Urbicide

[Dr. Goodword]

• urbicide •

Pronunciation: êr-bê-said • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, mass (uncountable)

Meaning: Destruction of a city or its character.

Notes: Today's is a Good Word so new Onelook can only find it in three marginal dictionaries. It can be found in the grandfather of them all, the Oxford English Dictionary with the earliest published example from 1963—an infant word in linguistic time. We may assume all the derivatives of the many words containing -cide: urbicidal, urbicidally, urbicidality, and urbicidology.

In Play: The most obvious example of this word is what is happening to Ukrainian cities today: "The cost of resurrecting all the Ukrainian victims of urbicide will be tremendous." Urbicide may only involve the character, nature of a city: "Coastal cities have failed to resist the urbicidal forces of beachside urban development."

Word History: Today's Good Word was first coined by science fiction author Michael Moorcock and published in 1963. Moorcock took the Latin word for "city", urbs, urbis, and combined it with the English combining form -cide, found in words like homicide, suicide, and fratricide. Latin urbs appears in English urban and urbane "citified, elegant". Its origin is a mystery. Pokorny thinks it is a mangled form of PIE gherdh-/ghordh- "to enclose, surround", but others think it came from PIE uerbh-/uorbh- "to turn" in the sense of "to encircle". Both refer to the fact that ancient cities were walled. Both explanations fall afoul of many obstacles. (Let there be no obstacle to our gratitude to Luciano Eduardo de Oliveira, editor of the GW series and long-time contributor, for suggesting today's very topical Good Word.)

[George Kovac]

Latin urbs appears in English urban and urbane "citified, elegant". Its origin is a mystery. Pokorny thinks it is a mangled form of PIE gherdh-/ghordh- "to enclose, surround", but others think it came from PIE uerbh-/uorbh- "to turn" in the sense of "to encircle". Both refer to the fact that ancient cities were walled.

For at least 9,000 years we have thought of cities as circles, whether or not encircled by walls. The density, the proximity, the interactions fostered by that shape are essential to our conception of urban life.

Today, Saudia Arabia is challenging that conception with its controversial plan to build the “Line,” a linear city 110 miles long and 1.2 miles wide, punctuated by some buildings as tall as 1600 feet, and stretching across the southern desert. Here is an analysis of that project in today’s WSJ:

A linear city as big as the Line is at odds with how humans have developed cities for millennia: naturally building outward in a circular manner, typically around a core.
“It’s battling against the entire history of the way cities are founded and grow,” said John E. Fernandez, professor in the department of architecture at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[Debbymoge]

Thank you for including the information about Saudi. You might have included the fact that evidently MBS suggested anyone objecting to being removed from the path of this grand new idea be eliminated (in the old Mafia-speak meaning of the word).
One other comment, though.
While I agree with the historic growth pattern being circular, driving along old state highways, one might argue that the Line is the obvious extension of the way towns connect now, mall after parking lot after mall, mile after mile after mile.
Luckily, however, so far as I am aware, that pattern of "development" has not led to the murder of the folks who used to live, work and play along the roadways now converted into driveways to parking lots.
Is Saudi just a classic example of extending an idea to its illogical conclusion?