Abstract
The status of a world city is not guaranteed by the number of its inhabitants, by the area it occupies, by its riches, or by its architectural wonders. It is not promised even by the city’s place in history or by its prominence in the world media. World cities are recognizable by their capacity for allowing other spaces both to exist and to interfere with each other — they are known by their heterotopic capacity, by which I mean their specific concentration of diverse historical, economic, cultural, and other elements. This is not only the capacity of a place to contain many different, and at times contesting, spaces but also a matter of the ways in which the heterotopic dimension plays out as an active agent in every aspect of the city, including its everyday life and its moments of crisis. The heterotopic capacity is, thus, not what the world city is about, but how its meaning has been performed, narrated, textualized, mediated, and imagined by those who live in it — as well as by those who construct and reconstruct the place from a distance.
Sarajevo is like the fortuneteller’s crystal ball that contains all events, all that human beings can experience, all the phenomena of the world. Like Borges’ Aleph, showing in itself all that ever was, that ever will be and even all that could be, Sarajevo holds within itself all that constitutes the world to the west of India.
(Karahasan: 4)
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© 2013 Silvija Jestrovic
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Jestrovic, S. (2013). Sarajevo: A World City Under Siege. In: Hopkins, D.J., Solga, K. (eds) Performance and the Global City. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367853_11
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