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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the relationship between the architectural overhaul and tourism narratives around the changing cityscapes in the Himalayan city of Srinagar.

Paper long abstract:

This study explores the intricate tourism narratives among domestic tourists in Kashmir, with a particular emphasis on the architectural transformations witnessed in the city of Srinagar. Despite enduring social, political, and legal shifts over the last two decades, Srinagar continues to attract a steady stream of tourists, catalyzing notable alterations in its urban landscape. Central to this paper is the examination of how these public architectural changes transform and interact with the collective memory of the region for the visitors.

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The paper explores how the ruined urban infrastructure of Mariupol is used by various groups of locals and Russians to construct new political futures while integrating the recent past of the city in a coherent temporal order of personal histories.

Paper long abstract:

In the spring of 2022, ninety percent of Mariupol’s built environment was destroyed by the Russian armed forces. Since then, the ruined urban infrastructure of the city has become a powerful tool in the hands of different actors to pursue their political agenda and tell their own story of the war. Ukrainian narratives repeatedly evoke images of destruction to remind the world to the extent of war crimes and human rights abuses committed by Russia. In Russian narratives, the ruins become a device of much more diverse and twisted agendas: a destination for urbex photographers, catastrophe tourists and adventurers with fantasies of a new Russian settler colonialism; a lucrative business opportunity for real estate developers in the “seaside capital of the Donbas People’s Republic”; and most importantly, the ground zero for propagandists to demonstrate the success of “Russian rebuilding”. In the meantime, people living in the occupied city express varying sentiments on social media regarding the destroyed urban spaces, ranging from desperation to manic enthusiasm about the reconstruction. Following these debates on the ruins of Mariupol, my paper will explore how material remnants of wartime destitution become a fundamental element in reordering temporal horizons after a war. While Russia is using the rebuilding process to construct an alternative political future in the occupied city through building materials and propaganda images, local residents turn to the ruins in order to reintegrate their lived experience of war and the following period of occupation in a coherent temporal framework.

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This paper discusses the socio-spatial dimensions of urban warfare and urbicide in Diyarbakır (Amed), the unofficial capital of Kurdish regions in Turkey. I demonstrate how political violence is imprinted in the material and immaterial aspects of the urban space through an ethnographic study.

Paper long abstract:

The tentative peace process aimed at resolving the decades-long armed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish Liberation Movement collapsed in 2015. Several Kurdish municipalities declared a demand for political autonomy followed by the state of exceptions, round-the-clock curfews, and military operations in numerous Kurdish cities and towns in Turkey. As one of these sites, the ancient inner-city town of Diyarbakır, Sur was encamped and sieged as a real enclave and lost most of its infrastructures and populations during months of armed conflicts and state atrocities. In the aftermath, the state compelled the historical inner center of the city to systematic demolishment and urban transformation. These transformation projects are immersed as spatial tools of counter-insurgency, displacing and dispossessing subaltern architecture and neighborhoods. The state facilitated urban destruction and transformation as revanchist and racialized mechanisms of socio-spatial intervention in Kurdish cities. Based on my ethnographic study in the Sur district of Diyarbakır from 2016 and 2023, including in-depth interviews with residents, state officials, subcontracting constructors, and civil society activists, I demonstrate how the political violence is integrated and engraved in the built environment. I discuss the Sur district as a spatial archive of past and present violence during decades-long racial oppression, social resistance, and resiliency.

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Paper short abstract:

Aleppo, once a vibrant city, suffered immense devastation during the Syrian conflict and continues to suffer due to present reconstruction efforts. This paper explores Aleppo's current urban landscape, emphasising its role as evidence of enduring atrocities.

Paper long abstract:

The city of Aleppo, once a thriving economic and historic center, has endured profound devastation as a result of the ongoing Syrian conflict. The period from 2012 to 2016 marked Aleppo as one of the most perilously inhabited regions globally, with the locals experiencing extreme vulnerability and unprecedented danger. The consequences of the conflict were particularly severe on the city's Eastern Side, where a complex narrative unfolds, intertwining violence, socio-economic divisions, and forced migration.

During this period, the destruction was indiscriminate, eradicating entire urban areas, obliterating living heritage sites, and reducing numerous cultural monuments to rubble. The housing sector, followed by the energy sector, bore the brunt of the damage, leaving the city scarred at its very fabric, and hindering the return of the displaced population.

Furthermore, the current reconstruction efforts pose a new set of challenges. The Syrian regime, largely responsible for the destruction, is actively involved in the reconstruction process. However, the regime's approach is raising concerns about inclusivity and sustainability. While the architectural response to reconstruction has focused on showcasing monuments and cultural heritage buildings, the regime has also employed urban policies that hampers a comprehensive and a just approach to rebuilding.

This proposed paper aims to investigate the current urban landscape of Aleppo, viewing it not merely as physical wreckage but as tangible evidence of the enduring atrocities in various parts of Syria. The investigation will scrutinise the multifaceted impact of the conflict on the city's social, economic, and cultural dimensions.

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Focusing on the Georgian Parliament building in Tbilisi, this paper aims to demonstrate how memories of political violence can be embedded in the built environment and reconstructed using participant-produced site drawings as a methodological tool.

Paper long abstract:

For 35 years, the area around the Georgian parliament building in Tbilisi has been a designated site for political mobilisations. Anti-Soviet demonstrations resulting in military tanks killing dozens in 1989, the civil war of 1992 and dozens of later cases of police brutality are now remembered through this area. The site is formed into the “lieu de memoir” (Nora, 1989), where traumatic and triumphant memories coexist, shaping ambivalent “affective geography”(Navaro-Yashin, 2012). This paper proposes participant-produced site drawings as a methodological tool that grasps traumatic affects and collective memories of political violence embedded in the materiality of the built form.

Based on already conducted research, the paper demonstrates how participatory drawings can be positioned as a methodological reflection of the theoretical “both-and”(Navaro-Yashin, 2012) approach, merging subject-oriented perspectives on affect with object-oriented theories (Thrift, 2007). Through subject-centred approaches, drawings become a “site of experimentation”(Ingold, 2021) where participants, as agents, “construct a reality” (Ssorin-Chaikov, 2013) and engage in “boundary making”, “choosing what to include in their images and what to omit”(Antona, 2019). Through object-centred approaches, drawings can be viewed not only as mere representations of the site but as actants (Latour, 2005) or “representations-in-relation” that “incite, move, anger, transform, delight, enchant or otherwise affect” (Anderson, 2019). In both cases, through the proposed method, architecture is not seen as a "static object" (Yaneva & Latour, 2012) but as “an ongoing process of holding together” (Jacobs & Merriman, 2011) that emerges into the archive of past political violence and brutality.

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This paper examines the place of time, capitalism, and corruption in transforming space after the Cambodian genocide from prei kmoac – the forest of the dead – to desirable land fit for development by the elite.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013 when I first interviewed people living on Koh Sap, a small Cambodian island in the Bassac river, people told me that the rich would never live where they did – in the prei kmoac - forest of the dead – a former prison and killing site which had seen the death of several thousand people. It was one of hundreds of such sites, resulting from the Khmer Rouge regime, who, in the late 1970s, enacted a genocide that killed over 1.7 million people. Following the genocide, prei kmoac such as the land on Koh Sap were common. Dead bodies and restless spirits – lost, lonely, and improperly buried – converged in these areas, making them unsafe and undesirable: land only for the poor and those with nowhere else to live.

Now, however, development is rampant and some prei kmoac have become desirable real estate for the elite. Over time and through various factors, the dead have lost their power to disturb, and the land has become open territory for acquisition, often forcibly. With entrenched corruption, the patronage-based system, and a recently established dynastic dictatorship, the elite in Cambodia are getting richer and more powerful, and land grabs and coerced sales are prevalent. The dead sometimes play a part in this – they can be central to development projects at the expense of the land and the poor. Meanwhile, as the population has grown, other areas have been transformed from the forest to homelands, and as this has happened the land has become safe: free from the dead and the haunting. As these transformations happen, what happened in these places becomes forgotten or rendered invisible. Through the case study of Koh Sap, I will look at such changes, and the role of time, memory, and global development in such processes.

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This paper explores the different recollections and everyday interactions with cityscapes and landmarks in Syria and Lebanon and interrogates the techniques used by Syrian and Lebanese activists to create archives of past atrocities.

Paper long abstract:

Syria and Lebanon have witnessed different forms of political violence in the last decades: uprisings, revolutions and (civil) wars that have greatly affected the architecture and landmarks of major cities and smaller towns. This paper aims to compare the treatment of the marks left by these events on Syrian and Lebanese cities. Beirut is a palimpsest of past political violence: its traces are not erased, they are exposed to everyone’s sight and sometimes turned into museum or memorial, even though or maybe because they revealed events that are still polarising. The city thus appears as a living archive of its contentious past, even the most recent one with the slogans of the 2019 revolutionary demonstrations still present on the city’s walls. In Syria, however, the regime has been carefully erasing all material traces of the 2011 uprising and subsequent armed rebellion by razing to the ground entire neighbourhoods and towns focusing on signs and proofs of the very happening of these events and their repression. The revolution's very materiality thus seems to have disappeared. How can cityscapes and architectural landmarks become archives of past political violence in these two cases? This paper will look at the different recollections and everyday interactions with these cityscapes and interrogate the techniques used by Syrian and Lebanese activists to create archives of past atrocities.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper catalogues some of the fore-soundings of war designed, built and landscaped into the architecture and public spaces of Moscow and russia during the years leading up to russia's invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

