re-adaptive infrastructure as a means of survival lejla odobašic novo and anisa glumcevic
surviving by adapting During wartime cities become urban laboratories as not only does war-inflicted urban trauma suggest broken spatial and social networks, it also removes memory from space, putting both the city's history and future in jeopardy. Aquilué, et al., argues that ‘trauma defines the moment in which the urban system needs to reinvent itself in order not to disappear’. 1 The example of Sarajevo under siege addresses an urban occurrence that often arises in urban conflicts: self-(re)organisation in all aspects of urban life, including infrastructure. Armina Pilav, an architect and scholar, has introduced the term ‘un- war space’, both a literary and spatial concept wherein the prefix ‘un’ stands for redefining, reimagining and reconstructing, while war is defined as ‘to address conflict via military violence’. According to Pilav, war and un-war spaces resulted in transitional spaces of different scales and materials. Sarajevo was caught in a cycle of destruction and reconstruction, turning both the public and private spaces into self-programmed ones. Subject to constant destruction, the city was physically transformed at all scales: infrastructure, landscapes, streets, living spaces and building exteriors, but also practices of everyday life. 2 survival strategy. In times of extreme violence, citizens find alternative modes of operation within the newly established social order by changing their patterns of movement, by repurposing existing infrastructure and buildings for new functions, and by reconfiguring interior space. They adapt to a new set of urban rules driven by patterns of military terror and destruction. During the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo, the city took on a new morphology as the citizens adapted both infrastructure and architectural spaces to the new-found circumstances of destruction. During times of conflict, where violence and destruction occur directly in an urban setting, changes of the infrastructure and the urban fabric become part of a warfare tactic and – at the same time – a part of
Repurposing building ruins became a daily practice, thus establishing transitory wartime interventions where living meant adjusting to the new spatial reconfiguration of the war. People’s movements were limited to underground and above-ground urban spaces, while most of everyday life remained underground and turned into a total emergency. The above-ground city was used solely for obtaining food and essential supplies. Many shops, schools, hospitals, and apartment and office buildings were uninhabitable, with walls penetrated by shells, windows shattered by blasts and rooms gutted and burned. Bricks from destroyed buildings were used to fill holes in walls. Many damaged buildings, once repaired, were habitable again, but some rooms were more dangerous than others. Walls and openings exposed to snipers and shrapnel, made them completely unoccupiable. The urban spaces were transformed into an enclosed ‘urban interior’ in which residents regained their right to move and access places of social encounter. Historical and inactive cemeteries, city parks and green arenas and stadiums were repurposed as war cemeteries. The city’s 40,000 trees were cut down for cooking and heating. 3 Public transport was non-existent, and people moved by foot or bicycles; heavy supplies were conveyed in baby carriages, wheelbarrows and winter sleds. During the siege of Sarajevo, its infrastructure and architecture became direct targets of war, shifting the discourse of urban destruction during conflict from that of collateral damage to that of purposeful and calculated annihilation. Unfortunately, we have seen similar patterns of combat repeated since and are witnessing a similar scenario in Ukrainian cities at the moment. This act of destroying the architectural corpus affects the city’s physical appearance and sets into motion other forces that then shape a new environment. Thus, the meaning of material or physical space and infrastructure gets re-established through new patterns of usage.
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1 Ines Aquilué, Milica Lekovic, and Javier Ruiz Sánchez. ‘Urban Trauma and Self-Organization of the City. Autopoiesis in the Battle of Mogadishu and the Siege of Sarajevo’. Urban 08-09 , 2014. p63–76 2 Armina Pilav. ‘Before the War, War, After the War: Urban Imageries for Urban Resilience’. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science 3, no. 1, 2012. p23–37
3 Amra Hadzimuhamedovic, ed. ‘Culture-Based Urban Resilience: Post-War Recovery of Sarajevo’. World Heritage Center web page, 2018.
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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