Date: Tuesday 28 May 2024
Time: 20:00 (drinks from 19:30)
Location: Independent School, Delftsestraat 33
Admission: 10,- (regular), €6,- (reduced)
Language: English
In the current Gaza war, as much as 40% of the housing has been damaged or destroyed, with over 1.8 million people internally displaced. The destruction of more than a third of Gaza’s homes is leading international legal experts to raise the concept of “domicide” – the mass destruction of dwellings to make the territory uninhabitable. This concept is increasingly accepted in academia but is not a distinct crime against humanity under international law.
On 28 May we welcome British-Syrian architect and researcher Ammar Azzouz, author of the acclaimed Domicide: Architecture, War, and the Destruction of Home in Syria (2023). In this book, Azzouz draws on the pain inflicted on his hometown of Homs, Syria, offering a blueprint for other urban areas of conflict across the world. From Aleppo to Mosul, Mali to Mariupol, to the ongoing destruction of Gaza, cities have been the epicenter of this type of violence. So what is the impact of domicide on the cultural and social fabric of these societies? What is the psychological and emotional toll on individuals and communities? And how can we prevent or resist domicide and rebuild what has been lost?
Participants
Ammar Azzouz
Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Research Fellow at University of Oxford. He is the author of Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Bloomsbury, 2023). Azzouz is the Principal Investigator of Slow Violence and the City, a research project that examines the impact of violence on the built environment at the time of war and peace. He has written for a wide range of platforms including the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New Statesman. He left Syria in 2011 to escape the war and now lives in London.
Nuria Ribas Costa
Nuria Ribas Costa is a Spanish Journalist and Jurist based between Rotterdam and Ibiza, her homeland. Formerly at OMA, she currently works as an independent researcher and policy analyst in the fields of urbanism and culture. She is part of urbanism agency Humankind, research group Vigla, the Center for Music Ecosystems and De Dépendance. She is interested in the relationships rural-urban, the politics of space and land and intersectionality in urbanism.