Designing Peace

A peace-keeping wall in Belfast. Image courtesy of Scott Bollens.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog-only article about an urban planner and his lecture on divided cities. That planner was Scott Bollens, who spoke at the UO for the Savage Lecture series called "Cities in War, Struggle, and Peace: The Architecture of Memory and Life — Rebuilding Cities after War and Disaster" (long, true! But accurate ... and by the way, podcasts of the first year of lectures, which concentrated on creating memorials, are available for download here.)

Bollens had one of the more interesting topics (though frankly, I was fascinated with the entire series — and really, you probably could tell that from the fact that I wrote 6 articles on the series even though, frustratingly, most of them only appeared online): Sarajevo, Belfast, Jerusalem, Nicosia — the cities totally divided by ethnic or religious strife, hatred and destruction. I finally had a minute to email Scott Bollens my questions a few weeks ago, and he kindly took time from his (obviously busy) schedule to send thoughtful answers and photographs as well.

Here's Bollens' description of himself (a short bio, if you will):

Scott A. Bollens has interviewed over 220 urban professionals and community advocates in Jerusalem, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia (Cyprus), Sarajevo and Mostar (Bosnia), and Barcelona and Basque cities (Spain) about the role of urban policy and city building amidst nationalistic ethnic conflict and political transitions. Recent books include Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization (2007, Routledge), On Narrow Ground (2000, State University of New York Press) and Urban Peace-Building in Divided Societies (1999, Westview Press). Prof. Bollens has written more than 35 journal articles and book chapters in leading venues over the past 20 years and has presented his international research on politically divided and contested cities at numerous public forums in the U.S. and throughout the world.

Want to read the rest? Trust me: Bollens has a strong sense of humor and outrage, a finely honed moral sense but an ability to look at his own actions that fully emerges even when he's talking about ethnic strife and planning for post-strife city rebuilding. Some of his answers come from his previous writings (that he put in the email to answer the questions), but they're still thought-provoking.

Go here to read the full interview.

Suzi Steffen: Can you talk a bit about how you got interested in urban planning in the first place?

Scott Bollens: The fact that there is a robustly political and subterranean process that lies underneath a reputed technical and rational process always has fascinated me. Many things go on behind the mask of neutrality, objectivity, and rationality

How did that translate into this intense interest in international hot spots?

I was a PhD student at University of North Carolina working on American issues of growth management and innocently working on multiple regression analysis when I was asked in 1987 by a faculty member to be a rapporteur at a seminar in Salzburg, Austria on “divided cities.” The seminar included 50 individuals from about 20 different divided and contested urban areas in the world. I was awestruck by how amazingly interesting and challenging these places were and how one could even think about doing some type of urban planning in them. I thought if I ever got a faculty job, and ever got security of employment through tenure, that I would revisit this topic using an urban planning lens. I did, and I did, and starting in 1993, I reoriented my research program from U.S. growth management to international urban hotspots. It has been an extraordinary trip since — academically, emotionally and spiritually.

Have you ever felt personally in danger in these cities?

Not so much a feeling of danger, but at times a general sense of uneasiness. Sitting in a west Jerusalem chic restaurant watching people coming and going at the entrance, amidst the startup of the second intifada and an uptick in bombings by Palestinian extremists.

As a kind of corollary, where does American privilege intersect with the emotions both of the people you’re working with and your own feelings about the situations of these cities and countries?

A very loaded question, one that I have pondered several times along the way. My first instinct has been to ask, “who am I — a guy raised in upper income and liberal westside Los Angeles — to be going around asking emotion-laden questions to these people in strikingly complex cities?” Guilt, amazement, insecurity enter in at times. Yet, I do have assets that I bring to such research — I think an ability to genuinely listen and to understand the ungraspable complexity of some of these conflicts, not to simplify, label or categorize people or the conflicts, not to judge people. These traits — along with native curiosity and a desire to do good — can go a long way in this very time-intensive type of research.

I wonder as I wander amidst the human debris of ethnic, nationalistic and religious conflicts whether I am no better than a voyeur, someone who collects emotions, facts and photographs of ethnic division in the same way as someone buys goods at a store. Am I not excited about how marketable these observations are in a world both entranced with, and in denial about, the primary of ethnic identity amidst modernity and globalization. One imagines an American entrepreneur like Disney building a simulated 'divided city' complete with 'authentic' portrayals of human suffering and physical destruction. Although these self-doubts at times enter, they do so at the margins of my thinking. Meanwhile, back out in the streets and gathering places of these cities, the drama of the human soul goes on in its immensity.

