Ideas - Why cities are targeted in wartime

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

“Urbicide” — the intentional killing of a city — is a common and brutal strategy of war, from the levelling of Mariupol, Ukraine to the destruction of Syrian cities. Armies destroy apartment buildings, theatres and bridges to destroy residents’ sense of home and belonging. But even in peacetime, urban planning can become part of a more subtle kind of war over who gets to call a city home. IDEAS explores how the “battle for home” shapes cities before, during, and after wartime.*This episode is part of our series, The Idea of Home, it originally aired on June 16, 2022.Guests in this podcast:Ammar Azzouz is an architectural critic and analyst at Arup, as well as a research associate at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria. Nasser Rabbat is a professor and the director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. He has published numerous articles and several books on topics ranging from Mamluk architecture to Antique Syria, 19th century Cairo, Orientalism, and urbicide.Marwa Al-Sabouni is a Syrian architect based in Homs and the author of The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria and Building for Hope: Towards an Architecture of Belonging.Hiba Bou Akar is an assistant professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She is the author of For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers.Nada Moumtaz is an assistant professor in the Department of Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She trained and worked as an architect in Beirut, Lebanon, and is the author of God's Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Residents clear away the remnants of their shattered homes. One of so many places across Ukraine decimated by the Russian invasion. Everything is destroyed.

says this man in the ruins of his kitchen. Urbicide, the intentional killing of a city. It's not only about the destruction of the tangible home of the people, but it's also destruction of the sense of home. A brutal tactic of wars both new and old. For weeks now, the citizens of Grozny have endured a storm of bombs and artillery, a bombardment intended to level the city. This is what the German Air Force has done to our beautiful London.

Isn't it time that the citizens of Berlin, too, should know this kind of horror? But even in peacetime, the built environment can become a battlefield for a subtler form of war. Geography, architecture, planning become the tool of conflict, much less bullets and cannons and snipers, etc. Ideas producer Pauline Holsworth brings us this documentary about the complex relationship between. between architecture, war, and peace. This is the fourth installment in our special series, The Idea of Home. And we begin in the Syrian city of Homs,

on the street where architect Amar Azouz once lived. It was a narrow street where we have buildings of four floors of each building, and there were a few shops on the ground floors. and I think in Homs there was a sense that everyone knew everyone so you almost know the story of every family living on that street so you definitely know at least the family name

the number of their children what do they do all of them the children and their parents do they work are they retired so there is a beautiful sense of community and the beautiful sense of belonging and I always say when I tell my friends about my life in exile, they say what it means to be exiled. I say it means that nobody knows

about your last name and nobody cares about it. And I think that in itself tells you about the life in Homs and in that street, because there was a sense that you are known and everyone knows everyone. Amar Azuse is an architect and writer now based in London. His forthcoming book is called Domicide, Architecture, War, and the Destruction of Home in Syria. So I come from the city of Homs, which is the third largest city in Syria after Aleppo and Damascus. And the city, since the start of the revolution in 2011, it turned into the icon of the revolution. And the city became to be known as the capital of the revolution. I spoke with him in November 2021.

10 years after the outbreak of war. At the time that you left Homs, what did the city look like and what was happening there then? So I left exactly on the 17th of November in 2011. So that's tomorrow will be 10 years. At that time, I was teaching at the School of Architecture at El Basse University. And tanks were already in the streets of Homs and snipers were already put on the tower blocks inside the city.

My journey to the university included walking by the tanks because the public transportation stopped from my neighborhood to the university. I also lost one of my architecture friends, one of the students at the School of Architecture, was killed in a peaceful demonstration. and I remember also one day when I was teaching at the School of Architecture there was an explosion in the building next to us and all the glass of our architecture studio was broken and we had to run with the students with all the staff members but it was already a divided city it was already

a city where fear emerged between people even at the university even at the School of Architecture the people who support the regime started reporting the people who support the revolution and reporting them meant like threatening their life and putting their life under pressure. So it was already a site of war, it was already a site of struggle when I left in 2011. And I do remember all the pain of like looking at the streets and looking at the city and looking at the faces of my family and my parents and looking at my bedroom. and I just wondered, like, how long this pain would last. Only by 2014, over half of the neighborhoods have been heavily destroyed,

whilst 25% of the city was partially destroyed, and now even years and years after the capturing of the city by the Syrian government, Almost all the ruins remain in ruins. So it's a city of ruins, it's a city of urban decay, and it's the city that it's synonymous by displacement and destruction. To understand what the destruction of home has meant in Homs, it's important to understand what kind of home the city used to be. And before Homs was synonymous with destruction, it wore other names.

