Husein Oručević: Defending public spaces – defending our future

Some of the public spaces and public utility buildings illustrate the presence of nationalist policies: some buildings in the city have a national prefix inserted in their names, either a Bosnian or a Croatian one. If a name does not have a national prefix, it is often the case that schools are named after significant religious personages, a fact which renders history one-dimentional and discriminatory. Street names have been changed: for a person with a decent knowledge of the Balkan history it will be obvious in which part of the city s/he is in: suffice it to look at street names.

The whole violent and bloody history of Mostar and the Balkans is still present in street names of Today’s Mostar. It is represented by names of warriors and fighters, ideologists and heroes (one nation’s hero is another nation’s war criminal or murderer) Violence follows you wherever you go.

Apart from nationalist “frenzy” in naming, the [questionable] choice of people standing at the helm of cultural and public institutions, and the negation of public welfare, another problem has arisen: „McWorld”. It seeks new, “unploughed dolar-bearing fields”, unbroken spaces which crave the consumptionist world. It is accompanied by an unethical (even inhuman) campaign. “McWorld” entered into Mostar as well, hand in hand with uncreative and antagonistic politicians.

Will the baloon burst and when?

Yesterday’s Croatians, Muslims and Serbs, divided, quarelling, wounded, became buyers and sellers. Shopping sprees and supermarkets are a surrogate of civil initiative and public spaces, substitutes for an Agora, a place for gatherings and discussions.

Objects valuable from the public’s point of view are prepared to be privatised or have already been sold, without informing the citizens. Destroyed buildings owned by the municipality are not restored, because the authorities lack the vision and the engagement, do not know what to do with them, how to govern and use them. Objects of historical value are being sold out at preposterous prices. Sometimes the façades of beautiful, old buildings are covered with “McWorld” billboards.

Huge billboards have become an end in themselves and the aim of the “huge profit”. Their owners disregard the violence inflicted on every person entering the city, as well as on every stroller walking down the streets of Mostar. These strollers are the people who notice the traces of the city. The newly arrived big commerce destroys and defies citizens of Mostar, not to mention people who work and learn in obscured rooms, darkened by the “Great – New Emperor” of huge commercial banners who threatens us with his black cloak. McWorld has arrived, and people are unable to oppose the global Emperor who pays homage to the idea of profit. Profit and well-being for the chosen few.

The cosmopolitan idea in Mostar lost the battle with aggressive nationalist politics, which were responsible for destroying the city and its traces. They destroyed spaces of remembrance and identity trying at the same time to establish even older and more grandiose identities, which no one remembers. None of the citizens of Mostar scattered all around the world and those divided within the city. Mostar is a city where no one feels good, not any citizen nor people belonging to whichever nation, religion or subculture.

This is why the Youth Culture Centre Abrasevic, an autonomous zone, a ”House on the Border” began to defend what’s left of the city’s memory, including the memory of urban development. All Mostarians remember the Abrasevic building. They would learn and play there, fall in love but also discuss solutions for saving the city and the urban idea. We had to sue the local authorities in order to save at least one site of remembrance and public interaction. We won the process and we will continue to develop this place with a view to seeking alternatives for today’s Mostar as depicted in this short introduction to the discussion about how to defend public spaces, spaces which are to defend our future and the future of the City.

At the city gate, strolling around a city, flying above a city
On boundaries, Agoras, bridges and some other more and less important stories

In her book Post-polis. An introduction to the philosophy of a postmodern city, Ewa Rewers distinguishes three perspectives of perceiving city life: "The first one is the perspective of a pilgrim who stands at the city gate, at its threshold. Getting to know the city from its threshold means to pose questions: What is a city? What does it mean to live in a city? How does it match its name?"

In a city in Istria called Kastav there is a “Gradska loža” (a city lodge), some would call it an Agora. The building is situated outside the old city walls, just by the city gate. It was built in 1571 The lodge has unique architecture and is a remarkable building. It was built as a place for gatherings and celebrating folk holidays, as well as for expressing views and mitigating conflicts.

Gradska loža is situated in the metaphorical city threshold. People who wanted to find safety or those who wanted to trade, those who were only visiting the city and ones intending to stay, everybody had to visit Kastav’s Gradska loža and think and talk about the city. The building became a form of “municipal voluntary quarantine” – a field for compromise. In a lodge which was created precisely as a place for reaching compromise two adjoined worlds meet and penetrate each other.

Two worlds establish contact on no-man’s land (a land of compromise, of conversation) or on a land conceived and organised so as to be an entrance and an exit at a time; a space which leads us in both directions – to the inside and to the outside. A place which takes us back to an unorganised space with no memory, wandering and unpredictable. Or to a space of memory which some say is close to eternal expanse – the city.

Kastav had its “bridge” which it had to cross, a “bridge” of initiation, a lodge. Spending time in it was a form of test – a test of conversation and a test for desire to live in the city. A short sojourn in the lodge allowed a stranger to cross the city boundary, cross its threshold. Kastav’s border – the lodge represented a well known Simmel’s idea on the inexistence of borders or existence of borders encompassing two strategies at the same time – closeness and separation.

Kastav was not named after its democratic lodge.

Another city I mention started with a bridge, was founded on a bridge. Many people wonder what came first – the bridge or the city?
Before the bridge is built, many places alongside the river are inhabited. But only one of them is going to become a city – the place where a bridge will be constructed.
According to Heidegger, the bridge comes first. My city illustrates his thinking. Mostar as a city was founded on a bridge, called the Old Bridge. A bridge opens possibilities to go to the other side, enables free movement, removes the obstacle for walking. It is a link, but also a frontier. It is a great solution for free movement of men, it enables things which were undoable yesterday, it becomes an idea. A bridge is situated at a frontier between two places which formed a city. It is a tool, a conversation of hands and technologies. It does not resemble the Kastav “city quarantine”.

A bridge is a miracle which will fade away with time. It will cease to be an ideal and become a frontier. It will carry out a strategy of separation, regardless of man’s idealised original wish that its aim should be to bring people closer – an unhampered movement towards....

Turning a bridge into a frontier has its destructive, conflict-breeding consequence: separation. A bridge is a mixture of two worlds, two extreme human features: the idealistic world and the destructive world. Mostar, a bridge-city, has qualities of an extreme city, precisely because it was founded on a bridge. Closeness and separation, conflict and conversation reconciliation, progress and backwardness, vital energies of the world – everything intermingles in the city. The aim is to bring these forces under control.

By building bridges Mostar made a step towards development, by destroying it the city reached the bottom – the hell of divisions and separations. Today the bridges of Mostar have been reconstructed, but the city is still divided. One might say that the whole world is stuck in Mostar Valley.

Fortunately, what is left are not only frontiers and bridges. These are not the only things which constitute a city. If this were the case, I would have to stop my reflections on a grim image of a struggle between conflict and encounter.

Let us leave the threshold and the bridge and the frontier, let’s enter the city and stroll around. Let us not forget that we are strangers. Those who enter the city have yet to get to know it and understand it. We left the lodge and the bridge behind us, but this doesn’t mean we will not encounter them in the city centre. We may still need them in order to understand the rhythm, the dynamics and the development of the urban tissue.

Coming back to Ewa Rewers and her point of view on city life, we reach the second strategy: the pedestrian, stroller: "Pedestrians of city streets “write” [the story of the city] with their own bodies according to individual rules."

Where do you go when you first arrive in a new city, when you meet it for the first time? How do you get to know it? Let’s seize the space, the memory map and the organisation of traffic and movement, slow movement. Let’s look at the city from the perspective of a stroller, not a stranger.

Where will the stranger feel safe? What is he looking for when he encounters a new organism in which he will spend some time, or maybe stay forever? Maybe he has friends. Do they have time for him?

Personal relations of course exist, but humans have a questing and curious nature. Everyone would like to understand and organise space in his own manner. The possibility of organizing space in our own way is a very important, if not the most important constituent of the. It is a space in which the city meets itself, where individuals intermingle, where groups created by the city’s past and memory encounter each other.

In public spaces, where the familiar meets the different, it will not be difficult for a newcomer form another city or another country to enter the Agora and engage in dialogue. In this social and cultural blend one is always among fellow people. We never feel alone in such public places, which constitute a space for art and social encounter. We are absorbed by the power of contact and dialogue, by different forms of communicative codes offered by such places.

My city is my individual network of city attributes, cosmopolitan spaces, “autonomous zones – islands”, cast aside in the boundless sea of self-sufficient, isolated spaces forming closed entities. The network I create enables me, or at least does not hinder, to meet the “other”, the “different”.

Today, when I find myself in a different, unknown city in Poland, I discover the grid of “my own city”, I’m looking for features of cities I’ve known before – I’m looking for places where ideas and art meet; places which the city created in the course of its unique history. It is in these places that one discovers the universal value of a city and its uniqueness.

Abandoned city space (the autonomous zone – island) pleads us to take care of it. These zones, destroyed, abandoned need not only be restored. We also have to breathe life into them by creating some spontaneous economic activity/content: parking lots, shopping malls or transport arteries. We also need to spend some time trying to understand the state these spaces find themselves in – a state of neglect and abandonment. Here lies the key to understanding a city, its future, and a necessary openness to people who, just as we do today, will be walking down the streets of the city, hence filling their own part of the urban map of memory and meaning.

In a city, there are many places which we avoid, even if this means a longer journey (even though a city constitutes one entity and there are no problems with getting from one part to another in no time at all). However, we rarely ask ourselves: why is our itinerary so indirect, why do we avoid certain parts of the city? Are they not landmines that we plant ourselves?

These parts are the wounds of a city, they become blank spots on the map, which only an experienced stroller can spot. These destroyed spaces were most often deliberately left out of the city communication grid. We encircle the “remembrance estates” in order not to look at them, but first and foremost in order not to ask questions, as questions must inevitably lead to answers. For many people today neither the questions nor the answers are important. They claim that there is no alternative and that they have no time to ponder on the subject. “The time is running, we don’t have time for that”, “Time is money”, “Who gives a damn about in the 21st century.”

It is the inclusion of such hidden, forbidden and ignored places that constitutes the main challenge for divided cities. An observant stroller, or even a less observant one (but still someone who wanders through the city) will see these blank spots, places cast outside the margin. This observation will cause a question to emerge: what is it that used to be here? Why was it destroyed, why isn’t it restored? Why was it left out?

While observing various cities and housing estates, districts, I discovered that every one of them had some kind of a “scar”, a place which begs you to get to know it, to restore its history and collect memories about it. If we don’t undertake historical work and restore the memory of such places, we’ll just avoid facing the problem which will eventually come up. It may reappear in a different form and become an agent and accelerator of destruction. The visible frontiers within a city, spaces hidden from the sight of its inhabitants constitute autonomous zones of remembrance, but also zones of ignorance – they are a problem which doesn’t exist (“I can’t see it so it doesn’t exist”). Everything we want to ignore, everything we wish no to know about is a sign of the passage of time, of the development of the city, so one might also say – a sign of the development of civilisation.

"... Because if the city is a splendid layer of memories, which as a rule exceeds the memory of just one given nationality, race or language, than what can the destruction of this “antropological memory” bring? Doesn’t it take away one good or maybe even the best part of human essence?" – Bogdanovic would ask.

Are these not just city-destructing instincts? The only thing they can imagine is ignorance and the only solution they see is war. Those who hate the city and cosmopolitan life can present and accept only oe truth. They prevent other truths from being stated by constantly feulling anxiety, including the fear of war. This fear hinders any attempt to meet.