Being exposed to these cities and their remarkable stories of organized hatred, individual perseverance and determination and the inferno of their life makes one more human and less patient with research done from a safe theoretical or analytical distance. Division — whether it is physical or psychological — is an extremely difficult emotion that spawns hatred, grief, denial, depression and forgiveness. We learn about difficult circumstances not through grand theorizing or simplistic generalizations, but by absorbing the views, concerns, and joys of people whose lives are intimately connected with them. Aldous Huxley reminds us that 'there is all the difference in the world between believing academically, with the intellect, and believing personally, intimately, with the whole living self.' Thinking back on the many individuals I have talked to makes me want to cry over our ability to hurt one another and to celebrate the human soul and its ability to persevere amid the trials of hatred. One gains much greater faith in the human spirit and less confidence in the ability of political leaders.

Here are some of the people I have met:

• A veteran Israeli official in Jerusalem, Yethonathan Golani, who worked for thirty years for the state, explains that the leading motivation behind his professional work has been "the trauma of the Holocaust, showing that we cannot trust anyone but ourselves."

• A loyalist Protestant ex-prisoner, Billy Hutchinson, who killed several Catholics and spent over fifteen years in prison now advocates in the nascent power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly for a peace in Northern Ireland and Belfast that builds confidence on both sides of the sectarian divide.

• An apartheid planner in Johannesburg, Dik Viljoen, states while sitting in his hillside estate atop the grime, soot and humanity of the black city below that apartheid was a "honest and serious attempt to provide opportunities for blacks to have their own areas and their own government, thereby taking them out of the political system."

• A Turkish Cypriot poet, Neshe Yashin, travels thousands of miles by plane so that she can bypass the 50 meter buffer zone that hermetically divides Turkish from Greek Cypriot in the city of Nicosia and the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

• "We grew up during the war, but we don't know when," states Jasmina Resulovic, a 23-year Bosnian Muslim woman who lived in Sarajevo throughout the four-year siege of that city by Serb Militias which killed 11,000 people and destroyed or damaged 60 percent of the city's buildings.

Johannesburg creates in one a constant low-level nausea concerning the gross and inhumane inequalities of the human condition. Untying the durable knots of apartheid will take generations. White South Africans have a habit of taking Americans to task for their racial views and behavior. American apartheid is not heard about because it was so effective in eradicating and containing the indigenous population, I am told. I am uneasy about this accusation, made especially painful by the fact that I had to confront my own views of blackness and minority status upon arrival in South Africa. For the first time in my life, I was a minority — a distinct, conspicuous one guilty by being white in South Africa. How was I to make sense of the overwhelming and rhythmic street scene of black people in this city, when most media portrayals of American cities suggest that blacks should be guarded against physically?

Fear, gates, and smiles. Whites in Johannesburg fear the avenging black, producing gates that separate houses from streets and even parts of houses from other parts. Gates provide a benign feeling of safety but also a dark reinforcement of the "other" as demon and threat. In the well-off ridgeline home we rented while in the city, there was a so-called "rape gate" in between the home's living room and its sleeping quarters. It was there to block a successful intruder's entryway into your bedroom at night. I recall the feeling that I was losing a bit of my humanity each of the 78 nights that I locked that gate. It made me feel more protected at night, but it didn't make me feel better. Sarajevo is the scene of a crime, a rape and devastation. It is an affront to humanity and rationality. Blown off limbs, punctured heads, humiliation, playgrounds and soccer fields turned into cemeteries because these were some of few areas that hillside snipers couldn't see, the ice rink from 1984 Winter Olympics shelled and afire, building after building shattered and burnt. How, pray tell, do I describe photographs of this place to my six-old son? Should I?

Jasmina Resulovic and Arnan Velic are 23 and 22 years old as this century closes. Jasmina is a short, round faced, bespectacled young woman with contemporary flare. Arnan is a lean man, almost gaunt, dark-featured and handsome. As Jasmina says, "I guess by our parents' birth we are Muslim." Both are architecture students at University of Sarajevo. They both stayed in the city during the four years of war, Arnan fighting in the Bosnian Army for five months, and Jasmina mired with her parents and other family in a high-rise flat near the front lines of hand-to-hand fighting. During the war, they attended abbreviated 'war school' in lieu of high school. Since the war, they and a few other students now run a "getting to know Sarajevo" student project that offers tours of the historic and war affected city. I spend one and a half days alone with Jasmina and Arnan as they guide me around the city and I query them about the 'indescribable'. They were 15 and 14 years old when the war started. They are now kids with the wisdom, sadness and perspective of adults. We stand for many quiet moments at the Vraca Monument on the hills overlooking new town Sarajevo. It is a remembrance of the power of brotherhood in the communist partisans' successful crusade against fascism in World War II. Arnan finally speaks — "it's unreal, it is like that war never took place; we learned nothing."

