As part of the EUniWell series of open lectures, on June 15, 2023, Professor Kostyantyn Mezentsev gave speech on the topic “Urbicide, everyday life and post-war reconstruction of cities” for representatives of member universities of the Alliance.
The lecture consisted of two parts. The first covered the change in everyday life during the war and how people make sense of what happened to them and their cities through individual experiences, traumas and fears. The second part focused on post-war expectations and possible ways of recovering cities through solving the problem of “difficult legacies” and transforming traumatized cities into welfare cities.
The lecturer considered the concept of urbicide, as a purposeful destruction of the created environment. It is noted that despite the variety of forms and concepts associated with urbicide, it has some common features, such as indiscriminateness, the simultaneous destruction of symbolic and everyday, familiar places, both physical structures and values, aimed at “killing” heterogeneous urbanism for the sake of itself. Even carefully planned, urbicide causes the reconfiguration of urban spaces in unexpected ways.
The recording of the lecture can be viewed at the link.
