Topos 99 Wounds

to po s. no 99

2017

DEFENDING EUROPE’S URBANITY – Terrorist attacks and their impact on planning the metropolis 32

REACTIVATING SARAJEVO – Conceptual frameworks to revitalize the once green Bosnian capital 54

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BEYOND RECONSTRUCTION – How landscape architects tackle Lebanese emergency landscapes 66

Content

THE BIG PICTURE

CURATED PRODUCTS

Page 8

Page 102

OPINION

REFERENCE

Page 10

Page 106

TALENT VS. MASTERMIND

EDITOR¥ S PICK

Page 12

Page 108

METROPOLIS EXPLAINED

Page 14 OLD BULLET HOLES AND NEW HIGH≠ RISES

Page 58

BACKFLIP

Page 110 THE SCARS OF MEMORY

BEYOND RECONSTRUCTION

Fields of battle – landscapes of peace Page 18

Tackling Lebanese emergency landscapes Page 66

HEALING THE CITY

BORDERLINE: TIJUANA ñ SAN DIEGO

How to mend a wounded city Page 28

An interview with border expert Tito Alegría Page 74

ESCAPE PLAN

Page 112 FROM THE EDGES

Page 114 IMPRINT

Page 113

DEFENDING EUROPEí S URBANITY

European cities as terrorist targets Page 32

THE AESTHETICS OF DANGER

The transformation of post-war seasides Page 78

DEAR KABUL...

Afghan affection Page 40 TIME VS. SUSTAINABILITY

How to build improved shelter types Page 46 REACTIVATING SARA JEVO

Search for a green urban infrastructure Page 54

GHOST ECOLOGIES

The haunting territorial shadows of U.S. militarism Page 90 THE GO≠ GETTER

“Slum upgrading” – a portrait of Fabienne Hoelzel Page 97 CONTRIBUTORS

OLD BULLET HOLES AND NEW HIGH≠ RISES

Page 100

Beirut's post-war art scene Page 58

GHOST ECOLOGIES

Page 90

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OPINION

METROPOLIS EXPLAINED

Kinder Baumgardner about self-driving cars and the city

Alessandro Grassani on Milan

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Page 14

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THE BIG PICTURE

Meteorite Shower Motorways represent the promise of permanent mobility like no other infrastructural element. At the same time they also create a barrier: The divided landscape is turned into a peripheral phenomenon ñ a blurred image that becomes secondary to the all≠ important wish to rush forward. The perception of those with the space changes completely, and becomes very particular. This becomes especially clear when something unexpected appears; an obstacle. And this is exactly what artists Anna Borgman and Candy Lenk have done along a motorway in Denmark ñ installed a meteorite≠ like structure that serves as a ì barrier in a barrierî .

And lo and behold, other things suddenly come to the fore again, and the speed≠ oriented space becomes a space in the landscape once again. The installation is part of a series entitled ì Wurfî (throw). The two artists placed the boulder, which actually consists of a wooden frame covered in cellulose fibre, in various places in order to get people to explain the irritation they feel when forced to deal with such unexpected situations.

TEXT: Alexander Russ

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Photo: ©BORGMAN | LENK

The big Picture

THE BIG PI CT U R E For more photos go to: toposmagazine.com/ wounds/meteorite-shower

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The Scars of Memory

Photojournalist Michael St Maur Sheil visited the battlefields of the First World War for several years.

On his excursions he discovered landscapes of great beauty and tranquility that still show the scars of war.

His work resulted in an exhibition and a book titled Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace. Here he offers us an insight into his work and thoughts.

MICHAEL ST MAUR SHEIL

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Vauquois, Meuse-Argonne This line of craters along the crest of the Butte de Vauquois was once the site of a picturesque little hilltop village. With extensive views over the western end of the Verdun battlefield it was an important strategic position. For four years, French and German troops manned trenches just forty metres apart whilst, underground, miners fought a ceaseless war in dark and dangerous tunnels.

This was perhaps the most intensively mined section of the Western Front. The two conflicting networks of tunnels extend for over 15 kilometres, with some reaching a depth of almost 100 metres. Over 300 explosions shattered the hill, as a result reduced in height by about 10 metres.

Despite this, one can still explore the tunnels, which today are populated by a profusion of bats and salamanders. But the steps smoothed by the passing of hobnailed boots and niches darkened by candle smoke, make this a place where one can almost touch the men of 1914Ăą 18.

