“Cities at War” is a fully online and publicly accessible 16-week lecture series jointly organised by 16 scholars from war-torn cities on how conflicts have produced and re-produced their cities. As all of the lecturers are scholars who are directly affected by war, displaced and/or on the move, the lecture series offers a highly pertinent perspective: the embodied knowledge of scholars who have lived experience of their subject.
Much of urban research on cities at war discusses the effects of armed conflict on urban space and the militarisation of urban space in the same breath. While we acknowledge that similar urban forms may emerge and are interconnected (e.g. via technology), we do not think that the militarization of urban space in the Global North that often is a result of the “war on terrorism” or some iteration of it, is comparable with the experience of cities and its inhabitants that currently or have recently experience(d) war or armed conflict.
Focusing not on potential but actual physical destruction and ruination (Navaro 2009), we’ll first take account of the everyday life of a city at war (Fawaz et al 2012, Harb 2017), the practices and strategies of its inhabitants to cope with the present and make use of its memory.
Underlining, secondly, the emerging continuum between war and peace in many war/conflict cities perceivable as a “practice of continuously planning for war in times of peace” (Bou Akar 2018), we want to contribute to a better understanding of the practices of planning a city at war and their interplay with processes of reconstruction (Sharp 2023), displacement, commodification and musealization (Genç 2021). The increasingly blurred “division between war and peace” (Sharp/Kelegama 2025) is our focus when we examine specific cities at war.
A third cross-cutting theme is the erasure of knowledge, heritage sites and memory that accompanies war, both through physical destruction and the loss of archives and records, and through the violent nation-building often entailed in post-conflict rebuilding in the form of re-engineering cities and their histories.
The online lecture series “Cities at War” is jointly organised by the Beirut Urban Lab, the Diyarbakır Association for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets (DKVD), Rojava University and Off University. The series is hosted at the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Course Outline
- Session 1 – 15.10.2025
Introductions, Overview of the Program
Mona Fawaz, Julia Strutz, Oksana Zaporozhets
- Session 2 – 22.10.2025
Homs at the Age of Brutalism
Ammar Azzouz
- Session 3 – 29.10.2025
Architecture as Resistance: The Reconstruction of Gaza’s Urban Fabric after the Ongoing Genocide
Anoud Ali
- Session 4 – 05.11.2025
Kobanê — Between The Ashes of War and The Dawn of Reconstruction
Aras Hiso, Luqman Guldivê
- Session 5 – 12.11.2025
Urban Ruins and Resettlement: Governing Cities in Post-Conflict Ethiopia
Wudu Muluneh Yimer
- Session 6 – 19.11.2025
Justice in Post-War Reconstruction: The Social Sustainability of Neighbourhoods
Zena Asswad
- Session 7 – 26.11.2025
Emotional Landscapes of Ukrainian Cities in Times of War
Olena Kononenko, Oleksandra Nenko
- Session 8 – 03.12.2025
The Other War: Economic Occupation and Civic Resistance in Hadhramout
Shada Bokir
- Session 9 – 10.12.2025
Beyond the Golden Walls: Everyday Life, Memory, and Survival in Jaisalmer’s Borderlands
Naman Agrawal
- Session 10 – 17.12.2025
Water Practices in Conflict-Torn Damascus: Distressing Memories to Overlook or Coping Strategies for Climate Resilience
Sarah Husein
- Session 11 – 07.01.2026
Kharkiv is a Dream: Planning a Future During War
Viktoriia Grivina
- Session 12 – 14.01.2026
Diyarbakır/Suriçi: Conflict and Urbicide as the Erasure of Collective Memory
Nevin Soyukaya
- Session 13 – 21.01.2026
From Archiving to People-Centered, Heritage-Led Urban Recovery: The cases of Gaza and Nabatieh
Mariam Bazzi, Batoul Yassin
- Session 14 – 28.01.2026
Spatial Justice and Everyday Resilience: Navigating Post-Conflict Urbanism in Kabul
Aimal Formolly
- Session 15 – 04.02.2026
The Settler Colonial Blueprint: Antakya as a Post-Disaster Development Project
Erkân Gürsel
- Session 16 – 11.02.2026
Evaluation and Feedback