Their long stares at this monument also likely owe to this cruel fact — it was from within that monument that the heavy guns of the Serb militias were first fired from the hills at the Grbavica neighborhood of the city below. Those militias and their guns spent the entirety of the war lodged within these walls that celebrate interethnic unity. For entertainment between gun fire, the militia men had erected a basketball backboard and hoop on one of the stone walls, knocking off during construction and recreation thousands of small letters of the names of partisan fighters commemorated on the hills above Sarajevo. It is a different life now.

"Everyone was equal during the war," says Jasmina, "now money follows money." And in a cruel irony, Arnan painfully describes how "we are looked down on now by those who left during the war and now are back with new cars and clothes. Sometimes I just want to strangle them." Jasmina's mother is a teacher and now makes about 400 DM/year, about one-third of her pre-war wages. Her underemployed father now makes less than her mother. When Jasmina was able to work as a translator for seven days, she was embarrassed to take the wages back to her household because it was as much as her mother makes in one month.

Jasmina describes her interest in a book Sarajevo: Wounded City, at 109 German marks an expensive purchase. While in a bookstore on Marshall Tito Street in the city, she asks the owner who can afford such a book these days. Jasmina recounts, "The lady said foreigners and those with the big cars. Funny, isn't it?"Arnan's and Jasmina's story is not one of only despair. Arnan asserts in an unpredictable, almost hopeful way, "We're not afraid of trying things now. If we fail, we fail, it's OK. There is so much opportunity now, not compared to before the war, but in life generally. It is short and one must make the most of it." And, shockingly to me, it was not depressing during our time together to hear Jasmina and Arnan talk. By this I do not mean that it was cheerful but rather that hearing stories of how the human soul perseveres and matures is affirmative of life. Depression relies on the lack of feeling, and this was feeling. Perseverance amidst challenge reveals the essence of who we are, scraped off of all the layers we put on it. These emotions and feelings are precious parts of life to witness, so much so that I must be careful not to want these experiences as one wants material things. Instead, I need to be grateful, always be receptive to them, for the special things that they are and what they can teach us about being human. There is hope in despair, a spirit amid gloom. The simple ability to persevere, live, cope and grow amidst hatred is proof of light and love. Without the surrounding darkness, how would we know that we could illuminate each other and ourselves? Connecting to the hardship of another does not discourage you, but makes you happy because it roots you in compassion.

After a day and one-half of touring war-stricken Sarajevo and tired and satisfied, I return to my hotel. At the reception desk is a gift T-shirt--of the cheap tourist type showing a leggy woman welcoming the viewer to Sarajevo — and a note from Arnan saying this is something that may help me remember my visit. I went back to my room, laid down and was flooded by the pain and the utter goodness of people living in inhumane places and times. A boy, now man, who has lived through hell thinks of giving to an American visitor. The kitschy nature of the gift makes it even more poignant. Sarajevo's and Arnan's story contains a rashly different plane of emotion that overwhelms and connects one to another.

In your speech at the UO, you talked about the need for urban planners and designers from both sides of a conflict to meet even as the conflict goes on. How does that work? How do members of professional classes get involved in that sort of work without being accused of being traitors and working with the enemy?

Jerusalem and Nicosia provide examples of such discussions of urban professionals and leaders amidst non-resolution of the political question. In March 2001, amidst hostilities that began November 2000, I participated in a joint workshop of Israeli and Palestinian urban professionals examining the challenges and future options of planning a Jerusalem of mutual acceptance. This meeting was an offshoot of a larger joint effort, begun in 1995, which contributed technical support to the 2000 Camp David peace negotiations. In Nicosia, for thirteen years, the mayor of the Greek Cypriot city and his Turkish Cypriot mayor counterpart met regularly on a clandestine basis. Such friendship helped bring about in the 1980s the development of a Nicosia Master Plan that disregarded the dividing line and planned for the city as a unified entity. This cooperation has facilitated the European Union-funded development of pedestrian areas in the commercial and historic centers on both sides of the line in ways that would enable them to be connected in the future.

At the panel discussion on the last day of the architecture series, the dean of the school of Architecture and the Allied Arts talked about architects needing to find a way to come in earlier after conflicts, to be part of the response team. Can you talk about some examples of your experiences working with architects in post-conflict settings?

In terms of international involvement, a good account of early intervention by architects is found in John Yarwood’s book on Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina (Rebuilding Mostar: Reconstruction in a War Zone).

