Resilient Futures Sarajevo Workshop 2022
Workshop lead by:
Architects and researchers Vernes Causevic and Lucy Dinnen
In collaboration with:
Architect, urbanist and educator Prof. Robert Mull
Partners:
Global Free Unit (GFU), Sheffield School of Architecture (SSoA), Umea School of Architecture (UMA).
This 2-week workshop came at a pressing time of perpetual uncertainty in Europe and globally. Humanity is facing planetary crises from which we are rapidly approaching a ‘point of no return’: climate change, wars, displacement, pollution, the pandemic, energy supply and the rise of popular nationalism! All against the backdrop of the EU’s 2050 deadline for carbon neutrality.
The War in Ukraine and the Energy Crisis is our final warning! Citizens and architects must learn to appropriate the ‘State of Emergency’ as the rule, and not the exception! To operate with urgency in times of peace and stability, to create socially and environmentally resilient ways of living with each other and with the planet.
Sarajevo is our site of investigation. We learn from extraordinary precedents of civilian-lead resilience during The Siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996), where over 300,000 people were cut off from water, energy and food supply for 1,460 days. We will investigate how ordinary civilians and architects overcame scarcity and occupation by inventing and up-cycling resourceful, transient, covert and often surreal tools, architectural interventions and urban infrastructures for survival.
We will also address the failures of Bosnia- Herzegovina’s post-war reconciliation and reconstruction processes.
We frame Sarajevo as a laboratory to explore new forms of urban resilience for local and global issues.
This is a fast-paced hands-on workshop setting to research, design, improvise and prototype experimental ‘resilience devices’, installed around the city and gifted to citizens.
TYPE / Design and make Workshop YEAR / 2022 LOCATION / Sarajevo PARTNERS / Global Free Unit, Professor Robert Mull, Umea University Sweden, University of Sheffield