In this guest post, Dr. Himmat Zoubi and Dr. Areen Hawari (Mada al-Carmel) discuss the upcoming events on the destruction of Gaza through the lens of urbicide, funded by a 2025 USF Seminar Series Award. A series of hybrid events will unfold from January to June. Stay tuned for opportunities to engage.
This project was born of the urgent need to confront the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where, since October 2023, Israel has waged an unprecedented campaign of violence targeting Gazan lives, and systematically destroying and erasing the built environment, infrastructure, homes, and public spaces, and the very conditions for life itself (Abu Kareem, 2025). What is unfolding is a systematic dismantling of space, memory, and social infrastructure, a process that we understand as urbicide, deeply entwined with genocidal intent.
This spatial violence—urbicide—is not just the destruction of buildings; it is the erasure of a people’s ability to live and remain rooted in their land. It builds on a much older settler-colonial project in which the systematic destruction of the built environment and the dismantling of the social and cultural fabric have long served as key mechanisms of settler-colonial domination, reinforcing displacement and eradicating the political and social presence of Palestinians both physically and symbolically.
At the core of this project lies the destruction of Palestinian urbanity. Building on earlier research on Palestinian cities after 1948, we argue that urban space is far more than a container for people or infrastructure; it is a system of social relations, affective life, and political possibility. Studies have shown how Zionist settler colonialism since 1948 has worked to dismantle Palestinian urbanism through spatial erasure, bureaucratic control, and the reshaping of collective memory and daily life (Hassan, 2019; Zoubi, 2021; Monterescu, 2015; Yiftachel & Yacobi, 2003; Yacob, 2009). The erasure of Palestinian urbanity after 1948 marked a rupture not only in physical space but also in political history, depriving Palestinians of their modern urban identity and removing them from narratives of modernity itself. The destruction of Palestinian cities was a foundational act in the establishment of the settler-colonial regime and in marginalising the urban indigenous presence.
Gaza’s urbicide must be understood in this context. What is being targeted alongside the infrastructure is urban life as such, i.e. the right to exist, to relate, to narrate, to remember, and to imagine a future. The concept of urbicide—the deliberate destruction of urban environments and the social life they sustain (Coward, 2009)—helps us comprehend this violence. Following scholars such as Abaher El-Sakka (2023, 2024), Nurhan Abujidi (2014), Ghazi Falah (2003), Martin Coward (2009), Stephen Graham (2004), and Eyal Weizman (2024), we approach urbicide as a political strategy that operates through space, involving the demolition of homes, schools, hospitals, cultural centers, refugee camps, and public infrastructure – a political tool with which to ‘unmake’ life.
This project centres Palestinian voices, especially those expressing the lived experiences of survival and resistance. Our point of departure is Gaza, but our horizon stretches over the broader Palestinian and regional contexts. We recognise that the destruction of Palestinian urbanity did not start with the current assault and is not limited to Gaza. The loss of cities like Haifa, Jaffa, and Lydda after 1948, along with the erasure of their cultural, political, and social heritage, continues to have a lasting impact; the process of de-urbanisation was also one of de-politicisation and de-historicization (Zoubi, 2025).
Our seminar series asks: How does urbicide function as a strategy of domination? What does it mean to rebuild after total destruction, and who has the power to determine that process? Through a series of interdisciplinary conversations, we explore the political dimensions of destruction and reconstruction, moving beyond technocratic and humanitarian logics to explore more profound questions of justice, memory, and resistance.
Running from January to June 2026, the series will comprise five public seminars and two workshops. These events will gather together urban scholars, planners, architects, artists, and activists, particularly those working in or on Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and the wider Arab-speaking region. Hosted by Mada al-Carmel– The Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in partnership with the Israeli Studies Program at Birzeit University and other Palestinian civil society organisations, the series will feature both in-person and online formats to maximise accessibility and foster transnational dialogue.
