Domicide

Media reports describing the destruction of people's homes, for reasons ranging from ethnic persecution to the perceived need for a new airport or highway, are all too familiar. The planned destruction of homes affects millions of people globally; places destroyed range in scale from single dwellings to entire homelands. Domicide tells how and why the powerful destroy homes that happen to be in the way of corporate, political, bureaucratic, and strategic projects. Too frequently, this destruction is justified as being in the public interest.

The city of Homs, like so many places in Syria, has suffered mass destruction since the war began in 2011. So far, the architectural response to the crisis has focused on 'cultural heritage', ancient architecture, and the external displacement of refugees, often neglecting the everyday lives of Syrians and the buildings that make up their homes and communities. In Domicide, Ammar Azzouz uses the notion of the 'home' to address the destruction in cities like Homs, the displacement of Syrian people both externally and internally, and to explore how cities can be rebuilt without causing further damage to the communities that live there. Drawing on interviews with those working in the built environment professions, both inside and outside of Syria, but also Syrians from other backgrounds who have become 'architects' in their own way as they were forced to repair and rebuild their homes by themselves, Domicide offers fresh insight into the role of the architect during time of war, and explores how the future reconstruction of cities should mirror the wants and needs, the traditions and ways of living, of local communities. Focusing on Homs but offering a blueprint for other urban areas of conflict across Syria and the wider world, the book is essential reading for researchers in architecture, urban planning, heritage studies and conflict studies.

“One of the best accounts of the reality of gentrification and urban development in China . . . grounded with solid historical, ethnographic and legal evidence” (Urban Studies). In recent decades, the centuries-old city of Shanghai has been demolished and rebuilt into a gleaming megacity. With its world famous skyscrapers, it now ranks with New York and London as a hub of global finance. But that transformation has come at a grave human cost. In Shanghai Gone, Qin Shao applies the concept of domicide—the eradication of a home against the will of its dwellers—to the sweeping destruction of neighborhoods, families, and life patterns that made way for the new Shanghai. Shao gives voice to the holdouts and protesters who resisted domicide and demanded justice. She follows, among others, a reticent kindergarten teacher turned diehard petitioner; a descendant of gangsters and squatters who has become an amateur lawyer for evictees; and a Chinese Muslim who has struggled to recover his ancestral home in Xintiandi, an infamous site of gentrification dominated by a well-connected Hong Kong real estate tycoon. Highlighting the wrenching changes spawned by China’s reform era, Shao vividly portrays the corrupt and rapacious pursuit of growth and profit, the personal wreckage it has left behind, and the enduring human spirit it has unleashed.

Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue.

Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond.

Media reports describing the destruction of people's homes, for reasons ranging from ethnic persecution to the perceived need for a new airport or highway, are all too familiar. The planned destruction of homes affects millions of people globally; places destroyed range in scale from single dwellings to entire homelands. Domicide tells how and why the powerful destroy homes that happen to be in the way of corporate, political, and bureaucratic projects. Too frequently, this destruction is justified as being in the public interest. Douglas Porteous and Sandra Smith begin their analysis by examining just how important home is to human life and community. Using a multitude of case studies of displacement, they derive a theoretical framework that addresses the motives for, methods, and effects of domicide. Two case studies of resettlement resulting from hydro-electric power development in British Columbia are used to test this framework. Porteous and Smith assess the implications of loss of home, evaluate current efforts at mitigation, suggest better policies to alleviate the suffering of the dispossessed, and – as a last resort – urge resistance against unacceptable projects.

The city of Homs, like so many places in Syria, has suffered mass destruction since the war began in 2011. So far, the architectural response to the crisis has focused on 'cultural heritage', ancient architecture, and the external displacement of refugees, often neglecting the everyday lives of Syrians and the buildings that make up their homes and communities. In Domicide, Ammar Azzouz uses the notion of the 'home' to address the destruction in cities like Homs, the displacement of Syrian people both externally and internally, and to explore how cities can be rebuilt without causing further damage to the communities that live there. Drawing on interviews with those working in the built environment professions, both inside and outside of Syria, but also Syrians from other backgrounds who have become 'architects' in their own way as they were forced to repair and rebuild their homes by themselves, Domicide offers fresh insight into the role of the architect during time of war, and explores how the future reconstruction of cities should mirror the wants and needs, the traditions and ways of living, of local communities. Focusing on Homs but offering a blueprint for other urban areas of conflict across Syria and the wider world, the book is essential reading for researchers in architecture, urban planning, heritage studies and conflict studies.

Austerity, a response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain.In The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte bring together the voices of campaigners and academics including Danny Dorling, Mary O'Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship, exposing austerity to be a form of systematic violence.Covering a range of famous cases of institutional violence in Britain, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, the risks faced by people on workfare schemes, community violence in Northern Ireland and cuts to the regulation of social protection, are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking expos� of the myriad ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.