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Papers by Gruia Badescu
Geopolitics, 2022
Connecting urban geopolitics with critical geopolitics, this article highlights the urban geopoli... more Connecting urban geopolitics with critical geopolitics, this article highlights the urban geopolitical significance of learning from the European Southeast. Urban geopolitics has often made reference to the European Southeast in discussions of urban warfare, conflict and contestation. In particular, Sarajevo and discussions of urbicide played a seminal role in understanding the contemporary relationship between conflict and the built environment. Beyond this attention to the 1990s wars, this article shows that contemporary urban transformations in the region reflect novel processes and alignments that can contribute to the larger project of rethinking urban geopolitics: allegedly ‘contested’ and ‘ordinary’ cities in the region reflect today a reshaping of practices of material and immaterial urban geopolitics highlighting transnational and global entanglements beyond the East-West and North-South conceptual and geopolitical divides. By employing a critical geopolitical analysis of the urban, the article discusses performative acts of power in urban space and the reconfiguration of the built environment in two cities in the region as a nexus of geopolitical processes, well beyond the wars of the 1990s: Sarajevo, arguably a divided city in a contested state, and Belgrade, an ‘ordinary’ capital city of a nation-state, albeit uncontested capital of a country with contested territories. The article highlights the emergence of newer relationships beyond the East-West divide, particularly with the Middle East, specifically articulated through urban space reconfigurations. It shows how the European South-East reflects that the urban geopolitical goes beyond the usual lens of ‘contested’ urban space to ‘ordinary’ cities, which become arenas of multi-scalar geopolitics.
This article investigates the relationship between spatial reconfigurations and peace by examinin... more This article investigates the relationship between spatial reconfigurations and peace by examining the practice I call syncretic place-making, identified in cities experiencing conflict. I suggest that this spatial practice reflects the promise of Hannah Arendt's political vision of a world in common, materialized in the city. I discuss architectural conceptualizations such as the Cypriot 2021 Venice Biennial entry and theorize from architectural practices of resistance identified in Sarajevo, defining syncretic place-making as a process of drawing from multiple traditions to celebrate coexistence in space. The article reflects on both the potential and challenges that such place-making has for conflict cities.
Contested Urban Spaces: Monuments, Traces, and Decentered Memories, 2022
The chapter discusses the connection between urban reconstruction and contested memories in post-... more The chapter discusses the connection between urban reconstruction and contested memories in post-war contexts. While architectural approaches usually circulate between a variety of urban situations, this chapter highlights that reconstruction is not only an architectural problem, but one of dealing with the past. By focusing on two former Yugoslav cities that experienced wars in the 1990s, it underlines the relational and situated nature of reconstructions and ruins as traces of war. It analyzes the traces of wars in both the material and the social fabric of the city and argues that urban reconstructions and ruins have to be situated in local contested memory landscapes.
Memory Politics and Populism in Southeastern Europe, 2021
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2021
In the last three decades, a ‘memory fever’ concerning past dictatorships and political violence ... more In the last three decades, a ‘memory fever’ concerning past dictatorships and political violence emerged both in the Latin American Southern Cone and in Central and Eastern Europe. Both regions witnessed the creation and then consolidation of memory regimes related to remembering military dictatorships and state socialism, respectively. This article interrogates how transnational migration experiences between the two regions challenge nationally framed memory regimes, with a focus on Chile, Romania, and Croatia. By tracing individual migrants and exiles between Romania and Chile, as well as the Croatian Chilean diaspora, this article discusses the entanglements between Chile and Southeastern Europe in the remembrance of the Pinochet and Ceausescu dictatorships, as well as the Tito´s Yugoslavia. First, it shows how migrants who experienced dictatorships in both regions operate their own vernacular comparisons between the two experiences. These reframe the tropes existing in dominant memory narratives in each country and create hierarchies of suffering and oppression (i.e. in the case of the Romania–Chile comparison, with a more negative valuation of the Ceauşescu dictatorship). Second, by discussing intergenerational memory for those who did not experience dictatorship, as well as diasporic memory formations (e.g. Croat Chileans), it shows that, in these instances, comparisons are more under the influence of dominant national memory frames, but also of memory entrepreneurs who mobilize specific threads. Moreover, the article discusses how these various migrant experiences constitute and reframe senses of belonging, interrogating both the formulations of home and transnationality.
Thinking Through Ruins, 2021
Contemporary Southeastern Europe , 2021
This article examines the reshaping of Belgrade's memorial landscape after the Second World War a... more This article examines the reshaping of Belgrade's memorial landscape after the Second World War and after the 1999 NATO bombings, with a focus on the role of architects. As such, the paper shifts the scale of memory debates in two ways: first, from the national to the urban; second, from 'classical' memory entrepreneurs of the political realm to city makers, usually perceived as 'technical' actors, but, as the paper argues, in fact relevant memory actors both through the way they influence sites of memory and through memory debates. The article places the engagement of architects with narratives of heroism and victimhood in Serbia in a historical perspective, examining the shift in memorialisation after the Second World War. It then discusses the hesitant approaches on engaging with ruins of the 1999 NATO bombing, highlighting frictions between various actors in the Generalštab debate. Finally, it analyses the distinctive memorial engagement with the ruins of the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) building by examining the bottom-up process of the competition for the RTS memorial. The article highlights that, even if not intentionally or by embracing memory-work, architecture and architects play a role in memory processes, while deeply enmeshed in constellations of political and economic power.
