Lessons Unlearned: Urbicide, Complicity, and Architectural Pedagogy from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Palestine

Description

he terms urbicide and ethnic cleansing emerged from and were theorized in response to the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s. Despite the scale of destruction and brutality witnessed merely three decades ago, critical lessons regarding mechanisms of perpetration, Western complicity, and symbolic justice have been only partially retained in collective memory and largely marginalized in educational discourse. Within architectural education specifically, engagement with the Bosnian case has remained symbolic and unsystematic, limited to scattered case studies rather than systematic curriculum integration.This contribution examines Western architectural education's responses to urbicide in Bosnia and Palestine, tracing how these spaces of professional formation have (or have not) evolved over three decades in addressing state-sponsored urban destruction and ethnic cleansing. By drawing parallels between pedagogical approaches to these two contexts, the analysis interrogates what has changed, what has been forgotten, and what patterns of complicity or erasure persist within architectural training. The paper argues that architectural education's failure to systematically engage with urbicide as both historical precedent and ongoing practice reflects broader institutional tendencies to depoliticize spatial violence, thereby undermining the profession's capacity to recognize and resist its complicity in mechanisms of domination and destruction.

Period	23 Jun 2026
Held at	The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES)