Studio Resilient Futures 20/21
Learning from Besieged Sarajevo
‘Sarajevo is science-fiction!… Sarajevo can teach you how to survive the post cataclysm!… Sarajevo is the city of the future!
Sarajevo Survival Guide, FAMA, 1993.
The pre-war city of Sarajevo was seen as the ‘European Jerusalem’ and cultural hub of the former Socialist Yugoslavia. The city’s global image changed during the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996), cutting-off 350,000 citizens from supplies of water, heating, electricity, food and comms for 1,460 days.
Alongside violence and destruction, this also gave rise to an intensive period of cultural production, creativity, and human spirit, in which ordinary citizens and architects made tools, urban and architectural interventions that played a critical role in the city’s survival.
Sarajevo remains in a perpetual state of crisis; suffering with trauma, political division, unregulated development, air pollution, erasure of public space and shared heritage, emigration and now, the Covid-19 pandemic.
Can we re-imagine Sarajevo as a laboratory for exploring alternative models of perpetual resilience for uncertain futures?
The Studio explores models of resilient architectures that can redefine borders and empower vulnerable and marginalised communities in the age of global uncertainty.
Using the ‘Sarajevo Survival Guide’ (FAMA, 1993) as a starting point, we investigate how Sarajevans adapted resourceful, transient, covert and often surreal infrastructures for survival.
We ‘visited’ Sarajevo in the virtual and fictional sense; met Sarajevans, got virtual tours of the City and museums, heard lectures and testimonies, dérived through 3D scans, archives, maps, war photographs, films and books. Re-interpreting and fantasising resilient architectures in relation to Sarajevo and our own ‘isolation’ in the Covid-19 pandemic.
We work individually and collectively to make observations and propositions at different scales: Device and Individual, Building and Community and City Infrastructure and Society. Projects are situated in present or future, real or fictional sites and crisis scenarios, through which we explore informal development, right to the city, collective action, self-governance, protest, eco-action, and design activism.
TYPE / MArch Design Studio YEAR / 2020- Continued LOCATION / University of Sheffield
5th Year Students
Esther Cheung, Amy Crellin, Maja Oparnica, Yufeng Song, Sophie Turner
6th Year Students
Rebecca Acheampong, Joseph M Mwaisaka, Georgina M Scott, Eleanor Wells, Peixuan Du, Wenxiu Zhang
With Thanks to our Studio Friends
Professor Robert Mull, Global Free Unit, David Bickle, Hawkins Brown, Dr Vedad Islambegovic, University of Sarajevo, Professor Kenneth Morrison, De Montfort University, Elma Hasimbegovic, Director, History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina , Elma Hodzic, Curator, ‘Besieged Sarajevo’ Exhibition , Dan Cash, Atamate , Garret Patrick Kelly, SEE Change Network, Melika Konjicanin. With special thanks to Dr Paul Lowe, University of the Arts London and VII, for sharing his archive of photographs from the Siege of Sarajevo, which has been a continued source of inspiration for the Studio.