Paper long abstract:

This paper catalogues some of the fore-soundings of war designed, built and landscaped into the architecture and public spaces of Moscow and russia during the years leading up to russia's invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Making use of hindsight as a methodological device, it grapples with the question of whether these portents spoke to war's inevitability; and with issues concerning the anthropologist's ethical and methodological responsibility in the face of war's build-up, outbreak and aftermath. Further, it traces some of the ways in which the logics and practices of violence, war and coloniality traceable in Moscow's built environment are now being "exported" to the regions of Ukraine temporarily-occupied by the russian federation, in the guise of so-called "reconstruction" projects; and it briefly compares these "dark reconstruction" projects with other contexts in which post-Soviet russian state and private actors have sought to settle, reconstruct and disfigure places which its war machine has laid to waste, focusing in particular on Chechnya following the wars of 1994-1996 and 1999-2009; and Syria following the Russian intervention in the civil war (2015-present).

Please note: russia is purposefully written with a small "r" in this abstract to signal an activist stance towards the illegitimacy of the present-day russian federation as a political entity.

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Paper short abstract:

Urbanix, describes the tactical alteration of built fabrics through processes of rejection and appropriation. Focusing on the case study of Drama, Greece, this paper provides alternative readings of historical narratives, where architecture acts as a witness and tool of slow violence.

Paper long abstract:

Cities are tangible manifestations of ideological evolutions, open-air workshops to test and reform ideas and formalise socio-political change. Acting as a repository of cultural memory, architecture is a palimpsest, where traces of the past can be identified in urban formations, buildings and iconography.

Nation-building, territorial changes and population transfers produce disrupted topographies, aiming cultural cleansing through the manipulation of urban fabrics. As an extension of urbicide, the author has coined the term urbanix (Georgiadou 2019) to describe the tactical alteration of built fabrics as a result of political shifts during peacetime. The author uses the lens of ‘slow violence’ to bring a case of urbanix to the fore. Urbanix refers to the gradual denial of elements of urbanity, rather than their monumental destruction associated with urbicide.

Under this prism, processes of rejection and appropriation underlying nationalist urban interventions, are investigated on the case study of the city of Drama, Greece, through a range of multimodal and nuanced approaches in built space manipulation. After its annexation to Greece in the early twentieth century and the concomitant population exchange of 1923, the city’s image was reformed to portray a new Hellenic national identity, through the erasure of its Ottoman heritage.

In scenarios like this, architecture assumes a dual role of the witness of political violence and tool in the hands of the perpetrator. Its examination can provide alternative readings and challenge prevailing historical narratives, offering a more inclusive understanding of contested pasts.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper theorizes the urban development of Tirana through the lens of Cindi Katz' minor theory framework and Deleuzian thought on fascism. My main argument is that Tirana's urban landscape has constituted a grounds for both national and international political dynamics to disempower its citizens.

Paper long abstract:

Moving away from mainstream academic considerations on architectural developments in Tirana during the last two decades, which mainly emphasise the works of starchitects and their international studios as signs of the Albanian capital becoming more of a European one, I argue that urban development in Tirana is the result of a subtle everyday fascisms. From unconstitutionally appropriating public spaces to turn over to private developers collaborating with starchitects such as Bjarke Ingels to commissioning a paint job over the dictator's mausoleum, Tirana's fraught and bloody public space history is art-washed at the expense of its citizens.

The visual assemblage of architectural imagination that has dominated development discourse in Tirana, taking the form of architectural renderings presented during electoral campaigns often hide threats to cultural heritage. Contrastingly, I place emphasis on the political ecologies (Bennett, 2010) that are overlooked by the neoliberal architectural imagination. By focusing, instead, on "minor theory [...] as a way of reconfiguring the production of knowledge [and] produc[ing] renegade cartographies of change (Katz, 1996)", I denounce the fascist practices that have desensitized citizens to national politics.

Moreover, I take to consider the visual material that neoliberal development and the older parts of the city of Tirana produce as two contradistinguishing extremes when compared in terms of the affects they display. Lastly, I make the case for future transpositions of the urban porousness of the city via the decolonization of architecture practice.