Centra European Horizons, 2021
The city of Rijeka/Fiume underwent an array of transitions in the long twentieth century, from th... more The city of Rijeka/Fiume underwent an array of transitions in the long twentieth
century, from the port of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy to a free
city, to D´Annunzio´s Italian Regency of Carnaro, annexation by Italy, incorporation
into Yugoslavia, and eventually the independence of Croatia. The
article examines the processes of urban reconstruction and architectural reconfigurations
in the city as “frontier urbanism”, building on Wendy Pullan’s
(2011) discussion of how various actors employ architectural and place-making
practices to secure the state in contested urban space. The article traces
Rijeka/Fiume´s urban development as a window of fixating state identities
in the built environment throughout the century, focusing on the aftermath
of the Second World War. It examines the urban transformations of the city
as the demographic landscape was reshaped after the departure of the local
Italian-speaking majority and the arrival of workers from various parts of
Yugoslavia, but also from Italy. By analysing decisions to rebuild or not
buildings damaged by war, as well as the demolition of the 1943-built votive
temple in Mlaka, the article inquires how reconstruction and urban planning
became avenues to secure the state at its new frontiers.
Agency in Transnational Memory Politics, 2020
This chapter discusses the memorialization of sites that are intrinsically related to transnation... more This chapter discusses the memorialization of sites that are intrinsically related to transnational processes. It examines the emergence in the Latin American Southern Cone of a regional regime of site memorialization as a process of transnational memory space making by analysing agency at different scales. It discusses how transnational circulations and entanglements of various actors played a role in the shaping of sites of memory. Moreover, it problematizes the memorialization of sites specifically referring to transnational political violence by scrutinizing the challenges to transnational place-making of such sites.
Cultural Studies, 2020
This article examines the relationship between architectural transformations and the reshaping of... more This article examines the relationship between architectural transformations and the reshaping of memory in post-imperial urban space. It reflects on two forms of symbolic violence: first, iconoclastic acts of reshaping space to reflect national self-determination and moving away from empire, and second, acts that embody the recovery of imperial legacies. It analyzes the recent restoration of the Habsburg-built Alba Iulia citadel in the eve of Romania’s Centennial celebrations of the 1918 Alba Iulia assembly which proclaimed the unification of Transylvania with Romania. It interrogates the intentionality of architectural transformations and how this heritage project expresses the frictions between memory narratives centred on the nation and forms of imperial duress and nostalgia. It traces how the after-lives of empire materialize in the built environment, as they do in the attitudes and yearnings of the cultural elite. Moreover, it reflects on parallels between European post-imperial and Global South post-colonial nation-building.
A shortened version of this paper has been published in Global Society, 2019
The (re)claiming and memorialization of sites associated with political violence occurred in the ... more The (re)claiming and memorialization of sites associated with political violence occurred in the aftermath of dictatorships in both Europe and Latin America. This article examines the circulation of such practices of memorializing sites, including memorial architectural design and museographic approaches within and between the regions of the Southern Cone of Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. It explores the ways in which various actors circulate memorial architectural practice between so-called 'peripheries'. It analyses circulations at the regional levels and then focuses on the analysis of two ongoing memorialization debates in Croatia and Chile that show fissures to regional memorialisation regimes. The article shows how transnational circulations are not only based on structures of professional networks and global memory and memorial architecture regimes, but often proceed from encounters, individual agencies and trajectories and are complicated by the multidirectionality of memories.
Multi-ethnic Cities in the Mediterranean World. Controversial Heritage and Divided Memories from the Nineteenth through the Twentieth Centuries, 2020
The chapter discusses the challenges of reconstructing cityscapes featuring heritage of multiple ... more The chapter discusses the challenges of reconstructing cityscapes featuring heritage of multiple groups after conflict and urbicide. The two cities discussed are Beirut and Sarajevo, which share the urban imaginary of a cosmopolitan past with Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities living side by side (the latter now largely gone), followed by long years of urban warfare and segregation, and then by contested processes of post-war architectural and political reconstruction. The chapter examines how war and reconstruction in the late twentieth century have challenged the cosmopolitan imaginary of the two cities. First, it discusses the emergence of this urban imaginary, while analyzing the correspondence of the spatial and social histories of Beirut and Sarajevo. Second, it examines the destruction of cosmopolitan heritage during the recent wars, discussing its conceptualization as urbicide. In a third section, the focus is on the process of post-war reconstruction. The chapter contrasts the two cities with regards to the political arrangements of the post-war era and the different approaches on memory of war, discussing their impacts on reconstruction. It analyses the tools of urban reconstruction, the uses of ‘intentional’ architecture, urban memory and monuments in reshaping the cityscapes. Moreover, it reflects on how the cosmopolitan imaginary of the pre-war populations is challenged by the presence of mostly rural refugees, perceived as antagonistic to cosmopolitanism by the former, leading to what I call “exclusionary cosmopolitanism”.
History & Anthropology, 2019
A version of this paper was published in History & Anthropology: Gruia Bădescu (2019): Traces of ... more A version of this paper was published in History & Anthropology: Gruia Bădescu (2019): Traces of empire: Architectural heritage, imperial
memory and post-war reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut, History and Anthropology, DOI:
10.1080/02757206.2019.1617708
Abstract:
Beirut and Sarajevo share a long Ottoman past followed by urban expansion under the protectorate of further imperial rule—of the French and Habsburg Empires, respectively, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This article examines how the architectural heritage of empires in the two cities has been transformed, reimagined and mobilized through urban post-war reconstruction by a number of actors: local authorities and politicians, architects, international organizations and investors. Discussing the tensions between the memory of empire and contemporary nation-building processes, the essay argues that the politics of memory and amnesia surrounding the recent wars shape and reconfigure the memory and heritage of empire. Moreover, it reflects how the reshaping of urban space acts both as an arena and as an enhancer of the politics and practices of memory and amnesia.
