Laerning the Western Balkans

Ivan Kucina on balkanization in architecture.

by Ivan Kucina

Balkan has been signified for centuries as European subconscious. While Europe has been taken as civilized, reasonable and tolerant, Balkan has been the place of wilderness, irrationality and everlasting conflicts. This stereotype that has been strongly supported by both sides has formed a belief that Balkan could not be developed and sustained without interventions from Europe. Contemporary Europe, however, suffers a hard time trying to identify its own concept of unity and has no more creative energy for the others. While waiting instructions „from the top”, as always, the Balkans become victim of unscrupled developers offering no more than fake images of European luxury. Instead of developing its own potential, The Balkans surrenders to a meaningless future.
To avoid this deadly scenario it is worth trying to look for the future of The Balkans beyond stereotype, from another, more positive prospective, one that will recognize its wild capacity and use it to cultivate meaningful alternatives for future developments. Like in an imaginable psycho geographical therapy, these alternatives, as formulated by the European subconscious, could then help Europe to find its new consciousness. This is not an easy work, because the Balkans have always been an unknown and unpredictable territory of non-standardized approach and boundless interpretations.
Taking these as a starting ground, an interdisciplinary and cross-national research project The Lost Highway Expedition tried to imagine economical, political, and cultural geographies for the unknown future of Balkan. It was set up as massive movement of individuals plotting a route along and around the highway that was named according to the most important state parole of socialist Yugoslavia -The Highway of Brotherhood and Unity. It was not accidental that this ideological name signified the connecting line among different nations that were making the road in massive voluntary campaigns.
New “Highway of Post Brotherhood and Non Unity” has no ideological meanings and merely functions as a linear mechanism in the framework of the recent EU political invention of the Western Balkans. Like the highway, the Western Balkans is a territory without concept. Lost Highway Expedition was looking for the missing concept believing that experiences and founds collected on the road could help in constructing meanings of Western Balkan and, as well, creating alternative vision of the future of Europe.

