Dealing with ruins in the post-war city : The case of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Sammanfattning

The presence and role of war-ruins in post-war cities persist as an underexplored theme in urban planning and cultural geography. After 30 years of urban rehabilitation in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, countless war-ruins remain. These remains challenge both urban planning and the everyday lives of the city’s inhabitants, as unresolved traces of the past. Through the theoretical framework of politics of memory and non-representational theory, the aim of this thesis is to examine how war-ruins make up part of Mostar’s eastern city centre, how ruins are experienced as traces of a haunting past, and why they persist. In doing so, this thesis extends the existing literature on Mostar’s post-war urban environment by providing first-hand accounts of the experiences of war-ruins in the everyday, as well as outlining the structural and political causes behind the impeded urban rehabilitation, offering a map of the remaining ruins. With the methods of semi-structured interviews, field observations, autoethnography, photodocumentation and mobile mapping, the thesis reveals that Mostar’s war-ruins are active agents of memory that evoke personal ghosts and collapse temporalities. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that war-ruins are not solely material remnants of war, their meanings extend the physical, shaping memory and identity in the everyday.