This city is nicknamed that is the mother of the poor, because the living in this city has been very affordable, easygoing. I think there's this kind of tenderness in the city's nature. Marwa al-Sabuni is a Syrian architect and the author of The Battle for Home and Building for Hope. I spoke with her over Zoom from Hobbes, where she still lives. I just passed children who just finished exams and just collecting fruits to each other. They just, you know, climbing on the wall of a house, collecting fruits. It's just a very pleasant thing to see. And it's in the nature of people that it's open.

You wouldn't scold them or just, you know, accusing of trespassing or something. Just, you know, it's how generous and open. It's something in its nature. Homs is also known as the city of black stones. They used to be a belief that there's a god in Homs that was represented by the black stones. So it's very close to our hearts as people in Homs. And there's also a very famous architecture style inside Homs called the Abluck Architecture Style, which is alternating grows of black and white stones in the buildings.

It used to be seen in the old city of Homs. so in the historical buildings, streets, public spaces, mosques, churches. Like many cities, Homs was internally divided by class and religion, which made the few spaces where people from different backgrounds could come together all the more precious. Like the old city, where churches and mosques used to sit side by side, the call to prayer intermingling with church bells. Roman architecture rubbed shoulders with buildings from the Ottoman era.

This interwoven architecture and this urban fabric that was so compact and so blended in a very harmonious way, there are no differences between the Christian houses and the Muslim houses. You wouldn't be able to tell from where they come or to which sect they belong, also to which class. Amar Aziz cherishes his old school for the same reasons. Because there was a competition to enroll, it attracted students from all over the city. It was the first time, I think, for me and for many students to meet the diverse communities inside Homs that maybe without that school, we wouldn't have met each other otherwise. So we made people who were from the Sunni or Shiaa or Durzhi or Ismaili communities

and people who are Christians, for instance. And also it was mixed gender, as we say, like, places are made by the people who are inside them. So I think it was really the beauty of the people coming together for the first time at the age of 12 to meet people when you're celebrating something and they say, oh, we don't celebrate it and you ask them why and how. And we didn't know about all these things before. We didn't know about our differences and how wonderful it was to see that we are so different and we are so beautiful together. And many people wouldn't have had the chance to meet what we both between practice the others

and maybe they only know about the myths, the stories about these people and keep them at others without meeting them in real life. You study herbicide, which means the premeditated destruction of a city. Beyond the physical buildings themselves, what does herbicide attempt to destroy? I think one of the main marks of herbicide is to create a society that it's homogeneous, a society that is divined by the people in power, where all the people who oppose or people who have no place in the city should be kicked out. should be displaced, should be arrested or killed.

Herbicide has deep roots in myth and history, going all the way back to the biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Why is the omnipotent, omnipresent, just supreme, powerful God, why does he punish moral infractions with the destruction of the whole city? It's definitely not the fact that he is destroying the walls and the doors and the windows and God knows what are people. But the city, for all intents and purpose, is the most sophisticated social tool that we have developed to create a notion of connectivity. We are going back to the notion of citizen. I mean, just notice the word. We are going back to the notion

of being an active political agent in an environment that is very well defined, which is this city. So herbicide is not a challenge to our built environment. It's a challenge to our notion of how you could be an expressive free agent in an environment in which you be a belong to a larger group, a collectivity, if you want to or a collective, that is what the city is. So when God comes and destroys it, God is destroying the attempt of humanity to organize, and that's his punishment. My name is Nasser Rabat, and I am a professor and the director of the Agaqan program for Islamic architecture at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nasser Rabat is originally from Syria. When the revolution began in 2011, he was hopeful.