The Western Balkans is reflecting the structure of a society in transition. The previous socialist state was projecting ideals of universal humanity onto spatial organization, following the most progressive concepts of modern architecture and urban planning. Social and cultural values—such as equality, solidarity, and unity—were represented by hierarchical and homogeneous urban structures composed of standardized units. New residential settelments made of groups of monoliths with parks and parkings inbetween rose in the vicinity of open fields on the peripheries of cities, transformed by wide motorways. High ideals of universal humanity were, unfortunately, realized with underdeveloped building technology and senseless administrative control reduced concepts of modernism to the mass reproduction of uniform building elements. Modern architecture and urban planing were misunderstood by builders and unloved by people. Unloved just like the socialsit state that was unsuccesfully trying to make modern architecture for the good of everyone.
Transition from socialism to capitalism as defined by neoliberal tendencies toward privatization, market growth, and profit increase has effected massive changes in social and cultural values in the new states of the Western Balkans. Using the void created between the collapsed central system of planing and corrupted transitional institutions, a new standard of singularity has been proclaimed in place of the ideal of collectivity. This singularity is reducing the complexity of social relations to a continual competition. Human issues are recognized only when they appear as affective reactions to commercial campaigns that are trying to attract as many customers as possible. Orientation towards ultimate personal success is considered sufficient reasoning for the abandonment of environmental issues. New social and cultural values are represented in architecture and urban planning as an assemblage of glossy nonrelated buildings that are radiating a globalized image of luxury. Potential variety of architectural types is standardized according to the most profiting ones, creating a mass of meaningless singular buildings that are rapidly occupying all the best locations in the cities and dominating surroundings.
Simultaneously, in the decades of transitional processes following the collapse of the socialist planning system and rising of the arrogant neo liberal development, millions of individual uncontrolled building activities have taken place, using the opportunities provided by corrupt institutions. The wild spreads of informal building structures have transformed the urban environment in all of the Western Balkan states. A new form of urban transformation quite different from informal settlements in other places has appeared. In order to understand how such urban transformations could indicate patterns of future development for cities in general, Stealth Group developed a research project – The Genetics of the Wild City , to study the transformation of Belgrade, capital of ex Yugoslavia.
As a result of the crisis in the nineties, Belgrade experienced an abrupt change from a centrally conducted development to an atomized building practice, becoming complex and unstable ground on which the rules for the production of architecture and the logic of urban vitality are constantly being reinvented. The trigger for the transformation of the city was given by a United Nations embargo in 1992, in an atmosphere of war traumas, media obsession and politicization. In this context, as a compensation for the collapsing state and institutions, the unleashed individual action started to produce innovation in literally every urban domain - from commerce, to housing production and public services. A new, non-regulated urban structure appeared, flooding the public spaces and superimposing as a layer of mutants on top of the existing city.
The research focused on the evaluative, time-based character of non-regulated transformations. It was a practice of discovering the inherent logic of emergent processes, under a hypothesis that their outcomes are often more sophisticated than the conventionally designed ones. Through this, a set of tools and a specific methodology has been experimentally developed to visualize, monitor and to a certain level predict spatial and organizational changes in time. In nearly all of the studied processes, pulsating and flexible models have been achieved, resembling profound symbiotic forms. Their organization is heterarchical; newness is produced through conflict and negotiation between institutions and individuals. Following the notion that there is a pattern of similar behavior among certain urban activities these patterns have been collected and developed into an urban design tool. While its rules are fairly simple, the complexity that arises may maintain the character of a self-organizing system and its heterogeneous and vivid spatial structure.
On a strategic level, The Genetics of the Wild City examined the role of the architect as one who confronts restrictions in urban design. The paradigm of the ‘wildness’ emerged through non-planned and barely regulated processes. In the urban domain, these processes feature a remarkable degree of innovation and therefore open possibilities for redefining institutional and professional participation in the creation of urban space.
The potential of the massive building activities in Belgrade and in the Western Balkans could provide fertile ground for establishing critical alternative confronting both the ideas of the socialist state about utopian modernization, as well as the theme of progressive globalization loved by the neoliberal state. Although developed under basic building standards, with high ambitions and low architectural knowledge, the building energy and boundless imagination of these “investors” can be used in a positive way.
In the workshop project - Balkanize Deutsche Bank , the School of Missing Studies explored the idea of Balkanization as an alternative tool of architectural representation and applied this to the stripped-bare Deutsche Bank Tower in Lower Manhattan in New York to create an innovative strategy for constructing from the dismantled fragments.
The term Balkanization emerged in response to independence movements in the Balkans at the beginning of the XX century and describes the process of geopolitical fragmentation. It is used today in the English language to depict any kind of political dissolution across the world in order to sustain. The term has also expanded to connote a variety of scenarios involving fragmentation, such as "the Balkanization of the Internet" or “the Balkanization of America,” produced by extreme voices that care about the unity of society and equality of individuals.
Furthermore, if globalization represents the increasing unification of people and places through converging processes of economic, political, and cultural change, then Balkanization is a counteraction to the integrating and homogenizing effects of globalization. That means that the term - local is empowered with the term -Balkanized, which truly shifts the meaning of the originally negative and hostile term of Balkanization into a constructive force. Balkanization occurs when the centrifugal forces outweigh the centripetal forces.
Participants of the workshop were defining algorhythms for different cases of Balkanization worldwide and applied them in a design process on a 3D monolith model of the Deutche Bank Tower showing the unlimited variety of options of Balkanization.
Further research and analysis of Balkanization produced a number of complementary spatial concepts, such as:
Parallelism - spatial implications of the various parallel states of existence
Hybrid - invention that results from the fusion of multiplicity
Fragmentation - reduction of authority and the growth of self organized bottom-up initiatives
Convertible Border – a potential of transforming limitations into a space for exchange
Temporary Hierarchy – an ability to take particular spatial action for a limited time
Raw End - unintentional result of the most literal application of basic building tools
Extensibility – capacity of the hosting body to adapt to the uncoordinated external partitions
Under Construction – continual delay due to undetermined building process
Student projects that were done paralelly in my reserch and design studio at the Faculty of Architeture in Belgrade during the last years have shown endless possibilities of cultivating these spatial concepts of Balkanization into articulated architectural statements.
Architectural design program 2in1, for example, was looking for the innovative architectural interpretations of the most common urban programs in Belgrade. While working on usuall comission, students were confronted with experimental design process that was pushing them to requestion their environmental cosciousness. This was taking them to the adventure of finding new urban and architecture instruments that could convert fragmentation into constructiing power, ucertainty into organizational patteren and accidents into proportional code. Serial of extraordinary architectural concepts that were re-qualifying basic social and spatial relations appeared. They were offering structures of organized uncertainty to the people who have to get lost in a balkanized chaos to be able to find alternative meanings

Lost Highway Expedition is initiated by School of Missing Studies and Centrala Foundation for Future Cities
www.europelostandfound.net

The Genetics of the Wild City is a research project by Ana Dzokic, Milica Topalovic, Marc Neelen and Ivan Kucina. It has been developed through a research at the Berlage Institute, Postgraduate Laboratory of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade and by the Stealth Group from Rotterdam. The research formed part of the Mutation Exhibition in Bordeaux 2000, Berlin Beta 2001 Conference, V2_Wire Tap in Rotterdam 2002 and Archilab Naked City Exhibition in Orlean 2002.
www.stealth.ultd.net