(re)mapping: tracing politics in urban space
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lejla odobašic novo and aleksandar obradovic
Street names play a powerful role in the formation of collective and national identities, and in the legitimisation of political ideologies. With a radical formation of a new ruling elite, the renaming of streets, public spaces and public institutions becomes a reflection of the new ideologies. New maps become testaments to a historical narrative always under reconstruction by those in power.
The deliberate renaming of streets in post-communist power shifts are a reconfiguration of space and history, a fundamental and essential element of post-communist transformation, creating new public iconographic landscapes in accord with the principles of the new regimes. In the former Yugoslavia where street names often celebrated socialist ideals, a series of ethno-national conflicts within its different republics resulted in the fragmentation of geographies and the resurrection of former nationalisms. We looked at two cities, Belgrade (the former capital of Yugoslavia and the seat of Yugoslav power during the 1990’s conflict) and Sarajevo (the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the former Yugoslav republics and now an independent country). Sarajevo was the most heterogeneous in terms of its population and the most reflective of the Yugoslav notion of ‘brotherhood and unity’ in the way its population coexisted; it is the city that suffered the longest siege in modern history at the hands of the Serb forces. After the last war in the 1990’s, East Sarajevo was built under the territory of Republika Srpska almost as an alternate Sarajevo with its own historical narrative that glorifies the Serbian nation.
We analysed the historical undercurrents that defined the name changes in the historic cores of the two cities, and the ways in which the same tools were most successfully used in creating and defining new national identities in both. The limitation of a study based on the political significance of historic cores is their chronological longevity that withstands political changes. However, these areas play a significant role in the mental map of citizens and thus the formation of collective identity. It is most common that historic centres, buildings, squares, streets, and urban scenes of the capital cities become the image of that nation. We examined the names of 52 streets and public spaces in Belgrade and 112 in Sarajevo in 1990, just before the fall of Yugoslavia, and then in 2020. In Belgrade, the names of certain streets have changed multiple times in this thirty-year period and some are still in the process of changing. In Sarajevo on the other hand, most changes of street names in the study area occurred between 1992-1995, as the new independent Bosnia and Herzegovina was being formed. The new ideals of autonomous Bosnian identity were rooted in the old historical patterns that attest to that autonomy.
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
:: urban matters
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