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The French government proclaimed a state of emergency on 13 November 2015, immedi≠ately following a series of terrorist attacks in Paris.

Even today (June 2017), the military continues to shape the urbanity of Paris.

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Defending Large European cities such as Berlin, London and Paris have become targets of international terrorism over the last few decades. The security and prevention policies practised by public urban planning departments are, however, as varied as the cities themselves. They must nevertheless ask themselves the same question: Does security in public open space also mean less freedom?

Photo: EXPA/ JFK, picture alliance/APA/picturedesk.com

KATJA VEIL

Europe’s Urbanity topos

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Ikeaí s ì Better Shelterî was developed jointly by the non≠ profit Ikea Foundation and UNHCR.

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Time vs.

Disasters and conflicts lead to the destruction of the built environment and to the forced migration of its inhabitants. Resulting recovery efforts reflect a dilemma that arises in such situations: There is a need to return and rebuild housing quickly, but also to support the reestablishment of sustainable and resilient settlement patterns. Cases in Nepal and Ukraine show that improved shelter types such as Ikea’s “Better Shelter” play an important role in addressing these needs.

Photo: Better Shelter

MARK KAMMERBAUER

Sustainability topos

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Ottoman Period 1461 ≠ 1878

Reactivating Sarajevo Post-war Sarajevo missed the opportunity of reactivating its formerly green centre. An initiative seeks to construct a conceptual framework to revitalize the Bosnian capital and produce lessons of global significance.

HARIS PIPLAS

Can we activate the adaptive potential of cities and transform them by looking into specific realworld examples and extracting applicable “lessons learned” of urban knowledge from cities around the globe? Yes, but: In times of radical change, we need to look into radical urbanisms as laboratories. A sheer unlikely candidate for such an urban laboratory is the city of Sarajevo. Yet, the city’s turbulent past and the variety of layers in its built environment reveal challenges and potentials relevant to the state of many contemporary cities worldwide. Sarajevo’s discontinuous and turbulent political, social and historical development has created a bricolage approach to urbanism. To deal with these complex problems, instruments like multi-disciplinary and multi-sectorial thinking are needed, approaches with which the interdisciplinary design practice Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), founded in 1998 by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, both professors at the Swiss Institute of Technology, ETH in Zurich, has already successfully worked around the globe. The U-TT initiative “Reactivate Sarajevo” which runs in collaboration with the mayor of Sarajevo and an array of Bosnian-Herzegovinian, Swiss and in-

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ternational partners firstly analysed the great urban potential of Sarajevo understanding that the city needs ways of working with its historic urban collage by adding new programs to it and reusing, re-generating or re-activating the existing.

By highlighting the existing local socio-cultural and ecological systems of Sarajevoí s urban structures, the initiative aims not only to contribute to a revitalization of the Bosnian capital but also produce lessons of wider, possibly global significance.

(Dis)continous historical urbanism The city of Sarajevo was founded in the mid 15th century during a period of oriental influence, being located in what was at the time the Ottoman Empireí s most western province. For more than 400 years the city remained under Ottoman rule, often referred to as “Europe’s Jerusalem” for the multi-cultural composition of its population. The diversity of what was once a major crossroads of different civilizations and religions is materialized in the façades of the city’s buildings, its landscapes as well as local culture. The mountainous natural

landscape that surround the city have also shaped Sarajevo’s vernacular urbanism.

Becoming part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878, Sarajevo continued its urban development as a typical Central European Gründerzeit city until the end of the Great War. For the first time, the concepts of public space, masterplanning and large-scale infrastructure interventions were being applied to the city’s urban challenges. The cityscape in 1914 displayed a plethora of typologies from introvert Ottoman urbanism to Austrian neoclassical bourgeois villas – a mélange of habitation, recreation and commerce space varieties. Taking the shape of a linear development that followed longitudinally the valley of the Miljacka river, a natural “cultural axis” was created, consisting of a network of cultural, sacred and symbolic buildings as well as green spaces.

Siege of Sarajevo (Frontline) 1992 ≠ 1996

Skenderija Complex

Sarajevo's urban structure is influenced by several historical layers, creating a bricolage approach to urbanism.

