The Golestan Palace, a UNESCO world heritage site, was among the structures that were damaged in US-Israel strikes on Iran beginning February 28. The 16th century palace was home to the famed Talar-e-Ayeneh (or hall of mirrors), a hall lined with an intricate pattern of small hand cut mirrors creating myriad internal reflections. Historian Syed Nadeem Rezavi laments, as a historian of architecture, the loss of this palace, a symbol of the “Persianate Empire” (taken from Richard Eaton’s formulation). This shared cultural space that traversed between Iran and India across the last millennium was far more significant than its more limited political geography. Characterised by vibrant exchanges within diverse fields like music, poetry, art and architecture, this period yielded fine examples of technological innovation and artistic sophistication. The transport of pietra dura stone inlay from Italy to Agra at the Taj Mahal via Persia, and the hall of mirrors from Tehran to Lahore and Agra only to return in the Palace, are examples of this interaction that crossed boundaries of space and time. At this juncture of sharp differences, it is imperative to recollect this shared legacy of the entire region, in the context of the Iranian administration’s acknowledgment of this historic linkage with India and its people. As the historian laments the loss of a historical monument, the profession of architects and urban planners must lament the loss of common everyday urban inhabitation and social infrastructure. Concrete urban fabric now lies in ruinVisuals from the recent spate of bombings in Ukraine, parts of Russia, Palestine, and most recently in Iran and other parts of West Asia, including Israel, reveal reinforced cement concrete (RCC) framed structures that have been torn asunder. This predominant building typology of urbanisation now lies in ruin. It has proven to be vulnerable to bombing raids, while its heavy structural members cause significant loss of life when collapsing. Yet the profession has not sought to examine or question its universal application. Large parts of these constructions are now flattened heaps of rubble while the portions that remain partially intact poignantly reveal signs of inhabitation of families now destroyed. These regions have witnessed attacks on schools, hospitals, airports and civilian residential complexes. Even refugee camps or convoys carrying supplies of food, water and medicines have been attacked.Architect Eyal Weizman records the manner in which Israel’s defence forces have strategically compressed the populations of northern Gaza further towards camps in the southern belt and has rendered their lands in the north uninhabitable. He likens this to a genocide as it ‘removes’ the basic conditions enabling inhabitation. in an age of overdependence on surveillance technology and artificial intelligence, now as the basis for identification of targets, increasingly characterises war. The recent bombing of a school for girls in the southern Iranian city of Minab, leading to the death of more than 160 young students, was based on the erroneous use of outdated information by an AI mapping system, reflecting both the changed nature of warfare and its implications for the urban fabric of distant cities and their unknown inhabitants.It is these alienated victims of war that architects must address. The critical question of our times is how to rebuild the worlds of these citizens who have been disenfranchised from the lives that they built only because they represented a particular side, however tangentially, in a larger geopolitical conflict. Yet, now these innocent men, women, children and elderly, have been rendered homeless and helpless without any resources to rebuild their lives.The role of urban planningIn order to re-evaluate the role of the profession in this context, one must analyse how it has been understood in the past. Urbanist Frank Mohr in describing the genesis of the urban fabric called the city “the most perfect example of human endeavour” while author Nancy Stieber argued urban planning to be an “allegorical personification” or an embodiment of the city’s glory and identity. This represents within the processes of urbanisation a search for a stylistic identity to mould the more violent dynamics of real estate development. Professor of Urbanism, Michiel Dehaene had contended that town planners like Patrick Abercrombie, Camillo Sitte, Patrick Geddes and Raymond Unwin presented urban planning “as a technical profession rooted in a descriptive documentation of the environment”, i.e. an assemblage of conscious interventions in the city fabric as opposed to the unconscious evolutionary processes implicit in development.But this search for control over such a stylistic identity is by no means a singular pursuit. Henri Lefebvre argued that the space of the urban “proposes numerous homologous paths” to choose and the ‘subject’ – through their engagement in productive activity within it – “invests certain paths with special value”. The conception of the urban thus constructed has been associated with emotions such as evolution (implying also memory and nostalgia), perfection, aspiration, and modernity. Thus the identity of the urban would necessarily be the negotiated amalgam of these many identities.Further, urban planning is believed to be an artistic improvement of the processes of urban expansion which remains rooted in the “practical aspects” of development activity premised on exercising control over land. The present state of war represents such an imperialist urge to control land, and so one such unconscious and violent process of ‘development’ within the urban. This condition of unconscious evolution with its control lying beyond the space of the central ‘subject’, raises fundamental questions to the ‘conscious’ nature of design activity and its solutions. Why urban development has become homogenousThe city has been constituted in part by larger political and economic shifts that override or at least drive these processes of seeking an identity. This can be seen in the development of Civil Lines adjacent to the British capital at New Delhi positioned against the old city of Shahjahanabad in the early 20th century. Similarly, the development of modernist architecture in post-colonial New Delhi and the urban development of post neo-liberal Gurgaon (Gurugram) followed the sub-urban development model of mid-century US cities built around shopping malls and commercial complexes. Similar trends from other parts of the Global South become apparent in the experience of Addis Ababa, with modern housing complexes being posited as the desirable alternatives to the congested older historic quarters. The similarity in the dynamics of urbanisation as evidenced by such examples reflects the presence of a particular stylistic representation and model of urban development that has come to be adopted in large parts of post-colonial and developing countries. It has meant that the urban landscape particularly of these regions has been largely homogenous and reliant on RCC construction accommodating typologies like malls, commercial complexes and large housing societies. It is these buildings and suburban regions that now lie in ruin owing to the bombing raids and owing to the fallibility of this material.Reusing rubbleTo address this ruin of urban infrastructure, two critical questions must be answered. First, with occupation being now an operative part of these armed violent conflicts, the primary imperative becomes to strengthen international bodies like the UN and the ICJ to enable the restoration of control over destroyed territory to the original inhabitants now displaced. Having done this, the profession may address itself to building for these people with what little that remains. Architect Romi Khosla while recounting his experiences of travelling through the region of West Asia during the Israel-Palestine conflict in the mid 1980s and 1990s, talked of the possibilities of reuse of the rubble. The rubble of the old masonry, he proposed, could be compacted into wire mesh cages to create gabion-wall structures or compacted earth structures giving rise to new edifices for a dislocated people building an identity forged by reclaiming space and material. These structures would fundamentally question and examine in a constructive way, the dominance of RCC in a scenario when production capability enabling that form of construction also lies in ruin.As the world anxiously awaits the fate of a tenuous ceasefire and posturing by both sides in the US-Iran war, and people of the region brace themselves for whatever fate awaits them, it is these questions of rebuilding urban infrastructure that must engage professionals in the field in a post-war scenario. Architects and urban planners, as responsible citizens of the world, must direct themselves to re-designing these spaces for dehumanised peoples from whom even the most basic tools of inhabitation have been snatched away. Kanishka Prasad is a Delhi-based architect and scholar with a doctrate in Construction Labour & Urban Planning.