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).
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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.
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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
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