Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ristic.
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/architecture-urban-space-and-war-ristic/
P A L G R AV E S T U D I E S I N C U LT U R A L H E R I TA G E A N D C O N F L I C T
ARCHITECTURE, URBAN
SPACE AND WAR
THE DESTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION OF SARAJEVO
Mirjana Ristic
Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict
Series Editors
Ihab Saloul
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Britt Baillie
Centre for Urban Conflicts Research
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and
conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war
and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series edi-
tors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective
of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage
appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and media-
tizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as
the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and
reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational
memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reen-
actments of conflicted pasts.
Dr. Ihab Saloul is assistant professor of cultural studies, founding direc-
tor and academic coordinator of the Amsterdam School for Heritage,
Memory and Material Culture (AHM) at University of Amsterdam.
Saloul’s interests include heritage and memory of conflict, narrative the-
ory and identity politics, museum studies and cultural analysis, trauma and
visual culture as well as diaspora and exile in Europe and the Middle East.
Professor Rob van der Laarse is research director of the Amsterdam
School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), and
Westerbork Professor of Heritage of Conflict and War at VU University
Amsterdam. Van der Laarse’s research focuses on (early) modern European
elite and intellectual cultures, cultural landscape, heritage and identity
politics, and the cultural roots and postwar memory of the Holocaust and
other forms of mass violence.
Dr. Britt Baillie is a founding member of the Centre for Urban Conflict
Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a research fellow at the
University of Pretoria. Baillie’s interests include the politicization of cul-
tural heritage, heritage and the city, memory and identity, religion and
conflict, theories of destruction, heritage as commons, contested heritage,
and urban resistance.
Architecture, Urban
Space and War
The Destruction and Reconstruction of Sarajevo
Mirjana Ristic
Institute for Sociology
Technical University of Darmstadt
Darmstadt, Germany
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For my parents and brother
Acknowledgments
This book was derived from my PhD research that I conducted at the
Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne,
from 2007 to 2012. I am thankful to the University of Melbourne for its
academic and financial support. I was fortunate to have been guided by a
team of exceptional scholars: my PhD supervisor—Kim Dovey, and my
PhD Committee Members—Anoma Pieris and Darko Radović. I am
grateful for all that I have learned from you.
This book was written during my Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral
Research Fellowship at TU Darmstadt (2016–2018). I am grateful to the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the funding that I was provided
during this period.
This book would not have been possible without help from Sarajevo
during my fieldwork trips from 2008 to 2017. I am thankful to the kind
staff at a number of public institutions who provided assistance in obtain-
ing research data, including staff at the Archive of the City of Sarajevo,
Library of the City of Sarajevo, Bosniak Institute, Library of the Faculty of
Architecture in Sarajevo, National and University Library of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Association of Architects of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
archives of Television of Sarajevo and Oslobodjenje newspaper, and the
Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am also thankful to
numerous kind people from Sarajevo who have supported my research in
various ways: Ivan Štraus, Tatjana Neidhart, Jelica Kapetanović, Vildana
Jakić, Šukrija Gavranović, Zijad Jusufović, Nijaz Pašić, Said Jamaković,
Ivan Lovrenović, Goran Trogrančić, Enra Soldin, Zoran Doršner, Milomir
Kovačević Strašni, and Selma Kadrić. I would like to extend my gratitude
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 Warscapes: Introduction 1
The City:War Assemblage 4
Mapping Warscapes 8
Sarajevo Warscapes 11
Outline of the Book 18
A Book About Conflict Versus Conflict About a Book 22
References 24
ix
x Contents
5 Resistance 107
Burrowing Underground 108
Adaptation of Urban Morphology 112
Patterns of Wartime Urban Life 117
The Metamorphosis of Sarajevo’s Apartment Buildings 120
Architects as Rebels: Construction as a Weapon Against
Destruction 124
Insurgent Place-making as a Tool for the City’s Defense 126
References 128
6 Rebordering Sarajevo 131
Post-war Sarajevo 131
Place, Discourse, Territory 134
Mapping Spatial Division Between Sarajevo and East Sarajevo 135
Spatial Coding of Urban Territory 136
Spatial Inscriptions of Identity 138
Forgetting Shared Spatial Symbols 144
Border-crossing as a Spatial Practice 145
Intangible Borders 147
References 149
7 Specter of War 153
Covering Wounds: The Parliament and Government Complex 154
Reconstructing as Forgetting: The Oslobodjenje Newspaper
Building 159
Reconstructing as Replicating: City Hall—National Library 162
Invention of Tradition: Post-war Religious Architecture 167
Reconstruction as Conflict by Other Means 170
References 172
Contents
xi
References 225
Index 251
List of Figures
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Warscapes: Introduction
Throughout history, city and war have reshaped each other. From the
ancient polis to the contemporary metropolis, cities have been walled,
besieged, burned down, bombed out, divided, segregated, terrorized and
traumatized. Built environments have provided the battlefields and targets
of war, albeit with different military architectures, strategies and arms. In
contemporary ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 2007), waged since the end of the Cold
War, not only does the cityscape provide an arena for fighting, but archi-
tecture and urban space have also been adapted as military weaponry
(Weizman 2007; Coward 2009; Graham 2010).
