IV. FROM URBAN VOIDS TO URBAN ROOMS

“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Jorge Luis Borges

IV. FROM URBAN VOIDS TO

URBAN ROOMS

A key finding of the examination, historical overview and urban mapping of the status-quo of Sarajevo’s public spaces was the identification of spatial (physical) and socio-cultural (non-physical) thresholds, gaps and grey-areas, as the most likely reasons for the city’s lack of cultural and urban continuity. A review of academic literature on public spaces reveals the need to discover an alternative to the traditional top-down approach to urban planning. Grand urban schemes are no longer suitable in the contemporary condition of permanent instability, especially in transient socio-cultural contexts such as Sarajevo. Rem Koolhaas sees this paradigm shift, and describes the quest for a new vision in urbanism in his book S,M,L,XL: “If there is to be a new urbanism it will not be based on twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definite form…” (Koolhaas, et al., 1995). Following a similar line of reasoning, Ibelings a rms that we are entering a postinstitutional period, characterised by a new paradigm of the development of smaller projects and more fragmented spaces (Ibelings, 2002). As many authors suggest, alternative planning methods should therefore consider small, fragmented spaces and limited economic resources. Saskia Sassen proposes a movement to create modest public spaces, which would diverge from traditional urban paradigms and grand monumentalised spaces. By creating modest public spaces, the experience of a particular locality gradually becomes part of a global network, comprising multiple localities.

The critical categories of public spaces identified in previous chapters of this book, referred to as urban voids, should be defined and closely examined in the context of current urban developments in Sarajevo. Urban voids, leftover and marginal spaces, generally emerge as inconsistencies within the urban fabric, intentionally or unintentionally produced in the process of traditional city planning and development. In theoretical discourse, these spaces are often referred to as voids, black holes, and cracks in the city (Loukaitou-Sideris, 1996): abandoned, unused spaces that have been pushed to the margins of daily life, both physically and historically. The proliferation of voids can lead to further physical and social deterioration in an urban environment, as elucidated in the broken windows theory. 45

The objective of the following theoretical discussions, which are accompanied by case studies, is to find the most suitable approach for the urban transformation of specific urban voids. We will examine how these passive urban spaces could be converted into active and vibrant urban rooms, and whether this transformation would affect the regeneration of broader urban areas.

One of the possible options in a bottom-up strategy to address Sarajevo’s public spaces crisis is the urban acupuncture methodology, which involves multiple micro-interventions. The final chapter will simulate potential intervention methods in a case study of small-scale urban voids, which could potentially lead to the broader urban regeneration of public space in Sarajevo. The objective of this simulation is to show how these black holes can be converted into urban rooms, and subsequently instigate the activation and re-signification of wider urban areas.

45 A social theory proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, which used broken windows as a metaphor for urban disorder that encouraged further social disorder and crime.