Frontiers create the area for conflict, but also a scope for conversation. They are hidden in the dark, in inconspicuous ruins, on which only the daylight reveals. They rest unnoticed, unrecognised, they have no history or their history is left unsaid. They remain unfamiliar until someone notices them, starts describing and working on them. In other words – until someone sets in motion the archeological memory of a place.

It is not easy to pass from the light, the light of a blinding neon, into dark unfamiliar spaces. In their case light serves as a separator – they are blinded and pushed into darkness by it. We who live in the light will never discover the other side, the “dark” side. The obscured side can teach us how to recognise light again and not to be blinded by it.

How to be reborn.

We have to bathe in the light of people who used to be a part of the citylights, a light which surrounds us, but remains unseen.

Analogies can be drawn to the situation of ghettos during World War II. They were also hidden from the sight of passers-by and they were also victims of ignorance. Such spaces – inaccessible for strollers, controlled, and after a certain period – forgotten – are excluded from city life. They are hidden as if they had never existed. Are they lost forever?

Autonomous art spaces, which I have already mentioned, face similar problems. They have significant reintegration potential in divided cities, but a policy of segregation turns them into second-class areas with no light. They are situated in ruins, ruins of memory as well – they are supposed to be forgotten as quickly as possible. Citizens’ (not strollers’) fear of an obscured and destroyed space surrounded by noise and by a sea of shining, glossy billboards tells us a lot about the problem of visual pollution and a fake feeling of security hidden behind immense quantities of light and omnipresent cameras. There is no mystery and no curiosity. The fear is stronger, because we don’t meet each other any more, we don’t know each other, and we buy safety in a package deal with the blinding lights. No longer do we obtain it by talking and reaching agreements. The night has become darker than ever before.

Hidden, ignored spaces are silent, unlit. They resemble settings from horror films, which should be avoided at any cost. If we find ourselves in such a place we should return as soon as possible to the safe sea of citylights. We don’t feel safe without cameras and screens, and the noise substitutes the feeling of activity and ongoing life.

The roads leading to autonomous zones look gloomy, they resemble a stroll of a blind man or a long muddy passage in the dark.

But, as in a jungle full of dangerous, lurking animals, we unexpectedly discover a clearing, an open space with a source of a huge river. Life exists here as well.

How to make this unpleasant passage of a blindman safer and more accessible? How can we humanise and shorten the path linking the two worlds which were created precisely with a view to divide? How to link them, how to contrapose them? One world resembles a curiosity museum, the other seeks safety in humanity and conversation. One is glossy, blinding, the other is bearly noticable, hidden in the dark. One is homogeneous, uniform, recognisable, the other is diverse and pluralist. One is nationalist, enclosed by hate, the other is curious and open, but hidden from the sight of passers-by.

If these were traits of human beings instead of features of urban spaces, which values would you like to protect?

Instead of creating enclaves or ghettos serving as a “place of transition for strangers” we should act to change these “autonomous zones – islands” into public spaces, spaces for exchanging and creating new visions of unity.
Immigrants, foreigners, “others”: where were they born? What do they bring with them, what experiences, what memories? What stories about evil of this world? What tales and myths do they bring with them to the cities?

For these people cities are mainly arrival terminals. Cities were formed by merging modern urban infrastructures, now virtual motorways develop within them. How can one find a place for themselves in such a mixture? How can we stay who we are and offer ourselves to others?

Only a real city is able to protect and secure the humanity of these strangers, who come to us and leave a part of themselves in our cities. They carry a burden we don’t know about, a burden of reality which stands in our doorway or is hidden in the darkness of ignored, remote places of the third world. Borders are created in our vicinity. Borders which the exiles have already crossed on their way to our cities.

