Abstract
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 architecture and urban space have also been adapted as military weaponry (Weizman 2007; Coward 2009; Graham 2010).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For instance, the concepts of urbicide and warchitecture have been reintroduced by the Association of Sarajevo Architects through the wartime exhibition “Urbicide – Sarajevo = Sarajevo, une ville blesse” in Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1994, and the catalogue of destroyed buildings and urban quarters “Warchitecture : Urbicide Sarajevo”.
- 2.
Sarajevo was founded by the Ottoman Empire as the capital of the province of Bosnia in 1462 (Donia 2006).
- 3.
The term Bosniak dates from the Middle Ages, when it was used as a marker of all peoples inhabiting the medieval Bosnian state . It was revived at the beginning of 1990s as a marker of the national identity that would include everybody who lived in and supported a united Bosnia and Herzegovina and who considered themselves Bosnian, regardless of being Muslim , Orthodox , Catholic or from a mixed marriage (Bringa 1995). Nevertheless, as the Bosnian Orthodox and Catholic populations largely declare themselves as Serbs or Croats , respectively, the term Bosniak operates as the national identity marker of the Bosnian Muslim population (Bringa 1995). The term has resolved the inadequacy of the term ‘Muslim ’, written with a capital ‘M’, which was used between 1971 and the 1990s as the national label of the Bosnian Muslims , even though many of them were secular.
- 4.
In May 1992, the Assembly of the Serbian People of Bosnia and Herzegovina stated six strategic aims that included “separation [of Bosnian Serbs ] from two other national groups” and the integration of “all Serbian territories without interruptions” (Donia 2006: 228) into what Malcolm (1994) argued was imagined as ‘Greater Serbia’. Sarajevo played a strategic role in this geo-political reconfiguration of territory as it linked the perceived Serbian lands in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina along the border with Serbia .
- 5.
The BSA was formed from the remnants of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) by retaining soldiers of Serbian ethnicity who were born in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Rujanac 2003). The BSA kept the weapons and resources from the JNA, which was the fourth most powerful army in Europe. The Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina was formed ad hoc at the beginning of the war by the soldiers who left the JNA, who were mainly Muslims but also non-nationalist Bosnian Serbs and Croats . The ABH had very limited resources at the beginning of the war. At the beginning of the siege , the only heavy arms that the ABH possessed were tanks from the Second World War housed in the Historic Museum in Sarajevo, while the uniform of its soldiers was a tracksuit and sneakers (Kapić 2000). Resources were obtained through conquer after battles with the BSA until June 1993, when the tunnel beneath Sarajevo International Airport was dug, which enabled the inflow of arms and equipment to the city from the territory under Bosnian-Herzegovinian control.
References
Al Sayed, K., & Hanna, S. (2013). How City Spaces Afford Opportunities for Riots. In Y. O. Kim, H. T. Park, & K. W. Seo (Eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth International Space Syntax Symposium. Seoul: Sejong University.
Alić, D. (2006). Marindvor Precinct and the Design of the Socialist Modernism. In T. McMinn, J. Stephens, & S. Basson (Eds.), Contested Terrains, The Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Notre Dame University, Fremantle, Western Australia, pp. 9–14.
Bassiouni, M. C. (1994). Study of the Battle and Siege of Sarajevo. Annex VI Part 1 of the Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992). http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/anx/vi-01.htm. Accessed 12 Sept 2017.
Bevan, R. (2006). The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion.
Bollens, S. (2011). City and Soul in Divided Societies. London/New York: Routledge.
Braude, B., & Lewis, B. (1982). Introduction. In B. Braude & B. Lewis (Eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society. New York: Holmes & Meir.
Bringa, T. (1995). Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burns, J. F. (1992, September 27). Sarajevo Siege Deepens, Defying Efforts at Peace. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/27/world/sarajevo-siege-deepens-defying-efforts-at-peace.html?src=pm. Accessed 12 Sept 2011.
Calame, J., & Charlesworth, E. (2009). Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Corner, J. (1999). The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. In D. Cosgrove (Ed.), Mappings. London: Reaktion Books.
Coward, M. (2007). Urbicide Reconsidered. Theory and Event, 10, 2.
Coward, M. (2009). Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. New York: Routledge.
DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1987). Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press.
Donia, R. (2006). Sarajevo: A Biography. London: Hurst & Co.
