Bomb Urbanism | Seed Urbanism

Bombs, Bans, and Sanctions Option Studio | 2025

Location: Gaza, Palestine; St. Louis, Missouri; Genoa, Italy

Professor: Farzin Lotfi-Jam

Analyze, and propose a response to, an event representing United States imperialism and its effects on imperial subjects.

The Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza is an exhibit bomb urbanism–an paradigm to think through imperial conquest in the sites of weapons production, deployment, and protest. Advanced weapons development and production leads to economic growth and suburbanization in the imperial city; bombs are deployed in the colonized city to destroy infrastructure that is not needed, appropriate what is needed, and add what is missing to construct an imperial city ethnically cleansed of its
indigenous inhabitants; in cities with the most effective protest, people and unions moved from the infrastructures of arrival and destination to the middle places of transport, shutting down the infrastructures of movements and clogging their conduits, a true shutdown of urban life.

The Bomb Heard ‘Round the World

On Sunday, December 15, 2024, the Israeli military bombed an elementary school in Khan Younis, Gaza that was being used to house Palestinian refugees during the course of the genocide. 20 people were killed as a result of the strike.

The strike is representative of so many violent strikes across Gaza. It was an attack on civilians, an attack on schools, an attack on refugees, and based on confirmation by munitions experts, it utilized the United States’ GBU-39 bomb developed by Boeing.

The GBU-39 is far from the only American bomb dropped in Gaza during the genocide, but it is notable for being one of the most advanced bombs in the American design arsenal. The United States has contracts to sell them to its allies and has dropped them on its adversaries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and of course, Palestine. It is one of the most advanced tools and symbols of the United States Empire, desired by its allies and all too familiar to its adversaries.

Bomb Urbanism

Much of the facts about the genocide in Gaza that are disseminated relate to the destruction. For example, the fact that 81% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Or the fact that nearly all of the vegetation and farmland has also been destroyed.

Perhaps not as much is being discussed about the groundwork being laid for a post-genocide, ethnically cleansed Gaza in the image of American and Zionist imperialism.

Seventy-seven percent of all of Gaza’s streets have been damaged and over one-third have been completely destroyed. In their place, the Zionist occupation has imposed its own corridors, five of them, stretching east to west across the Gaza Strip to facilitate its ground invasion of the territory.

And of course, when superimposed upon two of the major streets in Gaza, Salahuddin and Al-Rasheed Street, we see a figure reminiscent of the plan found in the leaked White House Gaza plan from earlier this year.

This urban structure, the structure of bomb urbanism, destroys what is not needed, appropriates what is needed, and adds what is missing to construct an imperial city ethnically cleansed of its indigenous inhabitants.

Its image is devoid of any Palestinian presence or context because there is no intention for one. The buildings depicted in the plan in these AI-generated renders are glistening skyscrapers with highways and vacant green space, a sight unfamiliar to the urbanism of Gaza.

And of course, there’s the inclusion of the familiar colonial strategy, representing the “good colonized people.” The “good” Muslims and “good” Arabs, the people that will go along with the occupier’s wishes and refuse to resist an occupation.

Bomb urbanism is the most violent form of top-down urbanism, where the needs of a people are completely ignored in favor of a seemingly irresistible and inevitable plan.

But bomb urbanism would not just affect the imperial subject, but the empire itself. And in the case of this genocide, it affects St. Louis, Missouri.

St. Louis, Missouri: Fighterland, USA

Boeing operates three manufacturing and research facilities in the greater St. Louis area. One in Berkeley, a suburb of St. Louis, one in St. Charles, where the GBU-39 is produced, and one in Mascoutah, Illinois, across the Mississippi River. The plant in Berkeley, Missouri, is the oldest.

When Boeing’s predecessor, the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, was founded in 1939 in Berkeley, Missouri, the area was sparsely populated. This changed after World War II, during which McDonnell produced fire jets for the war effort.

Due to various factors, including the provisions of the Housing Act of 1949, as well as the new jobs generated by McDonnell, suburbs near the facilities began to expand. The company merged with Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967, and became the largest private employer in the state of Missouri. Thirty years later, Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas, and they continue to expand their facilities today.

Boeing and its predecessor contributed to the expansion of St. Louis into the suburbs, changing the urban fabric of the city, and enhancing the trend of suburbanization that had been going on in much of America.

The development of advanced bombs affects the urban development of the sites in which the bomb is developed. But also it affects the sites of protest.

Genoa, Italy: Blocchiamo Tutto (Let’s Block Everything)

In Genoa, on September 27, 2025, thousands of Italians in Genoa, including union members, protested in the streets against the complicity of the Italian government in the genocide of the Palestinian people.

This wasn’t particularly unique. Multiple port cities across Europe, and in particular on the Mediterranean, which many of the people aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla called home, were the sites of many of these protests.

However, what was notable was that they did indeed act upon their slogan, blocchiamo tutto, let’s block everything.

Not only did the protests go through many of the major sites in Genoa, such as the university, the cathedral, multiple piazzas, the unionized port workers actually blocked a Zionist ship from loading a shipment of explosives that was likely going to be used in Gaza.

And throughout Italy, other unions went on strike, from airport workers to firefighters. People moved from the infrastructures of arrival and destination to the middle places of transport, shutting down the infrastructures of movements and clogging their conduits, a true shutdown of urban life.

The anti-genocide strikes in Italy demonstrate that urbanism is not just infrastructure and built things, but the people that operate those infrastructures and make those built things work. Without them, urbanism falls apart and everything is blocked.

St. Louis also had its strikes, albeit of a more tame variety. Boeing employees who were union members of the IAM, the International Association of Machinists and Airspace Workers, about 3,200 employees of the 17,000 in the greater St. Louis area, went on strike from August 4th to November 15th, 2025, advocating for fairer wages, pay, and benefits.

This strike did actually affect the machinations of bomb urbanism. It affected the delivery of Air Force fighter jet F-15EX, as admitted by the United States Air Force themselves. However, it did not stop the production of the GBU-39 bomb. Nonetheless, it proved that these union strikes do work.

However, they weren’t protesting because of Gaza.

There were other protests because of Gaza. In fact, this one from November 6th, 2023, at the St. Charles plant is pictured. But the concerns of these two parties were divorced from each other.

Both the IAM and the pro-Palestinian protesters did not take advantage of this sort of fluidity of urbanism and the fact that things can be blocked. There are a lot of emphasis on local participation, media awareness, but they did not take advantage of the urban possibilities.

Seed Urbanism

In contrast to the tendencies of bomb urbanism, which destroys what is not needed and builds infrastructures to facilitate the imperial city, I propose seed urbanism.

Seed urbanism proposes that the occupied people already have developed methods of living their lives amid and resisting the occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Those strategies are the seeds of post-colonial life. It is incumbent upon international solidarity networks and those who are complicit to help grow these seeds.

Where bomb urbanism is top-down, laying a network that overwhelms the city and its people, seed urbanism is bottom-up, taking individual strategies of resistance to occupation and building upon them.

In the case of Gaza, there are four possible methods. They all are not necessarily in this order, but generally they follow something along these lines and can overlap:

Reconstruction, resistance, reparations, and return.