Nationalities Papers, 2019
Fifteen years after the 1999 NATO bombings, a number of emblematic buildings in Belgrade still li... more Fifteen years after the 1999 NATO bombings, a number of emblematic buildings in Belgrade still lie in ruins and are at the center of debates surrounding their reconstruction. This article examines the collective memory and narratives of the NATO bombings through a spatial lens, looking at how architectural discourses of reconstruction relate to multiple understandings and narratives of the bombings themselves. It focuses on how architects in Belgrade discuss and envision the reconstruction of buildings such as the Generalštab in relationship to the collective memories of political violence and war. The article explores the continuum between calls for full restoration and memorialization, by discussing how architects relate to the bombing of 1999 on personal and professional levels, and how narratives of the bombing influence architectural visions for the reconstruction itself. All in all, the article argues that architectural reconstruction, collective memory, and national identity shape each other. On the one hand, reconstruction responds to collective memory as architects make sense of the collective memory of war; on the other hand, reconstructed urban space reshapes memory by creating a new cadre matériel for remembrance.
Urban Geopolitics, 2018
Beirut and Sarajevo share antagonistic urban imaginaries of cosmopolitanism and contestation, as ... more Beirut and Sarajevo share antagonistic urban imaginaries of cosmopolitanism and contestation, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This chapter scrutinizes how, despite these similarities, the process of urban reconstruction after the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995) respectively, produced very different urban outcomes through a planning framework resulting from contrasting post-war political settlements. While Sarajevo’s post-war political configuration institutionalized forms of spatial segregation, the Lebanese government’s vision for downtown Beirut aimed to represent religious diversity and coexistence, but installed nonetheless new divisions, based on fear, security and class differences. The chapter argues that in these particular contexts, the city does not emerge as an autonomous body that can circumvent national politics, but becomes instead an arena of at times conflicting geopolitical articulations of state-level politics and local dynamics.
Geografiska Annaler, 2016
Starting from Verdery and Chari's (2009) discussion of how postcolonial lenses are useful in unde... more Starting from Verdery and Chari's (2009) discussion of how postcolonial lenses are useful in understanding postsocial-ism, this article examines Sarajevo as a postsocialist city as an arena of postcolonial practices, processes and relationships. The city discussed, Sarajevo, provides a rich example of entanglements and relationships, both historical and of more recent origin. The article discusses with a postcolonial lens processes of urban reconstruction , specific to Sarajevo as a " post-conflict city " , but focuses on later urban development patterns, which in fact echo the general trends of postsocialist urban transitions in the broader region. As such, the article aims to unpack how the flows of capital reflect a postcolonial configuration of relationships between local elites, international actors and urban space. The case of Turkish investments reflects an increasing re-forging of ties between the metropole and the former province of the Ottoman Empire. New relationships also emerge, but with similar dynamics – the cases of Saudi investment and the construction of the US Embassy are explored to highlight the role of the local elites. The article argues that the postcoloni-al lens is useful to explore the relationship between the local elites and international capital in postsocialist cities, highlighting processes , practices, and relationships that are complementary to political economy-based urban geographies.
This paper examines the memory and narratives of the 1999 NATO bombings through a spatial lens, d... more This paper examines the memory and narratives of the 1999 NATO bombings through a spatial lens, discussing how the debates surrounding memorial architecture reflect the multiple, and at times conflicting, understandings of the NATO bombing. By analysing the competition to reconstruct Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) from its ruins, this article discusses the tensions and challenges brought by narratives representing victimhood in Belgrade after 1999. It examines how understandings of victimhood have been spatialized through urban memorials, situating the RTS competition in the wider landscape of memorial representations of the NATO bombing in Serbia. Developed using a bottom-up process, the competition for the RTS memorial reflects both the opportunities and the limits of memorial architecture. While the competition and overall debates mirror general trends of memorial architecture in the context of European politics of regret and trauma, the limited scope of the memorial and its marginality in the cityscape both reflect and enhance the continuing obfuscation of the past in Serbia. Fifteen years after the NATO bombing, a memorial park named 'Lest We Forget' was inaugurated in Belgrade's Košutnjak forest. 1 Located in front of a studio of Radio Television Serbia (RTS), the memorial consisted of 16 hornbeam trees, one for each fatal casualty of the bombing which actually occurred a few miles away at the headquarters of RTS situated in the centre of the city on 23 April 1999. The bomb-site itself has lain in ruins for years, with only a small memo
This article explores how the process of urban reconstruction and the act of dwelling in postwar ... more This article explores how the process of urban reconstruction and the act of dwelling in postwar Sarajevo were connected to the reshaping of postwar identities in BiH, as well as to the (re)creation of a sense of place and a sense of belonging for prewar residents and new residents alike. Interviews with architects, urban planners and residents from a variety of backgrounds were used to understand city-making and home-making processes. In the first part, the article discusses the framework and process of urban reconstruction in the city of Sarajevo and the city of East Sarajevo, analysing how nation-building and international capital reshape urban space. In the second part, the article explores how prewar Sarajevans and displaced people in Sarajevo perceive the city as their home and its spatial and social reconfiguration as part of home-making, the process of investing spaces with the meaning of home. The article argues that ambivalence and fluidity reshape the dwelling space defined by postwar settlements and international capital flow with distinctive agendas.
