Before the War, War, After the War: Urban Imageries for Urban Resilience (original) (raw)
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The aim of this paper is to analyze citizens’ strategies for surviving dangerous wartime urban conditions in Sarajevo, as made evident through different documents—photos, videos, and architectural drawings—produced by many authors during and after the war. Heterogeneous in its materiality, this study relies on the personal and professional life experiences of each citizen-author. It sketches the social and physical components of the city, at a time when the urban environment was made perilous due to continuous bombing, and a lack of public transport, electricity, water, and food. In the period between 1992 and 1996 in Sarajevo and in other Bosnian cities, survival became the most important activity for citizens. The inability of the city and the people living in it to function normally demanded as they developed innovative surrogates for the everyday objects not available to them—invented objects for cooking, lightening their spaces, sleeping, and self-protection. Likewise, they developed alternate models of the safe transportation of goods and bodies, along with other urban functions. Their war documentation is extremely important, as Sarajevo's destruction, which quickly transformed the prewar, compact city into the ruin—was and continues to be difficult to describe, document, and represent. Using wartime Sarajevo as case study, this article examines the importance of collective creation of documents about citizens’ adaptation to extreme urban conditions as well as their contribution to the emerging studies on war architectural and urban resilience. Considering these documents is central to the formation and maintenance of a collective memory, as citizens undertake post-war reconstruction efforts, as artists and writers develop materials for art projects and documentary films on the urban wartime conditions, and as scholars craft academic research and studies about the war across disciplines—architecture, urbanism, sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies. Finally, this article takes media expressions as methodological tools for the reading and analyzing urban transformations and resilient efforts to respond to such changes during the war. The aim is for these studies to be used as well for other urban emergencies, such as crises due to natural disasters or the shrinking of de-industrialized cities.
Sarajevo Redux: Socio-Spatial Outcomes and the Perpetuation of Fragility in a Post- Conflict City
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Urban Management at Technische Universität Berlin, 2019
In an increasingly urbanized world, new constructs concerning urban fragility, the changed nature and increasing urbanization of armed conflict and emerging conceptual frameworks for urban post-conflict interventions present new discourses for urban planners and post-conflict first responders to consider. Cities with the highest level of fragility tend to be in states destabilized by ongoing intrastate conflict and yet even after negotiated peace settlements recovering cities appear particularly vulnerable to the accumulation of urban risks and tensions associated with higher levels of urban fragility. Working as part of an international post-conflict intervention recovery effort, how can urban planners contribute to achieving better long-term outcomes of peace and stability in the urban post-conflict setting? By conducting a macro and meso level case study analysis of Sarajevo's international post-conflict intervention through the lens of the social contract, liberal peace, and collective memory theoretical frameworks, this thesis seeks to identify strategic approaches and outcomes of Sarajevo's post-conflict intervention process and the related long-term impacts of these outcomes at the municipal and neighborhood scale. More than two decades after the end of armed conflict, the greater Sarajevo metropolitan area remains peaceful, yet partitioned; social, yet segregated; and, functional, yet fragile. Though limited by the contextualized nature of urban post-conflict settings, this analysis might be useful for other urban post-conflict situations. Drawing from the results of the case study analysis, as well as from other relevant literature sources and related professional field experiences, this thesis hypothesizes that the early integration of urban planners with initial humanitarian and stabilization first responders as part of international post-conflict intervention recovery efforts can result in better long-term outcomes of peace and stability. Keywords: Urban Post-Conflict Recovery, Urban Planning, Urban Peacebuilding, Collective Memory, Social Contract, Urban Post-Conflict Intervention, Fragile City
Urban restructuring in post-war contexts: the case of Sarajevo
The transition from state-socialism to capitalism has not been the only process reshaping the urban landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe but some cities were a ected by war destructions, like in the Caucus region or in the former Yugoslavia. The case study of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is helpful to understand how the urban transformation is performed in post-war contexts, an arena neglected in the current literature on post-socialist cities. This paper aims at exploring the interplay between postsocialist urban restructuring and the peace-building process. It presents results of a series of Þ eldworks conducted in Sarajevo in 2010 and 2013. It is argued that in spite of the liberal policies implemented by the international community and the belated physical renewal, the transition from socialism to capitalism has been continuously undermined by the local power reconÞ guration carried out during the war. The paper analyses the restructuring policies of the post-war period and its impact on the urban spatial structure. The Þ rst two sections focus on the urban restructuring processes of post-socialist cities also in post-war contexts, in which the nature of the internationally-led reconstruction and peace-building is analysed as di erential processes. Finally, both processes are considered in the case of Sarajevo in relation to the transformation of its urban structure.
Towards an unsustainable urban development in post-war Sarajevo
December 1995, and this is expected to last until 2015. This paper argues that, despite the consensus achieved for developing Sarajevo through strategies aligned with European regulations for sustainability, the built environment of the city has moved in an increasingly unsustainable direction as a result of the need to deal with vulnerable groups in the population and the international policies that tend to promote a neoliberal urban development. The first section of analysis focuses on Sarajevo's existing particular geomorphological constraints on the development of a secure and sustainable built environment. The second section examines the increase in the geomorphological risks of new construction developed after the conflict in relation to the post-war and post-socialist urban processes.
Culture-based urban resilience: post-war recovery of Sarajevo
UNESCO, World Heritage Center web page, 2018
For the citizens of Sarajevo, prioritizing the recovery of life was placed in parallel to the reconstruction of urbanity and cultural heritage. The city's resilience during its siege from 1992 to 1996 and its postwar rehabilitation are a source of lessons learned on the access to postwar recovery of cities. Amra Hadžimuhamedović analyses Sarajevo's recovery in bello and post bellum. She examines how both positive and negative inferences can be gleaned from the actions when examined through the lens of a 3P (people-centred, place-based, policies) approach. While Sarajevo stands today as a vibrant city with a high level of public security, the scars of the war are still prevalent and the ongoing stage of post-recovery is challenging due to ambivalent development goals. According to the author, the recovery process must be based on a critical approach that takes into account the specific cultural, physical and historical context of a city. *The ideas and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors; they are not necessarily those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization. The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. This publication is available in Open Access under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO) license (http://crea-tivecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/). By using the content of this publication, the users accept to be bound by the terms of use of the UNESCO Open Access Repository (http://www.unesco.org/open access/terms-use-ccbysa-en).
Dwelling in the Post-War City: Urban Reconstruction and Home-Making in Sarajevo 1
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.
Sarajevo: Material Mediation and Survival Body
The aim of this text is to propose open methods of analysis of the production and reproduction of space in Sarajevo during the war (1992-1996) as a result of military operations and citizens’ reaction to it. Text itself is a research process that employs different media to create analytical tools and reflective project on the issue of materiality of these entangled spaces, body adaptation and human relations within, codes of knowledge formed on the edge of military war and citizens un-war activities. Our time distance to the end of the Sarajevo siege and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995/1996) allows us to conceive Sarajevo in the wartime as experimental and dynamic space that produced forms of spatial and human systems that were altering the pre-war, planned, practical context and the established images of the everyday life. During the siege of Sarajevo landscape, neighborhoods, streets, buildings, flats or even rooms were used as transitional spaces, between military operations aiming to destroy or defend and citizens’ everyday activities trying to protect themselves and normalize their life. These spaces were made at any scale by military operations and citizens’ reactions to it, transversally, in the ground, under the buildings, on and above the ground, through the walls, without specific spatial order or aesthetics using available natural and artificial materials. Next to the research, there is a pedagogical intention of this text to propose analytical, visual, and spatial languages focusing on the material world of the Sarajevo period in question and non-violent citizens’ adaptive reaction to the war destruction. Finally, the aim is to initiate a research lexicon of words and images that explores transitional and un-war spaces that differ from the terms, symbols of the military operations and aesthetics, from sensational reports of popular media, art and architectural projects that often employ war images and military aesthetics in a way to contribute to the continuation of wars both culturally and spatially.