Bosnian Parliament

Austro≠ Hungarian Period 1878 ≠ 1918

Sniper Towers

UNITIC Towers Holiday Inn Hotel

National Museum Historical Museum

War Cemetery

Sniper Alley

Plan: M. Radulesco, Urban-Think Tank, ETH Zurich

Yugoslav Period 1918 ≠ 1992

Top-down urban development continued under the socialist rule of the Yugoslav era, enacted through centralized planning regulations. The first masterplan for Sarajevo was established in the beginning of the 1960s, creating a typical modernist, socialist, functionalist as well as mono-functional urban fabric. Free-standing buildings floating in green spaces and infrastructure covering water streams and sealing soil, replaced the vernacular urbanism of Sarajevo. At the end of the socialist period the open space had decreased by 40 per cent, the urban footprint had tripled and the population quadrupled. Most of the construction activities occurred at the beginning of the 1980s, in preparation of the 1984 Winter Olympics.

The Olympic development strip – perpendicular to the longitudinal cultural axis – followed the

topography of a side valley. The tributary to the Miljacka that had shaped this valley had, however, been turned into a channelized and covered water stream. Proposed as a green axis (ZeTra or “Zelena Transverzala” = green transversal), the plan acknowledged the wrong urban decisions of the 1950s to 1970s and strengthened the historic landscape urbanism of Sarajevo. The network of urban green and open spaces established a connection to Sarajevo’s surrounding mountains as the ZeTra continued up the slopes of Mount Trebević.

Wartime urbicidal cityscape At the end of the Bosnian War that lasted from 1992 to 1995, Sarajevo had been turned into a “ruralized” city, with its urban fabric largely dissolved. This included the architectural and landscape architectural legacies of the Winter Olympics infrastructure, which survived only eight years after they had been built for the big event of peaceful athletic competition between nations. The mountains that surround Sarajevo became mined frontlines from which the city

was placed under the longest siege in modern military history. The shells hurled from the mountain tops dismantled the infrastructure and turned Sarajevo into a shrinking city. The destruction targeted historic buildings, cultural landscapes and public and sacred monuments, causing inestimable damage to the urban fabric.

The term “urbicide”, originally introduced by American philosopher Marshall Berman to characterize the destruction of his native Bronx in the 1980s, in Sarajevo took on new dimensions of meaning, signifying the targeted destruction of a heterogeneous urban space where different ethnic, cultural and religious groups had lived and interacted largely without antagonisms and physical or mental borders. Sarajevo’s streets became sniper alleys and public open spaces were turned into graveyards. Besides those “landscapes of death”, citizens in their battle for survival cut down hundreds of thousands of urban trees for fuel and reactivated or rediscovered local resources and ecosystems; water was taken from forgotten and sealed streams and open spaces were turned into urban agricultural sites. At the end of the war, the

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Old bullet holes Beirut, the Lebanese capital once flourishing as “Paris of the Middle East� and then haunted by a grueling civil war, is currently turning into one of the hotspots of the art world. A new generation of artists has focused their attention on the ongoing architectural transformation of the city, spawned by a persistent economic upswing. Their inspiration is fuelled by an urban environment that embraces extreme contrasts and by a deep longing for art forms that provide new prospects in life.

UTE STRIMMER

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Photo: Randa Mirza, Beirutopia: Beirut revit son age d'or . 80 cm x 110 cm , Edition of 3 + 1AP, courtesy of Galerie Tanit, Beyrouth/Munich

Beirut is currently witnessing a construc≠tion boom. The photo project "Beirutopia" (2011) by Randa Mirza is a portrait of the cityí s planned urban future.

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Beyond Post-war recovery probably confronts designers with the most difficult challenges one can think of.

The main obstacles are surely trauma and the urgency of the situation, paired with the externality of relief agencies and experts. At the same time, tackling emergency landscapes is a unique learning experience for designers, as several case studies in Lebanon illustrate.

JALA MAKHZOUMI AND RABIH SHIBLI

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Photos: Jala Makhzoumi, 2010

The landscape recovery narratives for post-war El Qleileh were selected by applyingthe holistic methodology of ecological design in order to identify Ecological Landscape Associations (ELA).

Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Cape Canaveral, Florida ACTIVE: 1950-2011 + 28° 29’ 20” N, 80° 34’ 40” W, alt. +2.7 m

Photo: Xxxx

After the conclusion of its 135th mission, the NASA Space Shuttle program came to a close in July 2011. The first reusable space shuttle, manned space shuttle and launch program ran 1981≠ 2011. After 30 years in operation, President Barack Obama announced its shutdown in response to budget constraints and criticism over management, safety, and scientific goals. Its shutdown in 2011 has refocused the future role of space as a territory of exploration.

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Ghost The U.S. Department of Defense boasts an impressive 25-million-acre footprint of military facilities and installations around the world. However, it is the lesserknown inventory of more than 10,000 sites – remote dumps, barren test sites, abandoned infrastructures, and obsolete facilities – that represent the haunting territorial shadows of militarism. Yet this extraordinary legacy is not only under-represented, it is systematically ignored in much American environmental history.

Appearing as mere afterthoughts of military administration, or outsourced to the civilian world of remediation, this article traces the scales and significations of this spatial residuum in the military-logistical operations of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Photo: NASA

PIERRE BÉLANGER & ALEXANDER ARROYO

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BACKFLIP – Barcelonaí s Gràcia Squares

In the 1990s, as a group of young students, we went on a pilgrimage to Barcelona, the city of architects, to marvel at the reconstruction of the urban landscape. Initiated by planning director Oriol Bohigas in the early 1980s, the urban renewal program had turned the city into an urban laboratory. A “controlled” metastasis was at the core of this program, implementing strategic projects to “infect” the nerve centre of neighbourhoods and achieve urban compactness, readability, a mixture of uses and the recovery of public space.

SIGRID EHRMANN

SIGRID EHRMANN is a German landscape architect who

has worked for various architecture and landscape architecture studios in Berlin and Melbourne.

She is currently a Research and Innovation Associate for Architecture and Design at RMIT Universityí s European hub in Barcelona.

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The Gràcia Squares by Jaume Bach and Gabriel Mora (1984) are emblematic of this early period of Barcelona’s urban transformation. Exemplary for their subtle interventions in a dense urban fabric and the renovation of neglected public space, their creation of a contemporary but timeless aesthetic in dialogue with the historic surroundings, the squares were reorganised and used a reduced material palette of pavement, furniture, lighting and tree planting in symmetry with the adjacent buildings.

Their open character, discreet simplicity and multifunctional use gave them a specific urban quality and brought them to the attention of the architecture world.

As only a few of the nine proposed designs for a sequence of interconnected open spaces were actually realised, the potential impact all of the interventions would have had cannot be known.

But the implemented projects turned the open spaces of the neighbourhood of Gràcia, previously dominated by car traffic, into significant, high-quality public spaces. Traffic lanes and parking lots were shut down and usable space reclaimed. In the case of Plaça Trilla, the architects created an urban oasis

where no public space had existed before. For this reason the projects played a crucial role in the revitalisation of the neighbourhood, as part of an urban strategy in the run-up to the 1992 Olympic Games that would gain in complexity and scale. The program would become known as the Barcelona Model and rapidly transform the city and have significant social and economic consequences.

Today, the Plaça de la Virreina and Plaça Trilla are unchanged apart from the removal and replacement of much of the original furniture. The most distinctive of the squares, Plaça del Sol, has undergone more radical modifications. Original custom-designed elements have slowly disappeared over time, while others have deteriorated.

A refurbishment in 2014 was directed by Bach Arquitectes. Jaume and Eugeni Bach explained that they aimed to preserve the open quality and harmonious proportions of the space by keeping modifications of existing elements like light poles to a minimum, and replacing the demolished pergola and pedestrian bridge with new elements of similar proportions and structuring function.

Plan: Jaume Bach + Gabriel Mora

Backflip

There is now a noticeable absence of street furniture on the square while commercial use of the restaurants and bars has increased. The painted children’s games on the granite paving indicate a compromise was made in order to avoid the construction of one of the fenced, standard council playgrounds now so common to Barcelona’s squares. Benches and a pergola were removed by the local council to avoid attracting homeless people or partying youths, making the evolution of Plaça del Sol representative of the growing tendency of the authorities to prescribe functions and increase control over the use of public space. Growing numbers of tourists and surging rental prices, the often criticised “uncontrolled” metastasis of the Barcelona Model’s urban renovation, are also felt intensely in the neighbourhood and have lead to increased interest in its public spaces. The Gràcia Squares can therefore be seen as a microcosm of the city and its diverse economic and political forces.

On a sunny afternoon people sit on the broad pavement of the Plaça del Sol, playing music, sunbathing and chatting, much like they did back in the 1990s. The legacy of the Gràcia Squares, for now, has been kept intact.