Reconstructing Sarajevo, 2014
This thought piece explores post-war urban reconstruction in Sarajevo from the perspective of the... more This thought piece explores post-war urban reconstruction in Sarajevo from the perspective of the societal process of dealing with the past. In the complicated canvas of urgent reconstruction needs, including housing shortages and infrastructure repair, funding considerations and local and national politics, the paper inquires what is the place of the process of 'coming to terms with this past' in urban reconstruction. It introduces key threads of the multidimensional relationship between reconstruction and dealing with the past for the LSE Cities project Reconstructing Sarajevo. The author coordinated the LSE Cities Programme urban design workshop which originated the publication.
Development, 2011
Gruia Ba˘descu looks at Beirut 20 years after the Civil War. He argues that metropolitan Beirut i... more Gruia Ba˘descu looks at Beirut 20 years after the Civil War. He argues that metropolitan Beirut is once again a successful economic center for the region as a whole, but in order to complete a sustainable Beirut, the city needs to prioritize public transport infrastructure and make its public spaces more inclusive. It needs to improve its economic, environmental and social impacts as a whole. The ability of the state to control urbanization through townplanning regulations has been very limited in Lebanon. He argues that a major step would be future dialogues between policymakers, businessmen and representatives of civil society in order to build co-operation; trust and partnership between these groups are important aspects to sustaining mobility.
Geopolitics, 2022
Connecting urban geopolitics with critical geopolitics, this article highlights the urban geopoli... more Connecting urban geopolitics with critical geopolitics, this article highlights the urban geopolitical significance of learning from the European Southeast. Urban geopolitics has often made reference to the European Southeast in discussions of urban warfare, conflict and contestation. In particular, Sarajevo and discussions of urbicide played a seminal role in understanding the contemporary relationship between conflict and the built environment. Beyond this attention to the 1990s wars, this article shows that contemporary urban transformations in the region reflect novel processes and alignments that can contribute to the larger project of rethinking urban geopolitics: allegedly ‘contested’ and ‘ordinary’ cities in the region reflect today a reshaping of practices of material and immaterial urban geopolitics highlighting transnational and global entanglements beyond the East-West and North-South conceptual and geopolitical divides. By employing a critical geopolitical analysis of the urban, the article discusses performative acts of power in urban space and the reconfiguration of the built environment in two cities in the region as a nexus of geopolitical processes, well beyond the wars of the 1990s: Sarajevo, arguably a divided city in a contested state, and Belgrade, an ‘ordinary’ capital city of a nation-state, albeit uncontested capital of a country with contested territories. The article highlights the emergence of newer relationships beyond the East-West divide, particularly with the Middle East, specifically articulated through urban space reconfigurations. It shows how the European South-East reflects that the urban geopolitical goes beyond the usual lens of ‘contested’ urban space to ‘ordinary’ cities, which become arenas of multi-scalar geopolitics.
This article investigates the relationship between spatial reconfigurations and peace by examinin... more This article investigates the relationship between spatial reconfigurations and peace by examining the practice I call syncretic place-making, identified in cities experiencing conflict. I suggest that this spatial practice reflects the promise of Hannah Arendt's political vision of a world in common, materialized in the city. I discuss architectural conceptualizations such as the Cypriot 2021 Venice Biennial entry and theorize from architectural practices of resistance identified in Sarajevo, defining syncretic place-making as a process of drawing from multiple traditions to celebrate coexistence in space. The article reflects on both the potential and challenges that such place-making has for conflict cities.
Contested Urban Spaces: Monuments, Traces, and Decentered Memories, 2022
The chapter discusses the connection between urban reconstruction and contested memories in post-... more The chapter discusses the connection between urban reconstruction and contested memories in post-war contexts. While architectural approaches usually circulate between a variety of urban situations, this chapter highlights that reconstruction is not only an architectural problem, but one of dealing with the past. By focusing on two former Yugoslav cities that experienced wars in the 1990s, it underlines the relational and situated nature of reconstructions and ruins as traces of war. It analyzes the traces of wars in both the material and the social fabric of the city and argues that urban reconstructions and ruins have to be situated in local contested memory landscapes.
Memory Politics and Populism in Southeastern Europe, 2021
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2021
In the last three decades, a ‘memory fever’ concerning past dictatorships and political violence ... more In the last three decades, a ‘memory fever’ concerning past dictatorships and political violence emerged both in the Latin American Southern Cone and in Central and Eastern Europe. Both regions witnessed the creation and then consolidation of memory regimes related to remembering military dictatorships and state socialism, respectively. This article interrogates how transnational migration experiences between the two regions challenge nationally framed memory regimes, with a focus on Chile, Romania, and Croatia. By tracing individual migrants and exiles between Romania and Chile, as well as the Croatian Chilean diaspora, this article discusses the entanglements between Chile and Southeastern Europe in the remembrance of the Pinochet and Ceausescu dictatorships, as well as the Tito´s Yugoslavia. First, it shows how migrants who experienced dictatorships in both regions operate their own vernacular comparisons between the two experiences. These reframe the tropes existing in dominant memory narratives in each country and create hierarchies of suffering and oppression (i.e. in the case of the Romania–Chile comparison, with a more negative valuation of the Ceauşescu dictatorship). Second, by discussing intergenerational memory for those who did not experience dictatorship, as well as diasporic memory formations (e.g. Croat Chileans), it shows that, in these instances, comparisons are more under the influence of dominant national memory frames, but also of memory entrepreneurs who mobilize specific threads. Moreover, the article discusses how these various migrant experiences constitute and reframe senses of belonging, interrogating both the formulations of home and transnationality.