The workshops will bring together early-career Palestinian scholars and encourage collaboration with more established researchers. These spaces are designed to facilitate connections across the fragmented Palestinian geography, challenge the rupturing of Palestinian intellectual life, and nurture intergenerational knowledge exchange.
We will explore themes such as urbicide as a settler-colonial tool; bureaucratic violence and spatial governance; the politics of post-war reconstruction; and community-led models of recovery and spatial justice. We will also draw comparative insights from other sites of urban destruction and rebuilding—Sarajevo, Homs, Beirut, and Nahr al-Barid—not to flatten differences, but to think relationally about solidarity, resistance, and spatial futures.
We are especially interested in how reconstruction, often framed as a humanitarian and apolitical task, can become another site of domination. Scholars such as Azzouz (2023) and Roy (2016) have shown that rebuilding efforts imposed from above and detached from local needs and memory risk reinforcing existing systems of control. In Gaza, reconstruction must not merely rebuild what was lost, but must centre the people’s own perspective in restoring the conditions of their lives, history, political agency, and aspirations.
This series is open to urbanists, researchers, students, and practitioners working on Palestine, settler colonialism, post-conflict reconstruction, and urban trauma. We also welcome artists, planners, youth organisers, and cultural workers whose practices engage with erasure, memory, and political imagination. While Gaza stands at the center of this initiative, the series seeks to contribute to broader urban studies debates about spatial violence, spatial politics, reconstruction, the political life of cities, and resistance.
The full programme of events will be published on the website of Mada al-Carmel, the Israeli Studies Program at Birzeit University, and the Urban Studies Foundation, and shared via social media. Some events will be open to the public, conducted in Arabic or English, with interpretation provided. We intend for this series to offer a critical and collaborative space for reflection, knowledge production, and imagining alternative political futures.
The seminar series benefits from the generous support of the Urban Studies Foundation, as part of its Seminar Series Awards program. We are grateful for this opportunity to build shared frameworks and challenge dominant narratives that erase Palestinian urban life.
Bibliography
Abu Kareem, Mansour. 2025. “Cultural Genocide in Gaza after October 7: The Urban Scene and Cultural and Educational Life” [الإبادة الثقافية في غزة بعد 7 أكتوبر: المشهد العمراني والحياة الثقافية والتعليمية]. In The Academia File in the Time of War on Gaza [ملف الأكاديميا في زمن الحرب على غزة], edited by Himmat Zoubi and Ali Mousa. Haifa: Mada al-Carmel.
Abujidi, Nurhan. 2014. Urbicide in Palestine: Spaces of Oppression and Resilience. Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics, 63. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
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Azzouz, Ammar. 2023. Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
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Kusiak, Joanna, and Ammar Azzouz. 2023. “Comparative Urbanism for Hope and Healing: Urbicide and the Dilemmas of Reconstruction in Post-War Syria and Poland.” Urban Studies 60 (14): 2901–2918. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231163978.
Monterescu, Daniel. 2015. Jaffa Shared and Shattered: Contrived Coexistence in Israel/Palestine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Weizman, Eyal. 2024. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso Books.
Yacobi, Haim. 2009. The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-Politics in a Mixed Community. London: Routledge.
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Zoubi, Himmat. 2021. “Transforming ‘New Haifa’ into an Israeli City: Spatial Planning as a Tool for Constructing Collective Sectarian Identity” [تحويل “حيفا الجديدة” إلى مدينة إسرائيلية: تصميم الحيّز كأداة لهندسة الهوية الجمعية الطائفية]. In The Palestinian City: Issues in Urban Transformations [المدينة الفلسطينية: قضايا في التحولات الحضرية], edited by Salim Tamari and Majdi Al-Malki. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies.
Zoubi, Himmat. 2025. “’48 Palestinian Creatives: Fostering Emancipation, Imagining Decolonialism.” Palestine/Israel Review 2 (1). https://doi.org/10.5325/pir.2.1.0006.