Dovey, K. (2010). Becoming Places: Urbanism/Architecture/Identity/Power. London/New York: Routledge.
Dovey, K. (2016). Urban Design Thinking: A Conceptual Toolkit. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Dovey, K., & Ristic, M. (2015). Mapping Urban Assemblages: The Production of Spatial Knowledge. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 10(1), 15–28.
Dovey, K., Ristic, M., & Pafka, E. (2018). Mapping as Spatial Knowledge. In K. Dovey, E. Pafka, & M. Ristic (Eds.), Mapping Urbanities: Morphologies, Flows, Possibilities. New York/Oxon: Routledge.
Elden, S. (2013). Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power. Political Geography, 34, 35–51.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
FAMA. (1993). Survival Guide. Sarajevo: FAMA.
Farias, I., & Bender, T. (Eds.). (2010). Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
GDELT. (2013). Mapping a World in Motion: A Daily Dashboard of Global Conflict. http://blog.gdeltproject.org/mapping-a-world-in-motion-a-daily-dashboard-of-global-conflict/. Accessed 30 Sept 2016.
Graham, S. (2003). Lessons in Urbicide. New Left Review, 19, 63–77.
Graham, S. (2004). Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards and Urban Geopolitics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Graham, S. (2007). Demodernizing by Design: Everyday Infrastructure and Political Violence. In D. Gregory & A. Pred (Eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. New York/London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.
Graham, S. (2010). Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso.
Graham, S., & Hewitt, L. (2012). Getting off the Ground: On the Politics of Urban Verticality. Progress in Human Geography, 37(1), 72–92.
Herscher, A. (2007). Urbicide, Urbanism, and Urban Destruction in Kosovo. Theory and Event, 10(2). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae10.2.html
Herscher, A. (2008). Warchitectural Theory. Journal of Architectural Education, 61(3), 35–43.
Herscher, A. (2010). Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Huyssen, A. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jukić, V. (2016). Cenzus of Population, Households and Dwellings in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2013: Final Results. Sarajevo: Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Kaldor, M. (2007). New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kapić, S. (2000). The Siege of Sarajevo 1992–1996. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga tiskarna d.d.
Karahasan, DŽ. (1994). Sarajevo, Exodus of a City. New York: Kodansha International.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Cambridge: Oxford.
Logan, W., & Reeves, K. (2009). Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult’ Heritage. London/New York: Routledge.
Macdonald, S. (2008). Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London/New York: Routledge.
Malcolm, N. (1994). Bosnia: A Short History. London: Macmillan.
McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and Critical Urbanism. City, 15(2), 204–224.
Misselwitz, P., & Rieniets, T. (2006). City of Collision: Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Müller, M. (2015). Assemblages and Actor-networks: Rethinking Socio-material Power, Politics and Space. Geography Compass, 9(1), 27–41.
Müller, M., & Schurr, C. (2016). Assemblage Thinking and Actor-Network Theory: Conjunctions, Disjunctions, Cross-Fertilisations. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41, 217–229.
PATTRN. (2014). Political Violence in Africa. http://p1005.pattrn-app.co/. Accessed 30 Sept 2016.
Riedlmayer, A. (1995, April 4). Killing Memory: The Targeting of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage: Testimony Presented at a Hearing of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, U.S. Congress. www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/killing.html. Accessed 12 Sept 2011.
Ristic, M. (2018). Warscapes. In K. Dovey, E. Pafka, & M. Ristic (Eds.), Mapping Urbanities: Morphologies, Flows, Possibilities. New York/Oxon: Routledge.
Rose, G. (2001). Visual Methodologies. London: Sage.
Rujanac, Z. (2003). Opsjednuti grad Sarajevo [The Besieged City of Sarajevo]. Sarajevo: Bosanski kulturni centar Sarajevo [Bosnian Cultural Centre Sarajevo].
Samper, J. (2011). Spatial Conditions of Violence in the City of Medellin. http://informalsettlements.blogspot.de/2011/03/spatial-conditions-of-violence-in-city.html. Accessed 30 Sept 2016.
Silber, L., & Little, A. (1996). The Death of Yugoslavia. London: Penguin.
Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London/New York: Verso.
Weizman, E. (2017). Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ristic, M. (2018). Warscapes: Introduction. In: Architecture, Urban Space and War. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76771-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76771-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76770-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76771-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)