Thinking Through Ruins, 2021
Contemporary Southeastern Europe , 2021
This article examines the reshaping of Belgrade's memorial landscape after the Second World War a... more This article examines the reshaping of Belgrade's memorial landscape after the Second World War and after the 1999 NATO bombings, with a focus on the role of architects. As such, the paper shifts the scale of memory debates in two ways: first, from the national to the urban; second, from 'classical' memory entrepreneurs of the political realm to city makers, usually perceived as 'technical' actors, but, as the paper argues, in fact relevant memory actors both through the way they influence sites of memory and through memory debates. The article places the engagement of architects with narratives of heroism and victimhood in Serbia in a historical perspective, examining the shift in memorialisation after the Second World War. It then discusses the hesitant approaches on engaging with ruins of the 1999 NATO bombing, highlighting frictions between various actors in the Generalštab debate. Finally, it analyses the distinctive memorial engagement with the ruins of the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) building by examining the bottom-up process of the competition for the RTS memorial. The article highlights that, even if not intentionally or by embracing memory-work, architecture and architects play a role in memory processes, while deeply enmeshed in constellations of political and economic power.
Centra European Horizons, 2021
The city of Rijeka/Fiume underwent an array of transitions in the long twentieth century, from th... more The city of Rijeka/Fiume underwent an array of transitions in the long twentieth
century, from the port of Hungary in the Dual Monarchy to a free
city, to D´Annunzio´s Italian Regency of Carnaro, annexation by Italy, incorporation
into Yugoslavia, and eventually the independence of Croatia. The
article examines the processes of urban reconstruction and architectural reconfigurations
in the city as “frontier urbanism”, building on Wendy Pullan’s
(2011) discussion of how various actors employ architectural and place-making
practices to secure the state in contested urban space. The article traces
Rijeka/Fiume´s urban development as a window of fixating state identities
in the built environment throughout the century, focusing on the aftermath
of the Second World War. It examines the urban transformations of the city
as the demographic landscape was reshaped after the departure of the local
Italian-speaking majority and the arrival of workers from various parts of
Yugoslavia, but also from Italy. By analysing decisions to rebuild or not
buildings damaged by war, as well as the demolition of the 1943-built votive
temple in Mlaka, the article inquires how reconstruction and urban planning
became avenues to secure the state at its new frontiers.
Agency in Transnational Memory Politics, 2020
This chapter discusses the memorialization of sites that are intrinsically related to transnation... more This chapter discusses the memorialization of sites that are intrinsically related to transnational processes. It examines the emergence in the Latin American Southern Cone of a regional regime of site memorialization as a process of transnational memory space making by analysing agency at different scales. It discusses how transnational circulations and entanglements of various actors played a role in the shaping of sites of memory. Moreover, it problematizes the memorialization of sites specifically referring to transnational political violence by scrutinizing the challenges to transnational place-making of such sites.
Cultural Studies, 2020
This article examines the relationship between architectural transformations and the reshaping of... more This article examines the relationship between architectural transformations and the reshaping of memory in post-imperial urban space. It reflects on two forms of symbolic violence: first, iconoclastic acts of reshaping space to reflect national self-determination and moving away from empire, and second, acts that embody the recovery of imperial legacies. It analyzes the recent restoration of the Habsburg-built Alba Iulia citadel in the eve of Romania’s Centennial celebrations of the 1918 Alba Iulia assembly which proclaimed the unification of Transylvania with Romania. It interrogates the intentionality of architectural transformations and how this heritage project expresses the frictions between memory narratives centred on the nation and forms of imperial duress and nostalgia. It traces how the after-lives of empire materialize in the built environment, as they do in the attitudes and yearnings of the cultural elite. Moreover, it reflects on parallels between European post-imperial and Global South post-colonial nation-building.
A shortened version of this paper has been published in Global Society, 2019
The (re)claiming and memorialization of sites associated with political violence occurred in the ... more The (re)claiming and memorialization of sites associated with political violence occurred in the aftermath of dictatorships in both Europe and Latin America. This article examines the circulation of such practices of memorializing sites, including memorial architectural design and museographic approaches within and between the regions of the Southern Cone of Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. It explores the ways in which various actors circulate memorial architectural practice between so-called 'peripheries'. It analyses circulations at the regional levels and then focuses on the analysis of two ongoing memorialization debates in Croatia and Chile that show fissures to regional memorialisation regimes. The article shows how transnational circulations are not only based on structures of professional networks and global memory and memorial architecture regimes, but often proceed from encounters, individual agencies and trajectories and are complicated by the multidirectionality of memories.
Multi-ethnic Cities in the Mediterranean World. Controversial Heritage and Divided Memories from the Nineteenth through the Twentieth Centuries, 2020
The chapter discusses the challenges of reconstructing cityscapes featuring heritage of multiple ... more The chapter discusses the challenges of reconstructing cityscapes featuring heritage of multiple groups after conflict and urbicide. The two cities discussed are Beirut and Sarajevo, which share the urban imaginary of a cosmopolitan past with Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities living side by side (the latter now largely gone), followed by long years of urban warfare and segregation, and then by contested processes of post-war architectural and political reconstruction. The chapter examines how war and reconstruction in the late twentieth century have challenged the cosmopolitan imaginary of the two cities. First, it discusses the emergence of this urban imaginary, while analyzing the correspondence of the spatial and social histories of Beirut and Sarajevo. Second, it examines the destruction of cosmopolitan heritage during the recent wars, discussing its conceptualization as urbicide. In a third section, the focus is on the process of post-war reconstruction. The chapter contrasts the two cities with regards to the political arrangements of the post-war era and the different approaches on memory of war, discussing their impacts on reconstruction. It analyses the tools of urban reconstruction, the uses of ‘intentional’ architecture, urban memory and monuments in reshaping the cityscapes. Moreover, it reflects on how the cosmopolitan imaginary of the pre-war populations is challenged by the presence of mostly rural refugees, perceived as antagonistic to cosmopolitanism by the former, leading to what I call “exclusionary cosmopolitanism”.
