Dr Julia Strutz, Dr Oksana Zaporozhets, and Prof Mona Fawaz
Funding period: 15 October 2025 – 15 February 2026
Type of funding:
Seminar Series
Partner organisations: Off University (Germany), The Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), HU Berlin, Department of Social Sciences (Germany), University of Rojava (Syria), and Diyarbakır Association for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets (Turkey)
Events: online public seminar series “Cities at War” from October 2025 to February 2026
Lead organisers: Dr Julia Strutz (Off University), Dr Oksana Zaporozhets (Humboldt University Berlin), and Prof Mona Fawaz (Beirut Urban Lab at AUB)
Team members: Dr Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi
Contact: Dr. Julia Strutz
Abstract:
Cities at War is a fully online and publicly accessible 14-week lecture series jointly organized by scholars from war-torn cities on how military conflicts and their aftermath 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 militarization 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 that often is a result of the “war on terrorism” or some iteration of it is directly comparable to the experience of cities where inhabitants are experiencing/ have recently experienced war or armed conflict.
Focusing on actual physical destruction and ruination (Navaro 2009), we’ll first take account of the everyday life in a city at war (Fawaz et al. 2012, Harb 2017) and the practices and strategies of inhabitants to cope with the present and protect war-related memories. Second, recognizing 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 results of the lecture series will be compiled, discussed during a round table of all participating scholars, and published online.