For example, the bulldozing of Palestinian settlements by the IDF or
the destruction of cultural heritage in Syrian cities by ISIS operate as a
means of forceful reconfiguration of territories and attacks on collective
memory and identity (Graham 2003; Misselwitz and Rieniets 2006;
Weizman 2007). Attacks on traffic hubs, infrastructure and flows of move-
ment in Middle Eastern and European cities work as instruments of terror
and control over civilian populations (Graham 2004). In the context of
divided cities, walls and checkpoints are built to mark territories and
boundaries, and religious symbols are used to produce homogenous place
identities and marginalize and exclude Others (Calame and Charlesworth
2009; Bollens 2011). Moreover, urban theories and methodologies have
become an integral part of military strategies in the urban fabric. The
Israeli military uses conceptions of space (of the city) enveloped by Deleuze
I delve into these issues by investigating the role of built form and pub-
lic space in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the ethnic-
nationalist conflict during and after the siege of 1992–1996. The focus
4 M. RISTIC
Mapping Warscapes
As outlined above, understanding the spatial dimensions of war involves
the task of ‘digging’ into the complexity of place, which requires multi-
dimensional methods of analysis. In this research, I use urban mapping as
a primary method of spatial analysis, and discourse analysis (Foucault
1995; Rose 2001; Fairclough 2003) as a supplementary method for
unpacking meanings and representations of architecture and urban space.
The majority of current studies investigate the spatial dimensions of war
through non-spatial methods of analysis, including discourse analysis and
a series of ethnographic methods (Ristic 2018). The existing scholarship is
largely grounded in the logic of verbal argumentation in the sense that we
read about the spatial dimensions of war without seeing them. A shift in
the field has taken place, with research emerging about the capacity of
mapping as a tool for analyzing how conflict becomes embedded in the
territories of a city (buildings, streets, practices).
Open source geo-spatial platforms, such as GDELT (2013) or PATTRN
(2014), are inter-active mapping databases of locations, facts and media
reports about conflicts and protests in cities across the globe. Although
providing a wealth of descriptive and statistical data useful for research and
analysis, these platforms map the locations where conflict takes place, rather
than how the place mediates it. The agency of the actual spaces of the city
in mediating social unrest has been explored through the axial (and largely
abstract) maps of the 2011 London riots by Space Syntax team (Al Sayed
and Hanna 2013) and the heat maps of how risk of gang violence embeds
in the urban network of Medellin’s informal settlements (Samper 2011).
Territorial, urban and architectural dimensions of war have been investi-
gated through ‘forensic maps’ that combine geo-spatial data, satellite imag-
ery and 3D modelling to provide spatial testimony lawsuits over international
war crimes and human rights violations (Weizman 2017). While these are
undoubtedly important methodological developments, the methods of
spatial analysis of war- and peacetime conflict are still in an inspectional
stage. I propose mapping within the framework of assemblage thinking as
WARSCAPES: INTRODUCTION 9
a research tool for analyzing the architectural and urban patterns of war.
The maps presented in this book are more than illustrations of findings—
they themselves are research findings that provide spatial knowledge about
how the nexus between the city and war works (Ristic 2018).
