Urbicidal planning: Managing risk in “dangerous” cities

The term “urbicide” has been used to describe the physical and material destruction of cities, specifically as a means to annihilate the material foundations of heterogeneity. Yet the act of physical destruction often works in tandem with parallel practices of construction that seek to create alternative urban futures. In this paper, we argue that “urbicidal planning” is a recurring logic of planning practice even in cases that do not involve the wholesale destruction of infrastructure. Often, such planning rests on a socio-spatial discourse that targets specific racial, ethnic, or social groups and their corresponding geographies as threats to political and developmental goals. It is therefore a preventative logic of city-making that rests on the eradication of particular urban risks, motivated by the need to pacify or eliminate the present and future dangers of the city. Moreover, it is a preemptive form of eradication that is often dissociated across time and space. We demonstrate these arguments through two illustrative vignettes: the policies and practices of the French protectorate in Morocco in the early 20th century and those of foreign humanitarian and military actors in Haiti during the United Nations’ peacekeeping operation in the beginning of the 21st century.