TRANSURBICIDE · Transition urbicide: Post-conflict reconstruction in post-socialist Belgrade

Transition urbicide: Post-conflict reconstruction in post-socialist Belgrade

The Transurbicide project investigates processes that influence post-war reconstruction of built environment in transitional, post-socialist societies. Although the militarization of built environment has been recognized as a phenomenon in recent years, this remains relatively underdeveloped and above all fragmented field of study. This is a problem that impacts all post-war societies because decisions made in early phases of reconstruction are almost impossible to reverse. To tackle these urgent issues, the project proposes new innovative methods for studying relationships and hierarchies between various actors that take part in these processes, and by doing so it re-examines the role of practitioners—architects, urban and spatial planners—in them. The main scientific objective of the project, achieved and surpassed, was to explain architectural engagements with violent transformation of urban morphology within the broader framework of urban geopolitics and post-war recovery in post-socialist societies, using as a test-bed the reconstruction of Belgrade after the 1999 NATO bombing. The central outcome of the project is an open source, interlinked data platform (https://transurbicide.gta.arch.ethz.ch), developed in cooperation with the Consortium for Open Data in the Humanities (CORDH) and the British Museum (using their ResearchSpace platform as a basis). Operating within the domain of digital humanities, the project managed to construct a histoire croisée of the multiple actors (their roles, influences and decision-making processes) and sources that are involved in post-war reconstruction. Investigating the complex relation-scapes and hierarchies of various stakeholders that took part in urban transformation of Belgrade proved to be both innovative and fruitful methodology that contributed significantly to the current state-ot-the-art in urban conflicts studies, thus confirming the main research hypothesis of the project. The specific objectives of the project were reached with equally satisfying results. The first specific objective was to develop a new research protocol for management and interpretation of the big collections of architectural documents from all actors of interest, using the cutting-edge big architectural data analysis technology. The project relied on the CIDOC-CRM semantic data model, commonly used in conventional heritage archives such as museums, and tried to rethink how modelling semantic data can be applied in architectural research and production. This posed certain methodological challenges but also led to key scientific lessons learned, namely, the necessity to clarify descriptions and definitions of taxonomies so that they are understandable to other potential users. The second specific objective was to use the analysis of collected documents to contribute to develop interdisciplinary research guidelines for investigation of cities in war and post-war contexts. Undoubtedly this goal has also been achieved - I have defined these research guidelines and they are also part of the semantic data model. Furthermore, as some of the published work can attest, these guidelines can ultimately serve as a tool for developing informed design strategies for rebuilding urban zones after violent conflicts.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз