VII. SUMMARY

VII. SUMMARY

This book addresses the contested identity of public spaces in Sarajevo on several levels. A historical overview of the genesis of public spaces and the mapping of their essential socio-spatial attributes yielded the category of urban voids: critical areas for potentially widespread urban regeneration in the city of Sarajevo. We identified their underlying condition of transiency or in-betweenness as one of their key features, in both physical and non-physical terms. This condition reflects the city’s recurrent historical transitions and its socio-cultural context; urban voids are the physical evidence of Sarajevo’s urban discontinuities. Nevertheless, although they are characterised as vague, unstable, empty and indeterminate, their ambiguity contains the potential energy for their transformation into active, vibrant rooms of the city. Urban rooms are spatially contained urban spaces, which are simultaneously interior and exterior, and private and public. They provide a sense of domesticity as well as common ground for community building and social cohesion. Urban life occurs inside the rooms of the city. Because of its topographic layout, urban scale and morphology, cultural legacy and introverted urban and architectural concepts, the city of Sarajevo contains a potential network of urban rooms to be activated and regenerated. These include its many neglected public spaces, its intra-block urban voids from Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian times, and its fragmented modernist urban voids, all of which may be converted to urban rooms. The emergence of a new perspective on urban rooms, however, requires a paradigm shift, and a new planning and intervention strategy. The implicit blurring between interior and urban spaces encompassed by the notion of urban rooms suggests a need to upgrade the usual methodological approach by merging interior and urban design practice as two relational and compatible disciplines, contrary to the traditional bias. This new dualistic

urban-interior intervention strategy combines urban-interior elements, principles and methods, with the objective of creating the atmosphere of an urban room. Ultimately, this new perspective shifts the focus from traditional, institutional top-down city planning, to a correlation between people, urban public spaces, and their context. The simulated intervention strategies presented in the case studies of five urban rooms in Sarajevo show that, as in interior design, a human-centred and collaborative approach to urban design means making the city from the inside out.