But the repression of these movements and the degree of violence made me feel the exact opposite of hope, despair, I would say. And that translated into an interest of destruction. He developed a class. on the history of herbicide. It examined the siege of Carthage, where the city was destroyed and the field sown was solved.

The destruction of indigenous civilizations in Latin America at the hands of the conquistadors, second World War bombing campaigns, and the bombardment of Middle Eastern cities in the 21st century. When you look at the history of history of Urbosian. What have been some of the most powerful motivators for the human destruction of

cities? You will laugh at that, but I think actually arrogance is one of them. I mean, what, if you want, joins together, Jenkinscan, Napoleon, Mussolini, Timurlang, and Bashar al-Assad is that they are arrogant as obese. And what is God, if not an arrogant creature when you think, about him. I mean, the God of the Scriptures, whether it is the God of the Jews or the Christians or the Muslims, you could see how God is developing into an extremely, extremely jealous God. At the beginning, it was, don't worship the other gods. But then at the end, it's like if you worship the other gods, I'm going to get fire and brimstone on you. That quality, in my opinion, is something that, of course, a lot of powerful men

and maybe actually a few powerful women in history have assumed and caused the destruction that you are after. But there is an element, it seems like, of revenge, sometimes, an herbicide of retribution. How do you understand the destruction of the German cities in the Second World War? Germany was defeated, was being defeated anyway. And therefore, it was very clear

that continuing, destroying these cities has no strategic value. You're not going to defeat them more than you already did by continuing to destroy their cities. But it was revenge. Revenge also plays a role in the destruction of Syrian cities. And it was vengeful not because if you want the rebel, destroyed something that the regime owned. But it was vengeful for something that takes me back to my earlier,

idea of arrogance. It's how dare you go against me. I'm going to punish you. So there are some maps showing that the neighborhoods in Homs have been totally destroyed and just like a few meters away from neighborhoods have been extremely protected. And I think there has been a lot of focus on the correlation between the neighborhoods, let's say, the rebel neighborhoods and the neighborhoods that have opposed the regime and the level of destruction. So if you look at the map of Homs and look at some of the neighborhoods, such as Baba Amr, which was one of the neighborhoods that witnessed enormous amount of protest and demonstrations, it's heavily destroyed. And at the same time, you can look at the neighborhoods that

supported the regime, such as Azhara or Ackramma, and you see the very low level of destruction there. So by looking at these maps of destruction, you can understand a story of the revolution. It's eerie what you said that there could be right next to each other, a neighborhood that has been significantly destroyed and then a neighborhood that is largely protected. Yeah, it's painful because at times where people are struggling to get their bread or to go to school, the neighborhood next to them would be living almost as an ordinary life. and it's just painful to understand how people from the same city would accept to see their siblings, their brothers and sisters being targeted and willfully having their buildings destroyed. The city of Hong Kong.

Combs began to fracture along class and sectarian lines, long before the war itself began. And Marwa al-Sabuni argues that architecture and urban planning actually played a role in its splintering. She traces that process back to the French occupation of Syria, which began in the 1920s. After the French policies of transforming the city of destroying this urban fabric by demolishing the neighborhoods by relocating buildings and monuments by assigning actually a French architect who has reshaped the Syrian cities from Damascus to Homs. His name is Michel Ecoschard and he has replant the city's for the sake of controlling actually the societies and just maintaining the French

authority in those cities because it was very difficult to them to penetrate that in them's area and to penetrate the societies. Part of Echoshard's strategy was to demolish dense, interwoven neighborhoods and replace them with new orderly neighborhoods to make the cities easier to control. Marwa al-Sabuni writes, In 1925, the French blew up an area of the old city of Damascus in order to replace its ancient organic network of streets

with a modern Cartesian plan. It didn't matter if the French style, buildings were appropriate or not, as long as they served the ruling residential and military interests. It was a new form of herbicide, reinvented for the colonial age. The idea of bringing civilization is something that has replaced the notion of the wrath of God. In most cases of destruction in history, it was always in the name of God. God is the one that told us to do that. But by the time of Napoleon, God is no longer a good excuse to we started looking for something else in Napoleon was the ultimate inventor of how France

is going to go in its colonial age and destroy huge swathes of Africa and Asia, the term that is a very significant term because it takes us back to the city, the mission civilizapris. It's the civilizational mission. This is what Napoleon said in his first colonial attempt, which was in 1798 landing in Egypt, he told the Egyptians, I'm coming back. to return your civilization to you. And this is the kind of propaganda that he was trying to propagate. Of course, in the process, he destroyed the whole western flank of the city of Cairo in order to prevent the Egyptians from revolting against him.

