Architectural Design V-IX: Sarajevo Code - Urban Transformation Project Sarajevo (H.Klumpner)

Abstract

How can urban and architectural prototypes inform design codes?How can we invent urban rules that address climate and environmental qualities?

Objective

The thesis for this Studio is to imagine Sarajevo city as a Learning Lab, (1), where design students work in a continuous dialogue between architectural and urban prototypes and the city’s regulations and codes, testing how each informs and transforms the other. In the context of climate change, rural-to-urban migration, and urban justice, it will be crucial to design interventions that generate new rules for the city's built and natural environment. Students will investigate how their proposals can inform adaptive frameworks and urban logics, creating innovative pathways for a resilient urban future. Students are introduced to tools and immersed in our Chair’s “method-design” to develop their prototypical design projects by: 1.) Base-Line: We design a continuum of architectural, urban, and planning scales to develop a basis for how the city is now. 2.) Mapping: By identifying existing and future challenges and opportunities, we take the role of stakeholders and visualize our demands and resources into different scenarios. 3.) Concept Design: We develop an urbanistic synthesis and translate a concept into an evidence-based prototypical architectural intervention. 4.) Prototype Design: We present the synthesis of our process on different scales. We frame the design projects as a narrative, consequently developed and communicated in analog and digital graphic representations. 5.) Upscaling: We test our project concepts and upscale prototypes through design-policy recommendations to make them transferable in Sarajevo and other cities. The urban morphology of Sarajevo reflects its layered culture, lifestyles, and history. From Ottoman Mahalas to Austro-Hungarian grids and Socialist housing blocks, the city bears the marks of its 1984 Winter Olympics expansion, post-conflict reconstruction, and hillside settlements born of migration and resettlement. Today, Sarajevo faces challenges including privatization, delayed urban development, and significant environmental pressures. A context where students can explore how architectural and urban prototypes can generate new rules, codes, and frameworks to guide the city toward future urban imaginaries. Sarajevo is at a crossroads: either to endure environmental and urban decay or to become a smart, climate-conscious city. Urbanization, digitalization, and ecologization require radically new readings of the urban, and the design of transversal relations between the historic and peripheral neighborhoods to the Miljacka River. Centralities, such as the new University Campus and Cultural District in the productive valley, require the design of capacities in the socio-economic and governmental sectors to design the city as a Center for Learning, promoting innovation, participation, the inclusion of all citizens, and the transition to sustainable urban futures. At the intersection of architecture, landscape, and public art, the studio envisions trans-scalar, design-led processes addressing Sarajevo’s socio-ecological challenges. Students will develop architectural and urban prototypes and derive from them codes, regulations, and new urban logics, testing how design interventions can shape the city’s future. The Studio will engage with the Urban Transformation Project Sarajevo (UTPS) multistakeholder team comprising experts and urban activists from Sarajevo, participants in the Sarajevo Days of Architecture, and experts from Zürich. The UTPS is developed between the Klumpner Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Laboratory of Energy Conversion, ETH Zurich spin-off SwissAI, University of Sarajevo, and the Canton Sarajevo Institute of Planning and Development. The overarching component of the project is the elaboration of the new Urban Plan for Sarajevo through 2040. 1) Unesco

Content

Whilst cities contribute to the highest CO2 footprints, they also have the potential to bend the carbon curve most effectively and to take Climate Action to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Moving towards decarbonized ways of living and `Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe and resilient (SDG 11) will require behavioral and systems change in all sectors of life. Access to quality education (SDG 4), co-creating evolving frameworks for life-long learning, building capacity for transformative processes, strengthening and building new circular economies, making use of digital and analog tools, as well as how easy it is to access services in the city, are the foundations to design and maintain sustainable urban futures. Education is the foundation for creating sustainable development models, such as the emerging University Campus, former Military Barracks and the Cultural District, which serve as the Studio’s grounds for imagining new relationships between traditional settlements, the rapidly developing post-industrial valley with its Brownfields, and the Miljacka River. Sarajevo's many self-constructed hillside neighborhoods are geographically close to the valley but, due to a lack of services, social functions, and economic opportunities, exhibit characteristics of disconnected peripheral peri-urban living. Sarajevo’s absence of a comprehensive building code since 1936 has produced a distinctive urban condition in which formal regulatory frameworks have been largely replaced by fragmented rules and incremental practice. As demonstrated in recent research on Sarajevo Canton’s spatial planning system, the lack of a binding implementation instrument has shifted the decision-making onto individual projects, forcing architecture and urban design to operate as de facto policy tools. In this environment, spatial form is shaped less by clearly articulated norms than by negotiation, improvisation, and case-by-case interpretation, with significant consequences for urban climate and everyday life. Historically, the city has functioned as a testing ground for radical spatial, ownership and political ideas, generating innovation in architectural form, urban organization, and governance models. Within this framework, the studio conceives Sarajevo as a contemporary field of experimentation, in which architectural and urban prototypes enter into a continuous, iterative dialogue with existing regulations, informal practices, and emerging codes generating new and alternative value systems. Using evidence-based digital methodologies, students investigate critical edge conditions where fragile everyday life intersects with large-scale urban intervention. These territories reveal the tensions between formal planning and lived reality, exposing deficits in infrastructure, environmental performance, and access to public resources. By reimagining these sites as experimental grounds for regulatory and spatial innovation, the studio seeks to formulate new design strategies, including an evaluation index and adaptive policy recommendations and instruments that enhance living conditions, ecological quality, and urban accessibility. In doing so, Sarajevo is positioned not merely as an object of study but as an active field of knowledge production, where the co-evolution of form and regulation can generate more resilient, equitable, empowering and inclusive models of urban life. The design studio focuses on the transformative redevelopment of the city on three scales: A_General Urban Plan (GUP) Scale: 1:10.000 / Sarajevo as a whole B_Regulatory Plan (RP) Scale: 1:1000 / Area between Transversale 1 and 2 C_Architectural Prototype (AP) Scale: 1:500, 1:200 / Projectsite

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