Urbicide, a particular form of environmental warfare, refers to the deliberate destruction of a city through the systematic obliteration of everything that sustains urban life: from poisoning water and air supplies to dismantling the social fabric that makes communities viable. However, urbicide extends beyond conventional military destruction and cannot be understood solely as an urban manifestation of necrocapitalism that profits from war-related death and devastation. Rather, the necrocapitalist dynamics of urbicide can operate within the ordinary functioning of dominant political and economic systems, manifesting through capitalism’s everyday slow violence. In her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Maria Gunko examines how these urbicidal politics play out in an Armenian town.
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Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction emphasized that capitalism’s relentless innovation would sweep away the ‘bad old’ to make space for the ‘good new.’ Regeneration requires ruins. This is the fundamental paradox of the spatial development logic of the contemporary era, which is driven by the interests of capital: places must first be obliterated before they can be ‘improved,’ existing worlds must be dismantled before new ones can be born. What many economists and urban scholars call regeneration (renewal, revival, revitalization, etc.) is rarely regeneration at all. Instead, it is a case of ‘creative destruction’ that fails to deliver on its creative promise. Ultimately, it’s about replacing an (imperfect) infrastructure of human and other-than-human life with an infrastructure of capital that is commercially profitable and attractive to investors.
My ethnographic research in the small Armenian town of Ajidzor reveals how the hollowed-out version of Schumpeter’s concept operates through superimposition – the layering of new places over existing ones without meaningful engagement. Capital does not discover voids to be filled, rather it manufactures them through acts of slow violence: deliberate disinvestment, cultural devaluation, and the systematic erasure of local knowledge and social practices. The colonial logic of terra nullius – empty land awaiting improvement – has been updated for our times, with ‘there is nothing here’ serving as a prerequisite for extracting value.
In Ajidzor, I witnessed how regeneration became erasure, how the celebration of Armenian heritage excluded the actual Armenians who inhabited the place. This is not simply a story about one peripheral town, but about how capitalism reproduces colonial narratives that justify displacement and annihilation.
Place of present absences
During the Soviet period, Ajidzor represented a particular vision of modernity – industrial, egalitarian, ordered and orchestrated by the state. The collapse of state socialism came with the unmaking of Soviet modernity and power, along with the places that they sustained. Different degrees of hardship were experienced across all of the post-Soviet realm; however, Armenia saw extreme deprivation as concurrent nationwide economic and energy crises struck the country embroiled in war with Azerbaijan over Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). The period of the early 1990s is referred to in Armenia as the ‘dark years’ or ‘dark and cold years’ [Arm: mut tariner or mut u tsurt tariner] when the newly independent country found itself enveloped in darkness, cold, silence, and profound shortages.
The ‘dark years’ were a spectacular rupture, a state of exception when the country at war put ‘normal statecraft’ on hold. However, when the energy crisis ended in 1995, the Armenian state lacked funds and political will to rebuild infrastructure and provide welfare, resulting in slow decay and rising poverty in many of Armenia’s rural areas and small towns, with Ajidzor being no exception.
Creative destruction in the guise of privatization entailed the systematic stripping of industrial equipment and infrastructure: dismantling as an act of deliberate value extraction. As Lori Khatchadourian wrote, this involved pulling “the heavy, metallic, unyielding remnants of the socialist factor[ies] out from the twilight zone of post-socialist stasis and into relations of capital.” One of my interlocutors in Ajidzor explained, “they destroyed and sold off everything” – referring to the alliance between political elites and capital that harvested and capitalized the remaining Soviet-built assets without replacement. This process transformed functional infrastructure into scrap metal, coherent spaces of social practices into ruins, and a working community into precarious subjects.
The colonial logic of regeneration
When transnational capital rediscovered Ajidzor in 2019 through Rafael – an US-educated entrepreneur living between Los Angeles and Yerevan – it brought with it a familiar colonial logic of development. His first encounter with the town was telling: “What I saw was a sad little place that had nothing. Despite all the opportunities, there was nothing here.” Rafael purchased the abandoned former factory building, along with other real estate including a Soviet sauna building and the vacant non-residential premises on the main square (former shops and local history museum), with vague plans to create “some sort of creative hub.” Yet, for a while all of his purchase continued to accumulate dust until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 provided an unexpected opportunity.
