Having witnessed more than its fair share of violence, destruction and subsequent rebirth, the Bosnian city of Sarajevo is a poignant location of the third LINA conference, entitled Community-Led Architecture. The bottom-up spirit of the city parallels the broad and hopeful discussions across LINA’s many members and fellows, demonstrating the powerful need for infrastructures of solidarity — as witnessed by Koozarch founder Federica Zambeletti.
The third LINA conference, which took place this year in Sarajevo, reconvened its community of 34 members and 25 fellows for two richly programmed days, exchanging ideas and perspectives across cultures, disciplines and generations. As a platform whose strength lies in its networks and collaborations that it fosters, this year’s focus on ‘community-led architecture’ might come as no surprise. Even so, the theme is observed through a number of critical lenses, challenging what might seem like a clichéd theme. What actually constitutes a community? To what extent is this term restricted to humans? Does architecture in fact need to be led? What kind of architecture is created by designing with a community rather than for them?
What actually constitutes a community? To what extent is this term restricted to humans? Does architecture in fact need to be led? What kind of architecture is created by designing with a community rather than for them?
The hosts of Community Led Architecture, this year’s title for LINA’s annual conference, are Dunja Krvavac and Irhana Šehović — curatorial masterminds behind the group Days of Architecture — and both relate to the theme with understandable fervour. Community-led actions lie at the heart of the history of Sarajevo, a city where both Krvavac and Šehović were born under siege. Their lecture, Architectures of the “Periphery” mocked the perception of Sarajevo's ‘peripheral’ status to focus on how the city’s development — in contrast with most other ‘central’ European metropolises — is the result of a truly bottom-up approach. Indeed, this determinedly social approach has and continues to fill in the gaps or errors left by a weak, if not entirely absent, top-down form of governance. Both Krvavac’s parents, as practising architects, engaged directly in the reconstruction of the city some thirty years ago. It is through such initiatives, amongst others, that Sarajevo managed to rise again from the rubble of destruction.
The notion of community in Sarajevo is inherently multicultural and multi-ethnic — something which is epitomised by the term raaya, which draws on the Ottoman foundations of the city. In Arabic, the word raaya was used to denote ordinary people; that is, both Muslim and non-Muslim citizens who stood outside the ruling caste of Ottomans. Five hundred years later, Šehović shares how the word is used to refer to “my closest ones, with whom I shareeverything” whilst also being used to talk about a “functioning group” who “operates by acting and producing social reality in accordance with its own principles.”
This relentless attitude has ensured that Sarajevo not only survived the numerous violences across the six distinct historical periods of the city — but that it has also thrived through these phases. The extraordinary Sarajevo Film Festival — itself born as an underground act of rebellion, when 10,000 Sarajevans defied the shelling to attend screenings — is only one remarkable instance which speaks to its defiant and creative culture. From children who played in the rubble, hardly discouraged by the continuous bombardments, to the dedicated practitioners who are engaging in the city’s cultural and architecture scene through Days of Architecture while running their own operative practices, it is clear that Sarajavo’s idea of community-led world-building speaks at once to the most generous and humble forms of practice.
A veritable chorus of female voices had travelled from Kiev and broader Ukraine to share their projects and works, whilst their male compatriots were forbidden from leaving that country.
Perhaps Sarajevo’s difficult history — as a place that has witnessed war and conflict as a part of everyday life, and where communities have blossomed in the face of hardship — positions it as a natural locus to highlight the power of strong social infrastructure. Throughout the two day conference, it was notable that a veritable chorus of female voices had travelled from Kiev and broader Ukraine to share their projects and works, whilst their male compatriots were forbidden from leaving that country. From initiatives dating back to 2014, as a response to the shift in power structures in Ukraine — as in the case of the NGO Urban Reform — to institutions emerging 2020 to explore human coexistence with the land (as in the Pavilion of Culture), these practices exemplify the importance of creating ‘safe’ or rather protected spaces, crafted with and for the communities of Ukraine.
Two years after the first exploration of Protected Lands at the 3rd Tbilisi Architecture Biennial in 2021 and a year since Before the Future at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, crossing paths with Ukrainian architect and researcher Iryna Miroshnykova is a bittersweet feeling. At LINA, she presents a development of the Pavilion of Cultures’ engagement with fortification constructions, through the project Hide-and-seek — a multidisciplinary exploration of defensive architectures used during wartime and their repurposed meanings during peacetime. Whether built by the people or the government — as either intuitive or professional, archaic or modern, temporary or permanent constructions, which take the form of bunkers, pillboxes, road defence barriers and gates (amongst other forms) — these defensive structures have come to serve as a common space of coexistence. Beyond that which has become part of a ‘normal’ urban experience, we might acknowledge the ad-hoc defence structures to be found within one’s apartment — when running to a bunker 500m down the street seems an inadequate solution during a night of incessant, recurring sirens and alarms. In these circumstances, elements as banal as a bathtub can become life-saving devices. In situations like this, the very idea of community-led architecture transcends the physical. Rather, it becomes impossible to think of survival without the architectures of care and solidarity.