Spanish (Catalan) architects and urbanists planned critical role in post-Franco Barcelona in formulating and creating urban democracy. Key leverage points included formulation of a metropolitan plan early in the political transition that cut build out and speculation, then in the years that followed the building numerous new public spaces that opened up the city.

How can architecture students build alliances with other planning professionals in order to understand the situation and work with the people of the city in recovery?

In your studies and design work, understand the political context within which built form develops. Think about how physical form either separates or connects cities and residents. Become knowledgeable with international discussions concerning social cohesion, urban human security, physical form and violence. A good place to start is the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) website and publications.

Tune in to progressive urbanists seeking political change:
Architects without Borders
Bimkom: Planners for Human Rights (Israel)
Community Technical Aid (Belfast)
Planners Network: The Organization of Progressive Planning (USA)
B'TSELEM- Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

You suggested that each city should have a heavily enforced neutral territory that does not include buildings with single ethnic or single religious purposes. Where has this worked? Why is it necessary?

A central plank of the international community’s urban strategy in postwar Mostar represents both the promise and pitfalls of “neutral” planning and spatial buffering as means of reconstituting a city of extreme division. The international community presented a well-developed conceptualization of how planning and urbanism would contribute to bridging the nationalist divide. Approximately 1 mile long and one-half mile wide, a “central zone” in the traditional commercial and tourist center of the city was to be administered by an ethnically balanced city council and administration. Consisting of a common strip of land along the former confrontation line where joint Federation, Canton and City institutions and administrations would be located, the central zone was to act immediately as a spatial buffer between the two sides and to indicate to both Croats and Bosniaks that land in this area would not be allocated based on wartime positions. It would be a place of neutrality and ethnically balanced control and administration. Over time, through appropriate development, the central zone would grow like a seed and demonstrate that cross-ethnic activities could resume, first within the zone, and then hopefully in larger swatches of urban space within the “ethnic” municipalities. The intent was that with this central zone buffer the city would grow together normally over time, rather than have it develop as a hard interface between two antagonistic ethnic halves of the city.

In reality, both Croats and Bosniaks have acted repeatedly to freeze this seed and obstruct its ability to grow roots that would connect the two sides. The same forces that captured the six other municipalities for ethnic gain also were able insidiously to warp and dismantle the integrative goals of the central zone. The district became in the early days a target of ethnic territorial ambitions and remained that way for ten years. Croats, more than Bosniaks, have strategically built ethnically exclusive institutions in the central zone. Such ethnic penetration — a bastardized type of “policy making through land occupation” (Gerd Wochein, OHR, interview) — has sabotaged the endeavor to construct a foundation for the long-term normalization of Mostar. In the face of ethnically entrenched and war-hardened antagonists, G. Wochein (interview) asserts that “we as urbanists should have helped integrate the city quickly through the design of the central zone with public functions, coffee shops and meeting places, and mixed living areas. We had the chance, but I think we lost that opportunity."

What further reading would you recommend for our readers and for architecture students interested in post-conflict rebuilding?

Esther Charlesworth. Architects Without Frontiers
Robert Bevan. The Destruction of Memory
John Yarwood. Rebuilding Mostar: Reconstruction in a War Zone.
Liverpool University Press, Town Planning Review, Special Studies No. 3.
Hashim Sarkis (ed.) 2006. Two Squares: Martyrs Square, Beirut, and Sirkeci Square, Istanbul.
William Neill. Urban Planning and Cultural Identity

What do you hear about rebuilding in the various cities of Iraq?

Political reconstitution and urban peace-building need to go together as two essential pieces of that country’s comeback. National political advances without grounding in urban betterment will be unanchored and unsustainable. Difficult questions need to be confronted whether Iraq’s cities are to be managed as segregated places of policed stability. Such a likely future creates a segregated Iraq that may likely buy some short-term stability at the cost of long-term genuine reconciliation between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. Political power-sharing in cities like Kirkuk will need to reinforced by on-the-ground changes that benefit all sides.

Where are you off to next?

Not sure where next, but the contentious rebuilding of Beirut, Lebanon and western European countries’ urban management of foreign (particularly Islamic) immigration are two items that have my interest these days.

Could you list some of your favorite cities in terms of their urban design — and explain why you like them?

The feeling of utter centrality of Jerusalem.
The mixed cultural and historic fabric of Sarajevo (and the trauma it endured).
The brilliant natural setting of Vancouver, British Columbia.
The grimy and organic creativity of Barcelona.
The architectural boldness and experimentation of Berlin.