Through his connections, Rafael was advised to engage with the Artists at Risk institution for attracting displaced creatives – Russians and Belarusians fleeing political repression, Ukrainians seeking refuge from war. Beginning in June 2022, young, highly skilled artists from major cities of the countries affected by the war arrived in Ajidzor. They agreed to renovate the deteriorating building in exchange for free accommodations. However, without formal legal contracts, they became precarious laborers investing unpaid work in property they could never own, while Rafael positioned himself as their benefactor and ‘social entrepreneur.’
Exploiting the labor of the artists, Rafael’s vision of regeneration also systematically excluded the local population through the imposition of external values and aesthetics. His plans listed a hip café, a shop selling ‘good French wines,’ and an ‘English language library’ – amenities that served tourists rather than local residents. When locals approached him about employment or building materials, he dismissed these ‘disgusting’ requests as opportunistic impositions rather than legitimate community interests. As Tanya Murray Li wrote about similar dynamics in China, India, and Southeast Asia, Ajidzor was appropriated by capital but decoupled from its residents who were rendered ‘useless’ – a “dispossession detached from any prospect of labour absorption.”
Against this background, urban regeneration turned into what Gediminas Lesutis called “urbicide of preexisting socio-spatial forms of urban life” with the goal being not to strengthen existing communities but to replace them with more profitable arrangements. Rafael’s label museum literally displaced the local history museum, substituting his personal collection for community heritage. The summer festival he organized with his wife Lina, supported by major Armenian diasporan funding bodies, proclaimed to celebrate Armenian culture while simultaneously ignoring the specific Armenian community of Ajidzor.
Superimposition and extraction
Rather than strengthening Ajidzor’s existing social fabric, Rafael’s endeavor created parallel geographies. The artists mostly dwelled on the factory grounds, serving as both laborers and spectacles. They were interactive exhibits whose creative work became entertainment for visitors. Festival guests clustered around the factory and main square, consuming the performance of ‘significant Armenian heritage’ through folk music, excursions to view medieval architecture, readings and staging of famous literary pieces.
Local children were quickly expelled by organizers when they attempted to sell wild berries to festival guests because the organizers found their presence disruptive to the curated cultural experience. When local residents asked organizers to lower the music and refrain from performing on the square to accommodate mourning rituals for a recently deceased community member, Rafael refused, which led to a confrontation. The dynamic I observed and stories I heard from my interlocutors vividly reminded me of China Miéville’s novel “The City & The City” – two places existing side by side, each forbidden to acknowledge the other.
This pattern extends far beyond postsocialist contexts. From urban gentrification to rural land grabs, capital consistently treats existing communities as obstacles to development. The promise of regeneration masks the implementation of projects that are completely unrelated to the existing context, accompanied by displacement. Meanwhile, the language of improvement obscures relations of exploitation. My interlocutors recognized this pattern, comparing Rafael’s actions to ‘acting like a Turk’ – referencing the systematic and longstanding erasure of Armenian heritage and communities in formerly Armenian-populated territories within present-day Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Towards pluriversal alternatives
The case of Ajidzor demonstrates the problematic nature of development models based on capitalist ‘visions’ that disregard local life. In this sense, socially just regeneration would need to begin from the creative strategies that residents have already developed – practices that Charles Piot describes in his work on post-Cold War Togo as “extraordinarily inventive bricolage” through which people maintain life amid crises and abandonment. Rather than imposing something, regenerative practices might support what communities are already doing to sustain themselves.
In Ajidzor, this would mean recognizing the value of and paying respect to subsistence farming, foraging, mutual aid networks, and how locals repurpose industrial ruins. Such an approach would align with what Arturo Escobar calls “designs for the pluriverse” – multiple ways of organizing social life that do not conform to capitalist metrics of success and that create meaningful forms of community and livelihood – perhaps precisely because they do not conform and instead build an infrastructure of life from within the multiplicity of existing materials, structures, customs, and species.
The main challenge lies in developing economic and political frameworks that can support such alternatives without appropriating them. This requires moving beyond the terra nullius logic that treats difference as a void, toward forms of solidarity that can strengthen existing communities without transforming them into tourist attractions, exploited laborers, or assets.
Note from the editors: The name of the town Ajidzor and all people mentioned in this essay are pseudonyms used for data protection reasons. The author’s ethnographic research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) project, “Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy After Postsocialism,” under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 865976).