful urbicide instrument in two ways: on the one hand, by changing a city’s name, one kills the past and marks a new possession or domain. That is the case of Leningrad and Stalingrad, in the old URSS, and the foundation of American cities where the Spanish name comes before the original, such as San Francisco de Quito or Santa Fe de Bogota. Within the naming of public spaces, one ultimately seeks to implement an official history of the existing reality - the absence of female or indigenous names is evident in that sense, as is the authoritarian imposition of names belonging to military staff or conquerors. Sadik-Khan said in New York, “If you can change the street, you can change the world” (GAETE, 2016, p.4). In Spain, street and square names were “castillianized” or “frenchized” from 1939 on. A reversal processes started with, for instance, 51 Valencian stress and 52 in Madrid recently modifying their names to reconcile memory and history. In Barcelona, street names now begin to be feminized.

Quito’s historical center, first place in the list of “World Heritage Sites” since 1978, dies from its success as it is emptied of society: in the last ten years, an annual population growth rate of -2,5% has brought a noticeable loss in its time of existence, fully functioning from 8a.m. to 8p.m., and a ghost city in thee rest of the time. That means Quito’s historical center loses time, space, and society.

Xativa, in Spain, is another case to be analyzed. In 1707, Phillip V ordained “to ruin it and extinguish its memory” by burning the city, irrigating salt to its supply areas and changing its name to “Colonia Nueva de San Felipe”. But history resists through a painting of Felipe V in the Museu de l’Almodí in Xativa, put upside down as an act of repudiation, and converted in a badge for the city and for the Valencian progressive and nationalist movements, so that memory is not lost. Franco also wanted its name to be Játiva, in Castillan, but its inhabitants keep it Xàtiva, in Valencian.

Detroit, a symbol of American industrial power and the American Dream, is econ­omically broken and emptied of economic activities and population. Once called “motor city” for moving the USA and being the mecca of the automobilist industry, the city starts dying due to a global change in the production logic, that made it inefficient to have all chains of production cycle concentrated in one space. The imposed assembly approaching production and consumption places, seeks to improve competitivity in a global level.

Gentrification colonizes the places of memory in a city, expelling its physiognomy and the historically-constituted ways of life in order to kill its previous daily life. As Jacobs (2013) said, the automobile monopolizes the public space and terminates the city by corroding parks, sidewalks, buildings, and by boosting contamination. Uncontrollable tourism, previously considered an industry without chimneys, radically changes the daily functioning of a city. Urban violence reduces time, space, and citizenship in cities: one cannot go out at certain hours of the day, visit certain neighborhoods, and the unknown is seen as potentially aggressive. Patrimony is deteriorated by capital’s voracity and conservationist policies, and forgetfulness settles in.

Definitely, urbicide is an ordinary reality in the current cities, one that conduces to a memory without history; but as memory is a part of the conflict, one must fight against forgetfulness, the deterioration of daily life, and against the destruction of the city’s symbolic and material basis. The right to city derives from the need to recover history so that the memory of destruction serves to preventing its repetition, and to allow the settlement of a citizen urbanism. For such, forgetfulness must be banished in favor of the construction of a citizen memory, proper to the city’s self-government (polis).

REFERENCES

CALDEIRA, T. Ciudad de muros. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, 2007.

CARRIÓN, F. Urbicidio: la violencia urbana, Diario Hoy, 2012. Disponible en: <https://works.bepress.com/fernando_carrion/522/>. Acceso en: 10 nov. 2017.

CARRIÓN, F. Urbicidio o la producción del olvido. In: SALCEDO, R.F.B.; BENINCASA, V. (Org.). Questòes contemporáneas: patrimònio arquitetónico e urbano. Bauru: Canal 6, 2017. p.71-88. Disponible en: <http://works.bepress.com/fernando_carrion/719/>. Acceso en: 23 enero, 2018.

GAETE, C.M. La estrategia de Janette Sadik-Khan, ex comisionada de transporte de Nueva York, para humanizar las calles. Plataforma Urbana, marzo, 2016. Sección Urbanismo. Disponible en: <http://www.plataformaurbana.cl/archive/2016/03/13/la-estrategia-de-janette-sadik-khan-ex-comisionada-de-transporte-de-nueva-york-para-humanizar-las-calles/>. Acceso en: 23 enero, 2018.

JACOBS, J. Muerte y vida de las grandes ciudades. Madrid: Capitán Swing, 2013.

MARCOS, M. Jane Jacobs y la humanización de la ciudad. TECNNE, mayo, 2016. Disponible en: <http://tecnne.com/urbanismo/jane-jacobs-y-la-humanizacion-de-la-ciudad/>. Acceso en: 23 enero, 2018.

SILVA, A. Imaginarios Urbanos: hacia el desarrollo de un urbanismo desde los ciudadanos. Bogotá: Convenio Andrés Bello; Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2004.

NOTES