Urbicide, as redefined by Coward (2008), is destructive violence aimed at architecture and the urban fabric. While the reasons behind urbicide can be attributed to war, gentrification or militarisation of the city, this research proposes the notion of ‘political holes’ as another form of violence. Within this proposal, the political hole is to be understood as a physical and psychological hole created through a building’s demolition as a result of an intentional, unethical and political decision exercised by specific actors away from wartime. The results affect people’s experience of the city and their understanding of it. By investigating how unethical political holes are created and the reasons behind them, this research contributes to unfolding how political holes alter the understanding of the urban fabric through their experience as physical holes and through their memory. Drawing on Van Gennep (1960) and Turner’s (1969) ‘liminality’, Casati and Varzi’s (1994) definition of the hole and Coward’s framing of urbicide, this contribution proposes to identify and frame ‘unethical political holes’ in the urban fabric by focusing on two case studies: Beirut (Lebanon) and Brisbane (Australia). Through archival research, mapping strategies – namely physical and digital mapping, walking practices and interviews, the ambiguous, material and ephemeral political holes are seen, mapped and given presence in the city. They are then uncovered not as mere empty lots but as traces of a history of urbicide with a particular lifespan: a temporality that manifests through their changing physicality and instances of functionality. Their accumulation, collection, analysis and classification into a final archive result in a new reading of the city that seeks to question the architectural archive processes and the built contents of these archives while unveiling the hidden stigma of spatial violence.