History & Anthropology, 2019
A version of this paper was published in History & Anthropology: Gruia Bădescu (2019): Traces of ... more A version of this paper was published in History & Anthropology: Gruia Bădescu (2019): Traces of empire: Architectural heritage, imperial
memory and post-war reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut, History and Anthropology, DOI:
10.1080/02757206.2019.1617708
Abstract:
Beirut and Sarajevo share a long Ottoman past followed by urban expansion under the protectorate of further imperial rule—of the French and Habsburg Empires, respectively, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This article examines how the architectural heritage of empires in the two cities has been transformed, reimagined and mobilized through urban post-war reconstruction by a number of actors: local authorities and politicians, architects, international organizations and investors. Discussing the tensions between the memory of empire and contemporary nation-building processes, the essay argues that the politics of memory and amnesia surrounding the recent wars shape and reconfigure the memory and heritage of empire. Moreover, it reflects how the reshaping of urban space acts both as an arena and as an enhancer of the politics and practices of memory and amnesia.
Nationalities Papers, 2019
Fifteen years after the 1999 NATO bombings, a number of emblematic buildings in Belgrade still li... more Fifteen years after the 1999 NATO bombings, a number of emblematic buildings in Belgrade still lie in ruins and are at the center of debates surrounding their reconstruction. This article examines the collective memory and narratives of the NATO bombings through a spatial lens, looking at how architectural discourses of reconstruction relate to multiple understandings and narratives of the bombings themselves. It focuses on how architects in Belgrade discuss and envision the reconstruction of buildings such as the Generalštab in relationship to the collective memories of political violence and war. The article explores the continuum between calls for full restoration and memorialization, by discussing how architects relate to the bombing of 1999 on personal and professional levels, and how narratives of the bombing influence architectural visions for the reconstruction itself. All in all, the article argues that architectural reconstruction, collective memory, and national identity shape each other. On the one hand, reconstruction responds to collective memory as architects make sense of the collective memory of war; on the other hand, reconstructed urban space reshapes memory by creating a new cadre matériel for remembrance.
Urban Geopolitics, 2018
Beirut and Sarajevo share antagonistic urban imaginaries of cosmopolitanism and contestation, as ... more Beirut and Sarajevo share antagonistic urban imaginaries of cosmopolitanism and contestation, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This chapter scrutinizes how, despite these similarities, the process of urban reconstruction after the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995) respectively, produced very different urban outcomes through a planning framework resulting from contrasting post-war political settlements. While Sarajevo’s post-war political configuration institutionalized forms of spatial segregation, the Lebanese government’s vision for downtown Beirut aimed to represent religious diversity and coexistence, but installed nonetheless new divisions, based on fear, security and class differences. The chapter argues that in these particular contexts, the city does not emerge as an autonomous body that can circumvent national politics, but becomes instead an arena of at times conflicting geopolitical articulations of state-level politics and local dynamics.
Geografiska Annaler, 2016
Starting from Verdery and Chari's (2009) discussion of how postcolonial lenses are useful in unde... more Starting from Verdery and Chari's (2009) discussion of how postcolonial lenses are useful in understanding postsocial-ism, this article examines Sarajevo as a postsocialist city as an arena of postcolonial practices, processes and relationships. The city discussed, Sarajevo, provides a rich example of entanglements and relationships, both historical and of more recent origin. The article discusses with a postcolonial lens processes of urban reconstruction , specific to Sarajevo as a " post-conflict city " , but focuses on later urban development patterns, which in fact echo the general trends of postsocialist urban transitions in the broader region. As such, the article aims to unpack how the flows of capital reflect a postcolonial configuration of relationships between local elites, international actors and urban space. The case of Turkish investments reflects an increasing re-forging of ties between the metropole and the former province of the Ottoman Empire. New relationships also emerge, but with similar dynamics – the cases of Saudi investment and the construction of the US Embassy are explored to highlight the role of the local elites. The article argues that the postcoloni-al lens is useful to explore the relationship between the local elites and international capital in postsocialist cities, highlighting processes , practices, and relationships that are complementary to political economy-based urban geographies.
