In this guest post, Prof Mona Fawaz (Beirut Urban Lab at AUB, Lebanon), Dr Julia Strutz (Off University, Germany), and Dr Oksana Zaporozhets (Humboldt University Berlin, Germany) present the online lecture series “Cities at War” funded by a USF Seminar Series Award. A series of free and public online seminars starts on October 15th, 2025 and runs over 16 weeks until February 11, 2026.
War destroys cities, and with them, the knowledge they embody. Too often, research investigating cities at war disregards the harm incurred by scholarly communities and their eventual dispersion and even erasure. This online series approaches scholars, the context of their work, and the lives they endure with the effects of violence as an integral whole, hoping to provide a modest opportunity to express solidarity, maintain research, and contribute to rebuilding academic communities.
This Cities at War online lecture series provides a platform for academics affected by war to share their research on/in cities at war within a reflexive positionality. The series brings together 17 scholars, all of whom live in and/or have lived and were forcefully displaced from war-torn cities, and it invites them to present research about the multiple ways in which military conflicts and their aftermath have produced and re-produced their cities. All speakers responded to an open “Call for Contributions”, and they were selected on the basis of quality, representation, and diversity of fields. Together, their voices provide a highly pertinent perspective: the embodied knowledge of scholars who have lived experience of their subject.
Contributions to the lecture series respond to a loosely defined shared framework that encompasses notions of urbicide, or the destruction wrought by armed conflicts on urban space that it presents, distinguishing between these practices and the militarised security increasingly imposed on urban spaces. Despite similar and sometimes interconnected patterns and practices (e.g. via technology), there are sharp distinctions between the militarisation of urban spaces in the Global North that is often associated with the so-called “war on terrorism” or some iteration of it and the violence brought on cities and their inhabitants during the experiences of war or armed conflict.
Three cross-cutting themes organise the general organisation of the lecture series, which is compiled as a course offered with an option for credit. First, the lecture series approaches the study of cities at war by focusing on the actual physical destruction and ruination (Navaro 2009), taking account of everyday life in cities at war (Beirut Urban Lab 2024, Harb 2017) as well as inhabitants’ practices and strategies to cope with the present and forge memories. Second, the series contests the sharp separation between war and peace (Sharp/Kelegama 2025), showing instead how these forces penetrate each other in what Bou Akar (2018) has described as the “practice of continuously planning for war in times of peace”.
Representations will contribute to shaping a better understanding of the practices of planning a city at war and their interplay with processes of reconstruction (Sharp 2023), displacement, commodification, and museification (Genç 2021). A third theme is the erasure of knowledge, heritage sites, and memory that accompanies both war through physical destruction and the loss of archives and records, as well as its aftermath, through violent processes of reconstruction typically disguised as nation-building, which entail forms of re-engineering cities and their histories.
The first five lectures in the series will explore the weaponisation of architecture. The lectures eloquently reflect the two faces of reconstruction: on the one hand, a form of destruction, bordering collective punishment, and on the other, an act of resistance by taking, for example, the cities of Homs (Ammar Azzouz), Gaza (Anoud Ali), Kobanê (Aras Hiso and Luqman Guldivê), cities in the Amhara region of Ethiopia (Wudu Muluneh Yimer), and Aleppo (with Zena Asswad). The lecture series then examines the impacts of war on emotional landscapes in Ukrainian cities (Olena Kononenko and Oleksandra Nenko), natural resources and transport infrastructure in Hadhramaut (Shada Bokir), the tourism industry in Jaisalmer (Naman Agrawal), and water infrastructure in Damascus (Sarah Hussein), considering the role these infrastructures play in the daily lives of city dwellers. A third group of lectures will focus on the past and the future of cities at war, with future making in Kharkiv (Viktoriia Grivina), the erasure of collective memory in Diyarbakır (Nevin Soyukaya), heritage-led urban recovery in Gaza and Nabatieh (Mariam Bazzi and Batoul Yassin), and the potential of gamified co-design in post-conflict Kabul (Aimal Formolly). The lecture series closes with a shift in focus to post-earthquake Antakya (with Erkân Gürsel), where post-disaster recovery turns into an opportunity for demographic engineering and territorial acquisition.
The Cities at War seminar series opens on Wednesday, October 15th and runs over 16 weeks until mid-February. The series is fully online and publicly accessible. 3 ECTS credit points are awarded to all regular participants. It is co-organized by the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), a research collective pioneering the collective and interdisciplinary study of cities at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, the Department for Social Sciences HU Berlin, Department of Social Sciences (Germany) as the accrediting partner, Off University (Germany), a self-organization of scholars at risk, University of Rojava (Syria), and and Diyarbakır Association for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets (Turkey).
Following a round table of all contributors to the lecture series, contributions will be compiled and published with open access and online.