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On 6 april 1992, the european union (eu) recognised bosnia and hercegovina as a new independent state, no longer a part of the socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia. The event marked the start of the siege of sarajevo, which lasted nearly four years, until late february 1996. It became the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, outlasting the leningrad enclosure by a year. During its 1425 days, more than 11,500 people were killed. The attacks left a trail of destruction across the city, which began to transform it in ways not experienced before.

This paper explores how the physical transformation of sarajevo affected the ways in which meaning and significance were assigned to its built fabric. I argue that the changes imposed by war and the daily destruction of the city challenged long-established relationships between the built fabric and those who inhabited the city, introducing new modes of thinking and interpreting the city. Loosely placing the discussion within the framework of ‘Thirdspace', established by urban theorist and cultural geographer edward soja, i discuss the relationship that emerged between the historicality, sociality and spatiality of war-torn sarajevo.

Whether responding to the impacts of physical destruction or dramatic social change, the nexus of time, space and being shows that the concept of spatiality is essential to comprehending the world and to adjusting to and resisting the impact of extraordinary circumstances. Recognising the continuation of daily life as essential to survival sheds light on processes of renewal and change in a war-affected landscape. These shattered urban spaces also show the ways in which people make a sense of place in relation to specific socio-historical environments and political contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, giving a general overview of its urban context through five historical periods, as part of a research study on its modernist architectural heritage.

Designed to mimic the theatrical process which unfolds through acts and intervals, the paper combines literary, architectural, journalistic and historical sources, to sketch the key periods which characterise the city’s urban morphology.

The sequence of acts and intervals points to the dramatic historic inter-change of continuities and ruptures, in which the ruptures have often been less studied and understood. This explains the frequent conceptualising of Sarajevo through East–West binary, which synthesises it as a provincial capital from Ottoman and later Habsburg rule, a regional centre within two Yugoslav states and a capital city of a young state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This highlights the need to study the ruptures as clues to the flow of continuities, in which the care and after care for built environment provide a field of evidence and possibilities for diverse perspectives of examination.

Corroborated by secondary sources, the paper examines the accounts of urban heritage destruction in the 1990s war, as recorded by a writer, an architect and a journalist, and outlines a pattern of unbroken inter-relations between urban and architectural space (tangible) and sense and identity of place (intangible).

This discourse is relevant to the current situation where the city of Sarajevo expands again, in the complexity of a post-conflict society.

Challenged by the political divisions and the laissez-faire economy, the public mood and interest is under-represented and has many conflicting voices.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the accounts from the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, this conceptual paper contributes to the formulation of a cross-disciplinary discursive prism through which the fragments of the city and its periods come together or apart, adding, subtracting and changing layers of meaning of the physical space.

In 2002, an issue of Open House International had already addressed the subject of war and the city. Scholars with different backgrounds and experiences reported on a number of cities. They analysed and reflected on the situation before the armed hostilities, both in physical terms and in terms of the conflicts of ethnic and civilian character, and the role of external forces and actors; the war in its different manifestations: a never ending conflict, a succession of battles and precarious truces, bombing, the threat of bombing; and the prospects of reconstruction, with particular reference to the different effects for the various groups and interests.