Architectural Design V-IX: Climate Corridors Sarajevo. Shaping Public Water Places

Abstract

How can we as designers radically reimagine place-making in Sarajevo by connecting the existing natural and built environment with local resources and digital infrastructures as models for sustainable living?The watershed of the Miljacka River has the potential to unlock socio-ecological systems and multifunctional corridors, that address urban fragmentation, and Climate Action.

Objective

Climate corridors Sarajevo. Shaping public water places. Students will emerge in our Chair’s “method-design” to step by step develop their individual prototypical design projects. They will address both architectural urban scales and will be guided to collaboratively develop a baseline scenario. Mapping, identifying existing and future challenges and opportunities, students will take the role of stakeholders and translate their demands and resources into different scenarios. They will design urbanistic concepts and translate them into an evidence-based prototypical architectural project- intervention. This prototype is the synthesis of a process in time and space on different scales. The design project will be framed as a narrative that is consequentially visualized and communicated in analogue and digital graphic representations. The project concept will be tested and upscaled through urbanistic design-policy recommendations within overlapping spatial and programmatic systems of CLIMATE -CORRIDORS.

Content

The basic thesis for this Studio Fall Semester 2010 is constructing an urban imaginary creating an interplay of a linear public space system providing identity and orientation in the Miljacka River valley of Sarajevo. Sarajevo´s culture is as diverse as its rich architecture and history of urbanization. Located on the Balkan Route, a crossroads between north and south, east and west, the city confronts us with one of the highest pollution levels of air, soil water, of any capital city in Europe. The watershed of the Miljacka River, wells, fountains, retention infrastructures, and flood plains are our point of departure. They have the potential to unlock socio-ecological systems, multifunctional corridors, and catalytic projects, that can transform fragmented neighborhoods, offering a living system of public water-places to the inhabitants. At the intersection of architecture, landscape, and public art, the studio envisions trans-scalar processes and interventions, addressing the cities social and ecological crisis, in support of the Sarajevo Cantonal Planning Office, applying a systemic design methodology, and responding to the urgent need for concrete projects and Climate Action. Policy recommendations and general advice for upscaling such prototypical concepts are already successful in other cities globally and apply to the Sarajevo-Case. The design challenge includes redesigning and densifying public open space, that combines social and environmental developments into a system of architecture, urban, and landscape design networks. The transformative redevelopment of existing street corridors and the interplay of architecture with landscape design and concrete prototypical and small-scale design interventions is critical for bringing together segregated communities in quality public space along degraded transport corridors. Linear multifunctional corridors can strategically connect to the immediate context and subcenters with feeder routes (considering Zmaja od Bosne), participatory public spaces, markets, playgrounds, production, and creating new eco-systemic connections with increased social and ecological qualities. Atmospheric contamination, fine dust, and CO2 have created during inversion weather one of the highest air contamination levels of any capital city in Europe compromising the health of Sarajevo’s people. Climate change is challenging necessary processes to re-planting the forest and trees of the city. The compliance with the targets and indicators of the SDGs pose considerable additional tasks to solve. In recent years, the bust and boom cycle in Sarajevo has put doubt on opportunistic international urban upgrading models linked with opportunistic investments, gentrification, and short-term gains for private investors. We have developed a toolbox by analyzing internationally recognized developments, sometimes permanent and temporary strategies such as Chengyecheon River Park, Seoul, Isarpark, Schlachthof / Munich, Corredores Verdes / Medellin or Cali, communal target-plan Zurich, Closed Highways in Sao Paulo or Bogota, Etc. These spatial processes have followed a widely known practice of consolidating a sequence of transformations, short-term strategies for long-term value production. Neighborhoods are re-evaluated through investment often initiated by art, popular culture, local participation, and place-branding. Urban- and Landscape Design can create a measurable impact in cities by increasing social justice, health, and wellbeing. The development of robust frameworks adaptable to change enable processes for regeneration with long-term operational, environmental and social benefits in response to global, local, and site-specific challenges. The role of architects is to imagine and model sustainable urban scenarios recognizing urban corridors as new possibilities and lifelines to impact meaningful and multidimensional transformative design strategies.

Resources