Even after Syria gained its independence from France in 1946, The reshaping of its cities continued. A reshaping Marwa al-Sabuni argues widened the divisions in Homs and made them easier to exploit. The decision was made that the city was a place where petrol refinery was placed. West of the city where the wind blown. So that meant constant pollution, manipulating and actually just sabotaging the environment and the weather. the economy of the city has changed the vocations of the city also, it's changed the whole

demographical scene in the city also changed because he had new neighborhoods created where people, instead of the organic way of creating a city, which meant that the newcomers to the city would be involved in the city's traditional means of production and they would live inside. The opposite planning happened, which meant that those people who were migrating from the countryside, they just lived on the fringes of the city, as we see in many global cities now. And they were housed in what become like their personal cocoons, a very ghettoized way. And this meant that the city just became different cities just juxtaposed next to each other. And the division actually started from there.

A decade of war has created a city much more divided and damaged one of the spaces where people could cross those divides, the old city. Marwa al-Sabuni and her family stayed in hams throughout the conflict. She vividly remembers the day when people were allowed to check on their homes and businesses in the old city. There was no, almost no sound. I mean, nobody was talking.

Just, you know, just a silent march. Just, you know, the grief, I think, and the fear and the shock. It's just something that you can sense those who are marching towards the city, anticipating the destruction, obviously, and anticipating the losing. I mean, many people,

people found nothing, literally nothing left. I don't know how to describe it in one word. I mean, it's something that was so surreal because some people, as I described in the book, were taking pictures of destruction. And some people were just looking for the most trivial things they could take with them, whether it's a broken picture frame or broken bicycle.

and just, you know, gathering this junk, which is what remains from their home and going back broken as much as their places. I spoke to Amar Azouz again in November 2025. Since the collapse of the Assad regime, he's been able to return to Homs twice. The return has been very hard. I think the biggest feeling is a sense of justice and a sense of joy

because also when I left the country, I was 23. I came without my parents, my parents still live in Homs. So it wasn't like many people who left with their families, for instance. So I had all the time this in-between space that I was almost living in the UK, but my mind was somewhere else or my brain was divided in two places. And now the return has been wonderful but at the same time it was very difficult

to witness the aftermath of the destruction, the mass destruction of the people and the country. So I returned twice this year and every visit has been harder than the other because the more you spend time there, the more you can see thrones, and the more you witness you know the pain that people have lived there and you can see that how the war has entered people's homes it's in people's bodies it's in their clothing it's

in their way of living it's in the way that they are piling food stock in case you know another war happens so people still live in this war situation war mindset but also it's been very painful to see friends who are returning to our own city and renting hotels or renting rooms because they have no place to return to. So I would say that returning to Homs has been the most wonderful thing that happened to me in the last decade and more. But at the same time, I feel so much pain and trauma from witnessing what happened there. And I think, you know, we live in a time where we need to take this.

sense of trauma and pain to try to find meaning and to translate it into something that can help us to pave the way forward. So when we first met and spoke, I think it was in November of 2021, what does the idea of home mean to you today, four years later? As to remember our conversation, I think like at that time, I always felt disoriented, disconnected, almost like lost in place or out of place, as Edward Saeed says. I think for me today, after returning to Syria, this year, I feel that home is everywhere and nowhere. And this is a sentence that I always was fond of, but I feel like now when I go to Syria, I feel an outsider, insider, and when I came to the UK, I feel an outsider insider. But in addition to all of these, you know, thinking about, like,

who am I, where am I from, where is my home, I still love that. the idea that I have two homes. I have two places. It's not like I'm half here, half there. I have a double place. I have a double home and that's just powerful. You're listening to our special series, The Idea of Home, which first aired in June 2022. is ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced

OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today. from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at specksavers.cavers.cairists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. It was the spring of 1988, northwestern Alabama. A preacher commits a sin, a deeply personal transgression. And from there, everything spirals out of control. The amount of damage this man did is incalculable. It's still damaging all of us. It still hurts. to think about it. From Revisionous History,

this is the Alabama murders. Listen to Revisionous History, the Alabama murders, anyway you get podcasts. We turn now from destruction to reconstruction, and from the heart of one broken city to the broken heart of another.

