Rupture, Ruin, Reconstruction | Reading the Spatial Legacies of Ethnic Conflict

Abstract

Prolonged violence in a city reshapes infrastructural and social systems through cycles of rupture, ruin, and reconstruction, generating unique urban forms of segregation and an architecture of defense that persists long after active conflict ends. While political, social, and economic frameworks are crucial to understanding conflict, they often underemphasize how spatial arrangements shape evolving conflict patterns. My research addresses this gap by repositioning violence as an ongoing process of social and spatial accumulation rather than discrete events. The thesis finds that violence produces distinct epistemic conditions in cities, creating the need for a diagnostic framework that can capture its urban processes by compressing layers of space and time. Through a multimodal methodology of documentation and representation of ethnic conflict in Ahmedabad, India, the project creates a dialectic between dominant narratives and counter memories, thereby expanding the perspectives that give meaning to the spatial knowledge of a place.