Description:
“Contested Fronts” is an exploration of architecture’s role for commoning practices in ethnically and socially contested spaces. It focuses on the agencies of architecture’s ad-hoc technologies that contribute into conflict transformation by advocating reconciliation processes to go hand in hand with urban reconstruction processes. “Contested Fronts” introduces three levels of frontiers’ investigation where architecture claims an active role: geopolitical, disciplinary and everyday urban politics’ frontiers. To do so, it concentrates on the agencies of ad-hoc technology’s materiality and use that encourage the emergence of collectives, with their members coming from areas across divides. Ad-hoc technology has to do with means of spatial engagement, of cartographic representation and of visual communication. It assists tactful organization of physical spaces and of events.
“Contested Fronts” is an open source that departs from archiving the Cyprus operating “Hands-on Famagusta” project that is a collective platform for reconciliation through the creation of common urban imaginary across the Cypriot divide. The “Contested Fronts Open Source Archive” includes international practices, networks and pedagogical programs, which are complementary to the “Hands-on Famagusta” project, to build a decisive critical mass of resistance to the dominant trends of post conflict reconstruction. It addresses two major challenges emerging from the case of Famagusta: firstly to operate in actual hostile environments where institutions produce narratives based on division. Secondly, to confront actual trends of post conflict reconstruction processes based on either large scale segregating private developments or on inflexible bureaucratic, non-transparent produced plans, both unable of encouraging commoning practices nor of handling the ever changing contested urban environments.
The “Contested Fronts Open Source Archive” starts from Famagusta and not from Nicosia, well known of its divided state, because it could contribute in preventing Famagusta to be the next divided city of Cyprus. Famagusta is a Cypriot coastal city, located on the east edge of the island just north of the UN cease fire military zone and east of one of the UK military bases on the island. Famagusta’s inhabitants are Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. However, after the 1974 war with Turkey, the city has been deprived of its Greek Cypriot inhabitants who were displaced to the south part of the island during the war. The Famagusta population was 38,960 inhabitants in 1973, of which 31,960 were Greek Cypriots and 7,000 Turkish Cypriots. The population in 2011 was 37,939 inhabitants consisting of Turkish Cypriots, (some of them displaced from the south part of the island in 1974), and settlers from Turkey. Famagusta consists of all kinds of enclaves with the most notorious one being the Turkish army controlled ghost area of Famagusta. It is an abandoned urban area, located by a beautiful sandy shore, which used to house around 30,000 Greek Cypriots. A French/Venetian walled city is situated further north, very close to a university enclave.
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