In situations like this, the very idea of community-led architecture transcends the physical. Rather, it becomes impossible to think of survival without the architectures of care and solidarity.
Drawing on the term “ruderal” — which describes a condition where nature has thrived within — and despite — environments radically transformed by humans, The Atlas of Ruderal Architecture stretches the boundaries of care for the local-sustainability biome. It takes in practices of salvaging, reusing and recycling evident the work undertaken by postwar practitioners across Europe, focusing on initiatives in Poland and Switzerland — as both nations supply second-hand construction components in support of grassroots renovation works in Ukraine. The work of the Atlas is pivotal, both as a documentation but more importantly as a catalyst for the creation of similar infrastructures of material support, in the wake of present and future reconstructions in spaces of conflict.
Reflecting on the verb leading — from community-led — and whether it’s a matter of designing with a community or for one, one cannot help but return to architecture’s primary role as shelter and to the notion of housing as a right. Numerous projects discussed by the fellows tackle the housing crisis throughout the European continent — as in the case of Co-Living London, de porte à porte and Rome on Display. Co-Living London starts from the experience of three friends, immigrants and trainee architect who take London to explore forced or chosen co-living situations in European Capital cities, while Rome on Display explores the shortcomings of housing complexes throughout the Italian capital. London, Paris and Rome are only three cities impacted by Europe’s ongoing housing crisis and a wider international context whereby 1.6 billion people are expected to be affected by the global housing shortage by 2025. With soaring property prices in all major cities, young people and families continue to be expelled from urban centres, as the shiny facades of capital replace once-affordable housing units. In this context, films like De porte à porte, by the collective docar. — which documents the disparate fates of seven social housing towers on the Paris ring road — are pivotal in revealing the paradigmatic shift from the demolition of social housing to the transformation of the urban renewal sector. During the day, contemporary practitioners — like Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and her Moratorium on New Construction — seem to connect and inspire many of the topics tackled by the fellows, from the right to housing to the case for adaptive reuse, all the way to questions of equity in the labour. Such arcs would weave together practices and projects as those of girlscanscan collective, Liisa Ryynänen, kuidas.works and NAA! (Netherlands Angry Architects).
For this year’s fellows, the notion of community notably extends beyond the human to include other species, entities and presences. Inprojects such as Echoes of the Earth and Radio Otherwise, sound becomes a means through which to restore nature-human interactions even as it challenges and moves beyond this binary division. Where Echoes of the Earth experiments with sound across Porto and Switzerland, connecting quotidien food, urban and social systems while establishing networks of solidarity, Radio Otherwise catalyses expertise spanning from cybernetics to ecologies, exploring the in-betweenness of the nature-human dichotomy. Through both works, the act of listening becomes fundamental.Within the project Learning with Ghosts, this act is taken a step further; Jacques-Marie Ligot and Lucille Leger explore what it means to summon ghosts as a means of questioning the unspeakable — to ask not what architecture and objects intend to show us, but rather what shows through them. The tent as a typology of temporary architecture — one born of urgency, which too often becomes a perennial condition — becomes the medium and hosting space through which the artists seek to engage with a community of thinkers, to share their experiences of “ghosts”.
Of course, architecture can be violent but it can also be very generous. If we did not trust in that knowledge, we would not be here today, doing the work we do together.
The practice of New South — co-founded by Meriem Chabani, LINA fellow 2021 — is engaged with untangling the complexities of what it means to design both for and with a community. Even a quick perusal of its past work reveals people to be at the core of the practice, in all of its facets. In conversation, Chabani generously shared her ongoing work under the heading of Sacred Ground, from research to practice, and the exchanges this has yielded. To discuss ‘sacred ground’ in the city of Sarajevo — a city which has been struck with destruction of heritage, the obliteration of places that seemed secure and protected — underlines the need for the collective protection of certain sites, as both spatial practitioners but also more largely, as citizens. Yet over the course of the conference, striving for shelter as a human right would seem to lie beyond aspiration, in the face of the ongoing, widespread and indiscriminate Israeli bombing across Gaza and now Lebanon.
Treading lightly between the urban scars known as Sarajevo roses, one can easily traverse the “meeting of cultures” — a physical line inscribed in the city, between its Ottoman half on the east and the Austro-Hungarian west — in a single step, and back again. There is much to learn from the Bosnian city and infrastructures of solidarity, nurtured by communities such as LINA. Of course, architecture can be violent but it can also be very generous. If we did not trust in that knowledge, we would not be here today, doing the work we do together.
Bio
Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.
