Some people argue that urbicide should be understood as a part of genocide, as to destroy people's homes is to destroy them. In his book Urbicide, Martin Coward argues along a similar line. Rather than use urbicide for all violence against the city, Coward uses the term to denote violence which seeks to annihilate difference through the destruction of the material foundation of that difference. The urban is meant to imply the material foundation of heterogeneity (being with others as being with otherness), and he interprets some instances of destruction of the city as an attempt to destroy the material foundations of that heterogeneity by foundational philosophies that make an 'appeal to the origin'. Urbicide would then share the annihilatory character of genocide, but not necessarily its focus on human beings as the object of destruction.