For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 12), mapping is a part of the way of
thinking that they call ‘rhizomatic thinking’, which contrasts with ‘tree-
like thinking’. Tree-like thinking is a traditional way of thinking that struc-
tures our thoughts hierarchically, deriving from a central idea. In contrast,
rhizomatic thinking is decentered and based on establishing connections
between disparate concepts, making new associations between previously
unconnected ideas (Dovey 2010). Translated into the language of cartog-
raphy, the dichotomy of rhizome vs. tree corresponds to that of mapping
vs. tracing (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Tracing is based on the logic of
reproduction of what already exists, it projects the empirical; “its goal is to
define a de facto state” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 12). A street map or
a map of building footprints, for instance, are forms of tracery just like the
navigational maps that we use in our everyday lives. In contrast, mapping
used as a research tool is engaged in experimentation with the real and the
possible. It “constructs the unconscious” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
12) in the sense that it opens up a view of the city that cannot be grasped
by the senses (Dovey and Ristic 2015). It involves digging, connecting
and exposing the spatial relations that are not obvious to the naked eye
(Corner 1999). Research maps are created from a multiplicity of tracings
that can be selected, overlaid and connected to expose “the various hidden
forces that underlie the workings of a given place” (Corner 1999: 214).
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the map partially as a synonym for
the diagram, which they also term the ‘abstract machine’ (Dovey et al.
2018). A diagram is the abstract set of relationships between forces that
underpin the workings of an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:
164). For instance, the diagram of asymmetric visibility is a set of power-
relations that Foucault (1995) identifies as the panoptic disciplinary
gaze that is embedded in the spatiality of prisons, schools and hospitals
(Dovey 2010). The map shares certain characteristics with the diagram
in the sense that it “fosters connections between fields” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 12). Its task is to uncover the relationships between
forces that shape the way a city works (Dovey and Ristic 2015). Yet the
diagram is deterritorialized and retains the highest level of abstraction
of the spatial relations immanent to an urban assemblage (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 141). Although a degree of abstraction is essential to
10 M. RISTIC
Sarajevo Warscapes
As outlined above, I delve into the investigation of the nexus between the
city and war by analyzing the role of architecture and urban space in
Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the ethnic-nationalist
conflict during and after the siege of 1992–1996. The empirical focus of
this book is on Sarajevo because the city represents a critical case study
(Flyvbjerg 2006) of how war- and peacetime conflicts are mediated and
contested in/through built environments. Sarajevo is the longest-besieged
capital city in modern history, which has become epitomic for urban
destruction throughout the world. A number of theoretical concepts,
including urbicide and warchitecture, that have been used in the analysis
of other international contested cities have gained attention in the context
of the siege of Sarajevo.1 As such, Sarajevo is what Flyvbjerg (2006: 229)
refers to as a “critical case study (…) having strategic importance in rela-
tion to the general problem”, in this case, the role of architecture and
urban space in political conflict. The ethno-nationalist conflict in Sarajevo
has been led through a variety of military strategies, including the specific
targeting and destruction of buildings and open public spaces, and
terrorizing civilian populations during the war, as well as post-war recon-
struction, reinscription, and memorialization. The struggle over the city’s
12 M. RISTIC
territory and identity has been mediated by different elements of its urban
fabric across different spatial levels and scales, including urban neighbor-
hoods, public squares, streets, buildings, relics and traces of the war, and
war memorials. A detailed analysis of Sarajevo’s wartime and post-war
transformations, rather than its comparison to other cities, provides rich
empirical material and conceptual reflections about various spatial mecha-
nisms through which the city mediates war. As such, the findings, meth-
odological innovations and theoretic insights from Sarajevo provide a
valuable reference point for understanding a mutually constitutive rela-
tionship between the city and conflict and for studying other contested
cities in the world.
Sarajevo lies in a narrow valley of the Miljacka River and is surrounded
by mountains on all sides. In the fifteenth century when the city was set-
tled, the valley was part of a medieval commercial corridor that connected
the Middle East and Europe, which brought a mix of cultures and reli-
gions to the city.2 Often described as the European Jerusalem, Sarajevo
contains “temples of four faiths”—Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, Roman
Catholic and Jewish—within a square kilometer (Karahasan 1994: 5).