This paper examines the memory and narratives of the 1999 NATO bombings through a spatial lens, d... more This paper examines the memory and narratives of the 1999 NATO bombings through a spatial lens, discussing how the debates surrounding memorial architecture reflect the multiple, and at times conflicting, understandings of the NATO bombing. By analysing the competition to reconstruct Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) from its ruins, this article discusses the tensions and challenges brought by narratives representing victimhood in Belgrade after 1999. It examines how understandings of victimhood have been spatialized through urban memorials, situating the RTS competition in the wider landscape of memorial representations of the NATO bombing in Serbia. Developed using a bottom-up process, the competition for the RTS memorial reflects both the opportunities and the limits of memorial architecture. While the competition and overall debates mirror general trends of memorial architecture in the context of European politics of regret and trauma, the limited scope of the memorial and its marginality in the cityscape both reflect and enhance the continuing obfuscation of the past in Serbia. Fifteen years after the NATO bombing, a memorial park named 'Lest We Forget' was inaugurated in Belgrade's Košutnjak forest. 1 Located in front of a studio of Radio Television Serbia (RTS), the memorial consisted of 16 hornbeam trees, one for each fatal casualty of the bombing which actually occurred a few miles away at the headquarters of RTS situated in the centre of the city on 23 April 1999. The bomb-site itself has lain in ruins for years, with only a small memo
This article explores how the process of urban reconstruction and the act of dwelling in postwar ... more This article explores how the process of urban reconstruction and the act of dwelling in postwar Sarajevo were connected to the reshaping of postwar identities in BiH, as well as to the (re)creation of a sense of place and a sense of belonging for prewar residents and new residents alike. Interviews with architects, urban planners and residents from a variety of backgrounds were used to understand city-making and home-making processes. In the first part, the article discusses the framework and process of urban reconstruction in the city of Sarajevo and the city of East Sarajevo, analysing how nation-building and international capital reshape urban space. In the second part, the article explores how prewar Sarajevans and displaced people in Sarajevo perceive the city as their home and its spatial and social reconfiguration as part of home-making, the process of investing spaces with the meaning of home. The article argues that ambivalence and fluidity reshape the dwelling space defined by postwar settlements and international capital flow with distinctive agendas.
Reconstructing Sarajevo, 2014
This thought piece explores post-war urban reconstruction in Sarajevo from the perspective of the... more This thought piece explores post-war urban reconstruction in Sarajevo from the perspective of the societal process of dealing with the past. In the complicated canvas of urgent reconstruction needs, including housing shortages and infrastructure repair, funding considerations and local and national politics, the paper inquires what is the place of the process of 'coming to terms with this past' in urban reconstruction. It introduces key threads of the multidimensional relationship between reconstruction and dealing with the past for the LSE Cities project Reconstructing Sarajevo. The author coordinated the LSE Cities Programme urban design workshop which originated the publication.
Development, 2011
Gruia Ba˘descu looks at Beirut 20 years after the Civil War. He argues that metropolitan Beirut i... more Gruia Ba˘descu looks at Beirut 20 years after the Civil War. He argues that metropolitan Beirut is once again a successful economic center for the region as a whole, but in order to complete a sustainable Beirut, the city needs to prioritize public transport infrastructure and make its public spaces more inclusive. It needs to improve its economic, environmental and social impacts as a whole. The ability of the state to control urbanization through townplanning regulations has been very limited in Lebanon. He argues that a major step would be future dialogues between policymakers, businessmen and representatives of civil society in order to build co-operation; trust and partnership between these groups are important aspects to sustaining mobility.
IN: Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City, Michele Lancione and Colin McFarlane (eds.), 2021
We suggest that these cities offer multiple vantage points to think globally.. We do not want to ... more We suggest that these cities offer multiple vantage points to think globally.. We do not want to dwell here on the pitfalls of using the term ‘postsocialism,’ but rather point to new analytics and metaphors helpful in making sense of differences and erasures in the efforts to capture socialist and postsocialist formations. If understanding postsocialism as a temporal and spatial container (legacy) is, indeed, obsolete, what analytic language can we use to capture socialist and postsocialist formations that persist in different parts of the world? In the following section, we indicate three areas where socialism and postsocialism seem likely to endure. We close with some remarks about analytic engagements with postsocialist cities as a form of comparative global urbanism theorization.
Martor, 2018
Museums, these quintessentially modern institutions, are built to last. Together with archives, ... more Museums, these quintessentially modern institutions, are built to last. Together with archives, they preserve the memory, embodied in objects, of a given community. The terminology used in museums clearly shows this drive towards permanence. Nothing more telling than the term “permanent exhibition” whose life-span in contemporary museums is shortening as we write, but continues to be used widely despite its obvious internal contradiction.
“So, when do you plan to change your permanent exhibition?” is the question commonly asked of museum curators, even when their “permanent exhibition” has just been opened to the public. This special issue of MARTOR journal seeks to offer different answers to this question, from diverse corners of the planet, from former Yugoslavia to Senegal, from Bucharest to Rome, diving not only into the “when” but equally into the “why” and “how” museums change.
This conference is the keystone event of the Places of Amnesia working group at Cambridge. Place... more This conference is the keystone event of the Places of Amnesia working group at Cambridge. Places of Amnesia has been an interdisciplinary research group originally organised by graduate students at the University of Cambridge in 2014, and hosted by CRASSH. Thr group has looked at how societies forget and seek to establish whether specific sites (people, events, knowledge) can be viewed as loci of forgetting or, recalling and critiquing Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, be studied as lieux de amnésie.
In 2014/2015 we held 12 seminars at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. We were honoured to host truly engaging talks by Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Wulf Kansteiner, Paul Connerton, Xun Zhou, Emiliano Perra, Andrew Herscher, and Lea David among others, as well as to organise two screenings of relevant documentaries.
The 2016 conference featured over 60 presenters from 20 countries and had Carlo Ginzburg and Paul Connerton as keynote speakers .