"...Exile forces us to be reborn, opens one dimension in time and space which may prove useful to reveal the true importance of things. We have to open our eyes: before changing the reality we have to see first... Exile, which is always preceded by a failure, is not only a painful experience. It closes some doors, but opens others: it is a punishment, but at the same time freedom and responsibility. It has one black, but also one red face..." – E. Galean writes in his work The Homeless.

Rebirth means discovering the world once again. Regardless of whether you are born or reborn, you see the reality in a different, clearer way. Such a new reality is indispensible for a city.

A city cannot be surprised by anything if it strives to be a city, a space of cosmopolitan values.

Assimilation, multiculturalism, separation, integration... Many questions arise from fear and lack of knowledge of the other person.

Always a mistake.

Inadequate questions.

The results are shocking, and divisions visible. How to acquaint an immigrant with the achievements of a city? Achievements not of one confession, not of one district, but also the achievements of other confessions and cultures. We often encounter “hidden” immigrants, poor people. We meet them in the outskirts of cities and in municipal institutions which still are common. I guess. They are hidden from our sight, invisible, we don’t even know if they’re here. They come to us because we were not willing to come to them and understand their world.

We thought that because we provide board and lodging the stranger will become a part of our world and our cosmopolitan (or rather economic) history.
We haven’t created that such a space, an indispensible Agora, a space which enables meeting other people. Places which would really show what a city really is and what it will face tomorrow. Agoras encourage people to talk about themselves, to reveal a part of themselves to others.

Immigrants, strangers must be provided with the possibility to meet the city. They need open public spaces to give them support and a sense of belonging. They have already passed the threshold of the city, we open the doors for them. Now they are another part of a mixture which the city has to develop.

They cannot be left to their own devices, because this breeds frustrated groups which, instead of being curious about others, violently intrude their the space. Public spaces, which are a means of changing the divided city, are attacked first. Interest in other people, which is as strong as a curiosity of a baby, transformed into another, subconscious side of curiosity – irrational brutality. This aggression reaches the other side, crosses the border and tries to destroy as much as possible.

Here we reach the frontier – it is either an area for conflict or a place for reconciliation and dialogue. Whether it will function as one or the other depends on us and on the behaviour of the city. It also depends on preserving public places in border areas.


The third perspective has a privileged point of view: “One of an Icarus, a solar or divine Eye floating above the city, liberated from earthly ways, independent from street traffic.”

Observing the world from above, encompassing it as a whole means understanding it. Monitoring and planning the development of the city means creating ideas and putting them into being. The city has become a new invaluable dictionary which, just as poetry does, may open the man’s horizons and draw attention to new solutions. Bogdan Bogdanovic, an architect and expert in urban planning perceived the city as a great technical tool:

The city in itself is a great technical tool, superior to all the other tools – not least because the city turned out to be a new “tool of thought”. It is the creation of cities which enabled men to look at themselves in retrospective and almost tangibly establish the currents of their own fate, just as they can account for the ups and downs of cities. Before the emergence of cities, men were ahistorical beings, not only because usually cities and the art of writing go hand in hand, but also because the city itself became a unique sort of writing, an extralinguistic one. It became a complex and precious ideography.

Today’s huge cities escape our perception because of their vastness, they hide beyond the horizon, no matter how high a mountain we climb. Even from a bird’s eye view we’re unable to see what has come into being in recent decades. Satellite pictures scan our streets, looking for the faintest light, controlling us and protecting us from ourselves. In these pictures we won’t find even one trace, even one sound, even one human story told from the perspective of a city.

...why was the City given to us? In order to dream in it and find all the pleasure we are able to obtain? It seems a valid claim. But a gift of this importance imposes a duty. I think that the City was given to us first and foremost in order to understand ourselves better, enriched by virtues of urban wisdom. A marvelous toy indeed! If we take a look at it, we can see ourselves. If we place it between us and the world, we see the world, the universe, entirety. It looks like the city is a colourful, educational mechanism, one might say: a teaching aid, a cognitive model... In ancient Middle Eastern cosmogonies the “world” and the “city” would often come into being simultaneously. Two sets of phenomena, city/civilisation/surroundings on the one hand and nature/world/universe on the other are inseparably linked in the mind of the archaic man.