According to the last pre-war census from 1991, the city’s population
numbered approximately 500,000, which included 50% Bosniaks
(Muslims), 25% Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox), 7% Bosnian Croats (Catholics),
13% Yugoslavs and the rest were Jews and Others (Jukić 2016).3 This cul-
tural diversity is reflected in the city’s urban landscape, as distinct parts of
the city are linked to different periods of its history and different politics
of identity (Fig. 1.1).
To the east is the Ottoman Town (1462–1878), built under the
Ottoman Empire, which consists of the central bazaar in the valley and
residential quarters on the slopes of the hills. They are characterized by
small-grain morphology of irregular pattern, which is accentuated by a
number of religious monuments. Although mosques are more numerous,
centrally positioned and prominent, the presence of one religious building
for each of the non-Islamic communities affirmed the Ottoman millet
system—a concept of religious tolerance that provided non-Muslims with
a significant degree of autonomy from the dominant religion (Braude and
Lewis 1982).
To the west is the Austro-Hungarian Town (1878–1914), built under
the Habsburg Monarchy, which is defined by an orthogonal matrix framed
by mixed-use perimeter blocks. Its spatial landmarks are secular public
institutions and two clusters of non-Islamic religious buildings constructed
WARSCAPES: INTRODUCTION 13
Fig. 1.2 The Siege of Sarajevo. Although the siege line changed over time, the line
as marked in this figure maps its most stable location throughout the siege, as deter-
mined through a range of sources including Rujanac (2003). (Map: Mirjana Ristic)
16 M. RISTIC
between the two armies made the siege of Sarajevo asymmetric warfare,
with the BSA the clearly superior force and aggressor.
Yet, the UN elected to treat the conflict as a ‘civil war’ and introduced
an embargo on arms to Bosnia-Herzegovina, believing that a free flow of
weaponry would only escalate the war (Malcolm 1994). UN troops on the
ground provided humanitarian help to the population and supervised the
warring sides without interfering in the fighting, except in the case of
direct attacks on UN collateral. It is widely argued that such circumstances
prolonged the duration of the siege, which lasted for 1425 days and was
recorded as the longest siege of a capital city in the modern history of
human kind (Malcolm 1994; Donia 2006; Silber and Little 1996).
The siege of Sarajevo has been described as a “medieval siege in the
service of modern nationalism” (Donia 2006: 287). The Bosnian Serb
political leadership stated publicly that their intention was to divide
Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina along ethnic lines, and that the BSA
was holding the city as a means of coercing the Bosnian-Herzegovinian
political leadership into accepting the division (Donia 2006: 290).
Sarajevo and its population became hostages of these ethno-nationalist
political aims, and their architecture and urban spaces were appropri-
ated as a means of achieving them. The map in Fig. 1.2 shows two
proposed division lines, in relation to the siege line, which indicate that
the BSA’s goal was to seize the Socialist Town in the west of Sarajevo
and leave the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Towns in the east to
Bosniaks and Croats (Burns 1992; Donia 2006). The siege line merged
the hillsides around the city and parts of the river bank in the valley.
Although it opened in the area around Sarajevo International Airport,
the city remained sealed, for all intents and purposes, as the airport was
controlled by UN forces, which allowed its use for humanitarian pur-
poses only and prohibited the crossing of the runway by residents or the
military (Donia 2006). The BSA positions to the city’s north were
largely behind the hills, which blocked the army’s view toward the val-
ley. However, the positions to the city’s south gave the BSA a com-
manding view of a considerable portion of Sarajevo. This included the
Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Towns and a large part of the Socialist
Town, particularly its eastern- and western-most areas. Sarajevo’s spe-
cific geography and urban morphology, together with the establishment
of the siege line, significantly exposed the city to the BSA’s positions,
which enabled direct and precise targeting of a large number of build-
ings and public spaces.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Oot, Herra, kovin mua rangaissut,
Tein varmaan paljon, paljon pahaa, nurjaa;
Kuin tullut ois, en varmaan toiminut,
Mä syntinen, mut, isä, sääli kurjaa.
Lempeenä istuimellas istuen
Oot kuva uskon, toivon, rakkauden.
4.
5.
6.
Suomi hädässä.
Kysymyksiä.
*****