“We wouldn’t have any American economy without the automobile business. That’s literally true. This is a great industry that has to go on and keep turning out more cars and trucks, and there have to be places for them to run – they’ll need more roads, and in order to get that done people are going to be inconvenienced who are in the way.”
~ Robert Moses
UrbanDictionary.com defines Urbanicide as ‘When a city or metropolitan area pursues a gargantuan infrastructure project that is considered mostly unnecessary by the citizenry while there are scant funds to pay for it. The urbanicide then occurs when an appointed authority decides to subject the region’s citizens to user fees/toll/taxes to pay for the extravagance, dividing the community and greatly impoverishing it at the same time.‘
Marxist humanist philosopher Marshall Howard Berman preferred the shorter form Urbicide when describing the ‘murder of the city‘ by such destructive infrastructure. Classically, the term was attached to catastrophes like Hiroshima, New Orleans, Sarajevo, the Gaza strip. Only in the last several decades have urbanists applied the term to the construction of built environments that ultimately destroy lives and depress living conditions.