The Beirut city center was once home to a bustling marketplace. There's suks, a lot of, you know, small shops owned by very different kinds of people. It was the souk of the goldman, the carpenter's souk, rather than, say, a mall with like a big Zara or something like that. And it was very mixed in terms of income. In 1975, the Lebanese civil war began, a civil war that was also a regional war, even a global one, with myriad external players inflaming existing class and sectarian tensions inside Lebanon. For Fyreau,

For 15 years of Beirut into a Muslim west and a Christian east. That line ran through the city center. And so the city center became kind of a green line, which you think is really empty, but in fact it was not empty, because there was a whole economy of it, and there's a bunch of novels that talk about it. Of course, there's spies, there's sex workers, there's all of these militiamen.

So there's a whole other kind of life that existed, but that was not necessarily open to everyday people in some ways. Virtually hand-in-hand with the peace deal brokered to end the Civil War in 1990 came an ambitious plan to rebuild the city center, to construct a new chapter in its history. Reconstruction involved more than rebuilding and restoring destroyed buildings. It was really about reconciliation. It was about bringing that nation that was divided together.

And there was this idea that if you actually like just organize and create some order and beautify and reconstruct downtown Beirut that is between the Christian East and the Muslim West, somehow people will start like meeting each other and they will ignore animals. that developed during the war. Well, that doesn't, it's not that easy. And on top of it all, in 2020, part of the city center was damaged by a cataclysmic explosion in the port.

Another blow to a space that has been central to the question of who gets to call Beirut home. Ideas producer Pauline Holtzworth brings us this documentary about how the built environment creates the space for both conflict and healing. It's the fourth installment in our special series, The Idea of Home. Heba Bu Acker and Neda Mumtaz,

both attended architecture school in Beirut in the 1990s, surrounded by both optimism and fierce debate about the future of their city. In some ways, that was what I grew up with. I mean, I came to age or kind of intellectual age in some ways while the reconstruction of Beirut was happening. My name is Nedam Muttah, and I'm currently an assistant professor in the Department of Study of Religion and in Near and Middle Eastern civilizations at the University of Toronto. I'm an architect by training.

The discussion, especially in planning school, is about the future that you try to forecast, future that you try to manage for like a kind of a hopeful future or a better managed future, right? My name is Hiba Barker. I'm an assistant professor of urban planning at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. At first, many people who owned shops in Beirut City Center before the war were hopeful about reconstruction. Because they felt that part of what the reconstruction meant for them as well was that they had this shop there, that they can rebuild their life. livelihood on it. But that wasn't how reconstruction played out. What does the city center look like now? Very, very different. I think it has become much more homogeneous economically. I think a lot of people feel excluded from it because it's really a playground for the rich. I mean, you cannot

find almost a bodega kind of thing, you know, what you call here, a Depaner in Canada. But yeah, You can't really find these little shops because nobody can't afford to actually rent there. So these buildings in the city center that are now, you know, kind of more high-end restaurants or more luxury housing, how is it that they transferred ownership from their original owners before the war? Yeah, that was a big part of the project. The idea was to create this real estate holding company that expropriated. everybody and all the owners and gave them shares in the company instead of their buildings or apartments, et cetera. Basically, rights holders were dispossessed of their lands. So there was

lawsuits that were filed. The company eventually created these possibilities for what it calls recuperation, which means that if your building fulfills or your shopping, or whatever, certain conditions, you can actually not take the stock and recuperate the building. But of course, there were these drastic conditions about what you're supposed to do with it, including rebuilding within a very short time span,

which meant that if people didn't have the cash flow, if it was very difficult for them to do so. So in fact, the recuperation, even though it exists in the books, in fact, in practice, very few of these recuperation. operations happened, which meant that most people actually lost whatever they had in the city center. How would you say this reconstruction has affected who gets to call Beirut home? Yeah, I mean, I think that is a important question. And I also want to mention as well the fact that

