Agenda UV

On 19 June 2017 it will be 310 years since the burning of Xàtiva by the Bourbon army during the War of the Spanish Succession. The inhabitants of that Xàtiva, supportive to the Habsburgs, payed their “obstinate rebelliousness” with the exile or the death. Their city was besieged, burned and destroyed as an exemplary punishment ordered by King Philip V, whose portrait remains upside down in the local Museum of Fine Arts as an iconic vengeance. The burning turned the “socarrats” in a Valencian symbol of resistance, at the same time it related them, unfortunately, to the inhabitants of other cities of History that suffered a similar destiny: the punishment of urban extermination.

This congress aims to reflect on the concept of urbicide using as a start point the burning and extermination of Xàtiva, which will star in a special section during the sessions. Nevertheless, it also wants to go further, to analyse the causes and consequences of a violence that has been a part of humanity since the organisation of the first cities – a violence that aims to destroy and erase cities as a space for collective identity and coexistence.

That is why this encounter is open to every kind of communication proposals regarding the urbicide topic from a huge variety of fronts: theoretical and conceptual; philosophic and moral; symbolic and identity; historical and social; human and demographic; military and strategic; architectonic, patrimonial and touristic; political, cultural and economic. The congress is also interested in the representation of urbicide in the different artistic manifestations that have approached it: literature, cinema, painting, photography, picture story…

From biblical cities such as Sodom and Gomorra to the destroyed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including Troy, Sarajevo, Maastricht, Carthage, Guernica, Numantia, Berlin, Beirut, Saint Petersburg, Kigali..., the urbicide is a part of the past of humanity and the collective imaginary, in addition to being a reality nowadays for many citizens all around the world. This congress will try to analyse the ways, objectives and meanings of the destruction of cities and the management of the memory of that destruction. Always seeing the urbicide as the set of military, economic, cultural and / or political strategies that, deliberately, seek to destroy a city, its inhabitants and all they represent.