Conference Programme Since the end of the First World War, cities and regions in Europe, particu... more Conference Programme
Since the end of the First World War, cities and regions in Europe, particularly in the eastern half of the continent, witnessed frequent changes in borders. Previous research on border change and territorial transfers has focused on the actions of nationalizing regimes after the 1919 Paris conference, as well as the post-1945 transfer of territories in East-Central Europe and ensuing flight, expulsions and repopulation programs (Rieber 2000, Ther and Siljak 2001, Ballinger 2003, Crainz Pupo and Salvatici 2008, Snyder 2010, Ferrara 2011, Thum 2011, Reinisch, and White 2011, Ferrara and Pianciola 2012, Service 2013, Sezneva 2013). Recent research has analysed how states appropriated cities and regions they gained from neighbours (Karch 2018), and, in the case of socialist states, used urban remodelling as an opportunity to showcase socialist modernization projects, as occurred in Lviv, Ukraine (Amar 2015) and in Yugoslavia (Kulić and Mrduljaš 2012, Le Normand 2014). While research on transferred cities and territories has tended to see border changes primarily as ruptures tearing people from their old lives and cutting cities off from their previous national frameworks, this emphasis is called into question by scholarship by geographers and sociologists who comprehend cities not as discrete entities but as nodes within regional, national and global networks. From this perspective, cities are spaces in which flows of different types (goods, labour, capital, information) enter, converge, and exit, connecting these cities with other circuits and points across the globe (Massey 1991, Castells 2002, Harvey 2003).
This conference seeks contributions that showcase research on history, memory, and mapping tools in the context of European border changes in the twentieth century. We are interested in highlighting research on the experience of cities and regions that have undergone border changes in the twentieth century in order to showcase histories of transition, to examine the reshaping of local and regional memory practices, and to explore the variety of research methods that might be used to conceptualize and visualize change.
Keynote speakers:
Dominique Kirchner Reill, Associate Professor, University of Miami, author of Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford University Press, 2012.) presenting her new book The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire.
Anne Kelly Knowles, McBride Professor of History at the University of Maine, editor of Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008) and Geographies of the Holocaust (2014), Guggenheim fellow (2015).
Brendan Karch, Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University, author of Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia, 1848–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Olga Sezneva, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, whose work has examined the connection between the urban built environment and social memory (particularly in the case of Kaliningrad/Königsberg), human mobility, and digital technologies; part of the artistic collective Moving Matters Traveling Workshop.
Organisers: The conference is organized by the Univeristy of Rijeka, Centre for Advanced Studies – South East Europe, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project Rijeka in Flux: Borders and Urban Change after World War II, the Memoryscapes project’s Seasons of Power flagship programme for Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities”.
International conference, Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest, 3-5 December 201... more International conference, Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest, 3-5 December 2018.
Conveners: Gruia Badescu, Nelly Bekus, Raluca Grosescu
This conference brings together museum practitioners and academics working in the field of dealing with the past in order to discuss the transnational circulation of ideas, cooperation and tensions between memorialization processes of right wing and left wing dictatorships in Europe. The conference aims to enhance collaboration between academics and practitioners and create dialogue between institutions whose activities are often confined to national borders. This conference is supported by the AHRC “Care for the Future” (UK) and Labex “Les Passés dans Le Présent” (FR) joint funded project The Criminalization of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective.
A troubled and segmented East-European history has given rise to a troubled and segmented museum ... more A troubled and segmented East-European history has given rise to a troubled and segmented museum history. Museums in Central and Eastern Europe have found themselves, time and again, faced with difficult and uncomfortable choices. Immediately after the Second World War, museums had to update their exhibitions in order to narrate radically different stories. One of the major changes also included exhibiting the socialist present, such as the accomplishments of the regime, and the recent past: the violent, revolutionary coming to power of communist parties all over Eastern Europe became part of the permanent exhibition of local and national museums. Museums also had to literally hide entire collections that were suddenly found inappropriate. After the fall of communism, these collections were brought back to museum halls (although much of their history, documentation and context had been lost) and it was time for the communist collections to become bothersome and thus be hidden or even destroyed. The workshop seeks to explore the specificities of reaction to political and social change in the context of museums and heritage sites. Museums could be considered in terms of their historiographic and political foundations, as the outcome of mobilizations of a wide variety of actors who have contributed to their creation or their dismantling (museum professionals, architects, academics, public historians, victims' associations and other cultural brokers). In some contexts, the heritage process has contributed to a discursive criminalisation of previous regimes – for instance the transformation of detention centres in museums or memory sites. In others, it has facilitated implicit forms of rehabilitation, under the guise of commercially exploiting the legacy – architectural, artistic, political – of the former regime. Finally, a significant number of museums and memory sites were faced with the challenge and task of reinvesting their collections with a new meaning and a new narrative, framed in new historiographies and nation-building projects. Within this framework, our workshop will bring together contributions that respond to one or more of the following aspects, relating to the central concern on whether museum displays and heritage sites have been remade to conform to new scientific and political narratives/ agendas:-will examine case-studies of metamorphoses of East-European museums and built heritage during the Cold War and in post-communism.-will discuss whether museums are sometimes in the vanguard of social and political change or are they merely reacting to societal transformations.-will analyse how museums and heritage sites have been mobilized to qualify, and at times to criminalize the socialist period-will seek to highlight the emergence and circulation of heritage models at national, regional and trans-regional levels, evident in the museums established in former detention centres, in the management of heritage assets related to past dictatorial regimes, and in the reconfigurations of exhibitions in museums around the area.
The Balzan Prize Research Group hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of K... more The Balzan Prize Research Group hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz is proposing an intense summer school for MA students and PhD candidates in the first semesters of their projects. It is aimed at students and young researchers interested in the making of memory in European cities. Participating students will be introduced to central concepts and methods of Memory and Urban Studies and their relationship to space in urban contexts. By pairing theoretical debates with case studies, we also aim to explore the emergence of memory practices ‘from below’ that reshape collective memory and identity, analysing how they relate to official politics of the past.