all of this rhetoric also is very much marginalizes a lot of refugees who ask. actually call Beirut home, for example, and who are not Lebanese. So all of the national rhetoric of the reconstruction completely disregards Palestinian refugees who had been there for a long time, the Syrian workers who actually built the city center at the time, people who actually, yeah, they did call Beirut home for a long time in Lebanon as well. But of course, we're not imagined as part of the nationally imaginary. And there's also a lot of displaced people who had been more displaced and had lived in the city center and in Beirut itself as well in buildings that had been abandoned by their original inhabitants. So there's also that layer. And so these people were like

kind of sent back to their villages, even though they had lived in these buildings for over 20 years. And so there is this kind of a razor of reality and the reality of who actually is there towards this imagined kind of who the original Beirutis are, et cetera. While at the same time, the economic consequences of the project kind of displaced a lot of the working class that existed and who are Beirutis and they ended up also having to leave the city. So it's a really warped kind of project. Architect Amar Azuz says there's a danger the same story could play out in Syria. So there are projects in Damascus, for instance, where they propose. areas for the rich engaged communities with swimming pools and they feature some animation films with people having yoga or playing basketball or shopping in the most expensive shops

at the time when people are struggling to get their daily bread. So there is almost a dystopian imagination of what reconstruction could look like and instead of focusing on affordable housing and houses for everyone. There are these projects that they come with shiny skyscrapers and elitest visions for the rich and perhaps the foreign investors. Post-war Reconstructioners. in Beirut is also complicated by what Hebabubu Akar calls the logic of the war yet to come. There's always, even till now, there's always this constant, constant discussion in Lebanon

that there's like, is the war coming, there is a war, what do we do if the war happens, should we buy an apartment here? What if a war happens? Are we going to be like, had to like run away again because we're not from the same sectarian group, etc. So it's a constant discussion about like when is the next war happening. I mean, I don't think the civil war, for many people in Lebanon, who lived the civil war, has not ended. I was fascinated by even my own parents. Sometimes I would be driving and we would be passing certain kind of geography from Beirut going up to the mountains that has also witnessed a lot of battles. I will be like seeing, for example, lemon trees.

And they will be describing to me, this is where ex-person used to live in this house before it was destroyed in the Civil War. is where we used to go for walks before the Civil War. This is where we used to do this. So I don't think anything related to the Civil War is dead or anything. I think it just gets mutated or reprused in different ways. One example is the religious political organizations that dominate Lebanese politics. Many of the political parties that are still religious political organizations that are in power, are still like they mutated, but they are still the same parties that were fighting during the wars. And those groups continue to fight each other today, just using new tools. Planning becomes a tool in this kind of conflict in times of peace, where

geography, architecture, planning become the tool of conflict, much less bullets and cannons and snipers, etc. For example, changing how an area is zoned, so only villas or single-family homes can be built on hilltops. So many of these zoning changes seem very mundane, right? Like, for example, you can look at these zoning changes and say, yeah, it's a good move because you want to, like, preserve the top of the hills. Because these villa areas, what we call villa, like single family homes, are on the top of the hills. And you want to preserve the greener on the top of the hills. So you might not make much out of it because you say, oh, it's a protection. It's a protection zone.

But there was a different kind of protection at play. And the intention is partly to prevent, you know, a big apartment building from going up that might provide sort of posts for snipers in a future war. Yeah, so that, yeah, or like a large group of people being able to settle on top overuse. So they have more like a geographic advantage in the event of war or sniper position. Most of the time these are rumors, like no one actually can, like, trace them. But it doesn't matter because it actually ends up shaping the materiality of space, shaping how people think about their neighbors, the construction of the sectarian person as an other.

You don't want to live next to because in the event of war, you're going to be targeted, et cetera. So it ends up shaping the post-conflict geography of the city within an expectation that another yet round of conflict is going to happen. In a post-conflict city, memory and forgetting are highly charged. One dilemma post-conflict cities often face is the question of what to do with ruins. There has been many cities that decided to question the ruins of the aftermath of conflicts and wars. And in certain places, these ruins have been preserved as markers of the past.

as reminders to the future generations of what happened in the city. In Berlin, the dividing wall between the east and the west. After the fall of the wall, there was a desire to entirely remove the wall and the wall started to disappear from the landscape of the city. And years after that process, it was thought again that the wall is a reminder of what happened in this city. and it's also part of the story of Berlin and part of the identity and therefore every single piece that was left at the time was preserved and now if you go to the city to Berlin

you can go and see different pieces across the city and understand the story this is the same in Hiroshima with the Hiroshima dome that was preserved as a ruin the geography of ruins in Lebanon is very interesting because I mean there was a lot of debate about whether you You need to see a building that has been, like, punctured by bullets and bombarded to remember that there was a war and not to repeat it or whether it's fine. You don't have to. In Beirut, the debate over runes has also been shaped by the logic of the war yet to come.

Take a neighborhood called Haimadi, which is a mix of civil war era ruins and shiny new developments. The reason you will see everyone standing right now is not because only it's a memory of a civil war, but because of the war. it's actively part of an ongoing territorial war between the church and organizations that are affiliated to it and the Shi'a developers and its affiliated political parties that are basically like we're engaged in a race on who gets to buy the land first. When I asked one of the church offices about whether it's because there's an interest in keeping the ruins as a memory of war, et cetera, and it's like, no, no, no, that has nothing to do with that.

The land is important, but we don't have money. We spent all the money on purchasing the land. So we don't have more money now to, like, figure out what to do with the ruins to, like, turn them down and redevelop them. They want to keep the neighborhood Christian, which is interesting because that means you can ascribe a religion to land. Bosnia is another way in which they start ascribing religion to land there, and that's how ethnic cleansing also happened. In Haimadi, the Christian church was especially determined to, quote, keep the land Christian. Because some of the new buildings going up amidst the ruins, whereby Shia developed. The Shi'a developers were interested in, basically this is an extension now of the southern suburbs of Beirut, of Dahlia, were considered like mostly the stronghold of most famous religious political organization, Lebanon is Hezbollah. So it's considered like an area where most of the Shi'a families live. And so it's just a but I've got an extension of that area residentially, while the rest of the sectarian groups start seeing this kind of as encroachment as taking over as pushing them out.

that you spoke to actually kind of describe this almost like an invasion or that this is sort of real estate is how territorial conquest happens in times of peace. Yes. I mean, so many people see it as invasion as a takeover. It became like a big thing on TV. Like there was a period in which every day on TV like I think around 2011, most night show programs were about land sales in these areas and it's like accusing each other. You sold first. You're a traitor to your community because You sold your land first. And around this time, around 2011, there's actually a proposed law that would ban selling land to people outside of your religious community. So they were trying to ban land sales between Muslims and Christians in the name of coexistence, i.e. for Muslims and Christians to coexist in Lebanon, we need them to stop, we need basically the Muslims, mostly Shia, to stop buying land, to make it impossible for them to buy land from the Christians.

which is a twisted form of coexistence. I don't know what kind of a coexistence is being imagined there. That, thankfully, did not pass. But there were smaller informal policies that get implemented on a municipal level, like Al-Hadas, which is the area right next to Haimadim Chayil. First it was you cannot sell to a Muslim person. Now you cannot rent even. Sometimes it's announced, like Al-Hadaz had these posters at the time saying,

don't sell your land, don't sell your house. The municipality will not sign for you. But then there are other municipalities that are doing, it more like hush-hage secretive. They will ask you like five, six questions to know what kind of sectarian group probably your family or you are from. And then like, oh, sorry, it got sold or sorry, we can't rent it anymore. Oh, my son told me I'm going to, he's going to need the studio now. I can't give it to you. You mentioned a word that kept being used, Bia.

