Urbicide and Beyond: Narratives of Violence Against Cities in Twentieth-Century Europe

Talk by Gruia Bădescu, Research Fellow at Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, and 2024-2025 research-fellow at the Paris IAS, as part of the conference organized by the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences. 

Onsite event, open to the public.
Conference in English.

Presentation

This intervention traces the history of urban violence in twentieth-century Europe, focusing on the concept of urbicide and its use in various political and historical contexts. The talk explores the link between war, urban planning, and political ideologies in shaping urban spaces.

The conference aims to strengthen a pan-European view on the history of violence, one not predetermined by pigeon-holing research problems into specific ‘historical regions’ but driven by an interest in comparable historical phenomena which, while occurring in different places at different times, were essentially similar and therefore explicable. Such a view of European history does not consider phenomena as prisoners of ‘regions’ or ‘systems’, whether East and West, dictatorship and democracy, socialism, capitalism and colonialism, but as manifold variations of the path to and through modernity.

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