Brutal Urbanism

Monu Magazine has released their 5th issue - Brutal Urbanism: Violence and Upheaval in the City, with all of the articles posted online in PDF's. Brutalism is something that has always been a part of the urban environment, from the birth of the city centuries and centuries ago, which is traced in a fascinating timeline by UAS (a design and research studio at the University of Kansas). It's development up through today is evident in the structural manifestation of brutality, conflict as a main building block in the urban DNA of the city; brutal urbanism as a systemic evolution of mankind; the city as brutal sublime. Loïc Wacquant examines the integrity of the nation-state challenged by a self-perpetual paradigm of urban disorder, collective violence, ethnoracial conflict; polities governed by an institutional brutalism that exists at the heart of the world's advanced societies.


Another article written by Lukas Feireiss looks at the visible and non-visible lines of the city, the various architectural confinements that make up in part both the obvious and subversive fabric of an urban environment, and how a "socio-spatial militarization of the city naturally generates a condition of upheaval." Eyal Weizman further indicts architects and planners as "war criminals" and draws upon the very definitions of international humanitarian law as the ultimate basis for architectural critique. He argues that "urbicide" was not defined by the bombing campaigns in Bosnia or the military destruction of infrastructure and monuments where architects played a role in assisting the military, but began in the early stages of urban renewal, and the "hygenic" regeneration practices of American planning, like the agressive "cleaning up" of the Bronx, for example. Then, Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets offer a great history of Jerusalem, which has become "a labratory for the production of extreme spatial configurations, a condition that could be described by the notion of a 'conflict urbanisn'; [...] a city that always interwine with political agendas, [...] that changes physical form at an accelerated, almost daily fashion," where "processes of urban change, such as road planning, closures, construction of walls, fences, etc. that require year-long planning processes in Western cities can be implemented virtually overnight."

It's an excellent issue with lots of other great reads, so check it out.