On the frontier of divided cities

What infrastructure will the frontiers within divided cities need in the future?

Passageways, tunnels, bridges or checkpoints, barbed wires, minefields? Both these groups have been tried in practice, both constitute a part of our infrastructure, “historical projects” and architectural ideas – how to extend a path without the need to stop and how to end a path to stop a stranger.
Here I’d like to avail myself of the metaphor “a bridge over dry land”. There is no river, no visible obstacle, but a real wall, canyon or precipice exist in the minds of the inhabitants.
Such a bridge does not look like a bridge because it has a different role and structure. It is situated on the border between two or more entities. Such an object can have one of the roles I’ve mentioned above. It is worthwhile to translate the functions of these objects into the language of society, politics and culture.

Passages – it is vital to ensure an undisturbed extension for pedestrian traffic disregarding the divisions and obstacles existing in peoples’ minds, especially if the passage is situated on the frontier. Such a space is a safe one, because the “stranger” is not seen from the other side and enters it undisturbed. Today, when we are just at the beginning of overcoming divisions, curiosity should be protected. The guarantee of safety is supposed to encourage the “coming-out”.

Tunnels: underpasses which seem to be the safest way to get to the other side, under the condition that the entrances are situated in the heart of a ghetto, deep within the “others” territory. The tunnel resembles rather an underground city or a labyrinth which leads everywhere, not only to one or the other side. Hence a tunnel is not only a means of crossing the impassable frontier. It also opens other entrances to other parts of the city which were not connected with such a grid – an underground labyrinth – before.

Bridges and “bridges over dry land”: it’s an unusual idea: to live on a bridge, not only cross it. When you live on a bridge, every passer-by becomes your guest, because you live in the middle of it. A house-bridge.
Regular passers-by for whom crossing a bridge was only a means to an end will cease to exist (although people who are not curious will always be a majority). Who will live on the “bridge”? Who is capable of living on a bridge? Who will look after such a “house-bridge”? What values will such a “house-bridge” represent? The visibility of frontiers in the future depends on the answers for these questions. The “house-bridge” teaches us how to go to the other side and who we will meet there. This in turn reduces the anxiety about the unknown or almost unknown.

A tradition of living on the bridge which is a public space is not new in the Balkans. All social strata have visited the bridge without concerns – it was treated as a no-man’s land, but at the same time as a space belonging to everyone. These, often very hermetic, groups took part in enriching encounters, after which they went back to their hometowns and villages not fearing to come across someone they had never seen before. They were ready to meet strangers. Such a space is best described by Ivo Andric:
"On the bridge and below it boys were playing, first love blossoms, people work and quarrel; on the stone walls the merchants exhibit their commodities. People sit, deliberate, sing; beggars and cripples gather. Travellers arrive through the gate and people set off on journeys. They arrive for weddings and funerals alike. They leave summons and messages, but also heads of convicts. The news from the district, good and bad, reach this bridge faster than any other place. It is here that respected citizens meet to talk business. In difficult times people of all three confessions from three parts of Visegrad meet here. A mullah, an Orthodox priest and a rabbi exchange opinions and jointly make decisions concerning the city.”

All ideas I mentioned resulted from a several years’ struggle I undertook against divisions in Mostar. It is a struggle against ideas and actions which still divide some cities in the world and threaten them with fight and conflict. That is why I chose to show you at the end of my presentation several pictures of a frontier. This is Bulevar street in Mostar. It divides the city into Eastern and Western parts. I also present several public buildings which are to be privatised or destroyed.

At the end I’d like to say that it is not too late for Mostar to make a step towards creating unity. It is not too late to create infrastructure which would serve as a bridge over dry land and improve communication between both sides of Mostar.