What does that word mean, and how does it sort of shape the sort of sectarian logic of Beirut today? So just to define that word, Bia basically refers is environment. And what I start feeling that is very dangerous about that word is the way it naturalizes, because you're using a word that refers to the environment. It's like the air you breathe or the water that's out there, you know. You stop questioning. And so you start saying, this person, bittu, ghe, I cannot live with her or him

because hers is a different Bia as a way in which they get away from thinking about the politics through which you construct the other as such an other that then you can take to the extreme that you, the extent that you do humanize them and you can wage a war against them or they can wager a war against you. And I thought about the question a lot. I was like, what is bothering you by the fact that they're like, oh, I just want to live in my own BIA, you know, like, what is it to me, you know? I mean, again, I'm not a believer in social engineering or in like,

environmental determinism. So what is it that was that was like bothering me? And I realized that it's not about, it's not about the choice, but it's about how a choice is constructed. There is a political production of a choice in which the sameness is constructed along sect. Sectarianism, which is something that when you think about, about the Middle East people like, oh, sectarism, they eat each other, they cannot like live with each other, they kill each other, et cetera. And I think what is important in shifting the discourse is how actually sectarianism is always being produced. In this case, I talk from an urban and geographic perspective, sectarism is being produced and reproduced every day through everyday practices, through policies, slow planning interventions.

And so the hopeful thing is that, yes, some of these lines became battle lines. But then it's also interesting to see that how these are not walls, that they are always negotiation and they're being always changed as the political alliance. change. And so in some ways, sectarianism is produced because it's benefits and there is money for many of these political parties that are in power, that are war militias that are still ruling us, for some reason we're unable to get rid of them. And because it is produced, then you can somehow consciously unproduce it. You can do something different in the future and produce a different kind of geography. Of course, you're not going to wake up one day and

you're like, people are going to have, make different choices. We just talked about how choice is very much politically choreographed, but somehow that you can educate, you can learn, you can choose different ways of living together that somehow can undo this violence along sectoral lines that has been shaping many neighborhoods in Beiru. think the process of coming to terms with these histories requires more than just, you know, a few buildings done differently. But I do think that living together also, yeah, I mean, it's very hard because I think like, okay, living together is important because, you know, like I remember meeting people who had never met a Muslim before. And you're like,

where do you live? And so they have all of these ideas about what a Muslim is in ways that if they had encountered Muslims in their daily lives, it would not be as scary or as possible to other that person. However, we all know that, you know, during partition in India, in Lebanon, and during the Civil War, like neighbors were killing their neighbors. So it is true that even people who are close to one another are kidding each other. So I don't know. It's kind of a difficult question to kind of answer because, yeah, I have no solution for you. But I really appreciate that nuance, and it is both things. It is that there is power and living together, but that living together is not the be-all and all of all social problems.

Yeah, definitely. Let me ask you finally, even just the word herbicide itself, and the idea of killing a city suggests that a city is a living organism. what do you think herbicide reveals about the nature of the city itself? That it is a living organism. Indeed. I mean, what else is the city? I mean, at least actually the ideal city, or if you want to function in city, despite the fact that many of us speak about alienation in the city

and despite the fact that a lot of us actually subscribe to the notion of modernity al-Baudelaire of like I'm an anonymous flaneur in the city and I can go around and no one recognizes me. But the city is providing you with the framework, with the infrastructure to go around. I mean, the idea of a flaneur, the idea of someone actually who goes into spaces in order to, like a bee,

you're going from one flower to the other and you are sucking up the nectar from one flower after the other. That nectar is the life of the city, is the institutions in the city that are there for you to fulfill your humanities. If you're religious, it is the churches,

the synagogues, and the mosques. And if you're like me, I mean, I don't know about you, but I'll tell you about myself. Every time that I land in a new city, the first thing I go to is the museum. I am a worshipper of museums because I'm a secular person. And our modern cities are competing with each other

to provide us with these temples and the park and the shops and the God knows what. I mean, the city is where human life is fulfilled. for better or for worse, by the way. I mean, some people would tell you being out in nature is much more fulfilling to our human nature. But for better or for worse, this is the machine that we came up with.

This is, if you want, the complex system that we came up with in order to live together. And it worked. On Ideas, you were listening to the fourth installment in our series, The Idea of Home. The series is produced by Pauline Holtzworth. Special thanks to Nahid Mustafa and Matthew Lazen Ryder for their help with this episode. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

The senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of Ideas is, is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayyed. to CBC.ca slash podcasts.