ABSTRACT
Good professional solutions to ethnic or religious partition in cities are indeed rare. The reason might be that the tasks of urban planners and policymakers often exceed the limits of what an urban policy can do, as the problems they address are often historically complex and cannot be solved with simple interventions in space. There might also be some important pre-conditions here, such as the presence of senses of shared identity, unity or togetherness among the groups, larger trust in institutions and the state, or shared willingness among the city dwellers to overcome conflict, among others. However, some urban planning strategies in divided cities are particularly confusing. This text is about one of them: the planned and imposed ‘neutral’ or ‘central’ zones in the middle of these cities, that are usually planned as zones where ethnic or religious infrastructures and symbols will not be built and where city dwellers from both sides should normally feel equally invited. This chapter will discuss how these planned and imposed ‘neutral’ or ‘central’ places make sense as such in the ways city dwellers imagine and organise their everyday lives in the city. Thus, it explores how city dwellers construct ‘our’, ‘their’ and ‘neutral’ places in the divided city, focusing on de Certau’s ordinary practitioners; those who would perceive their city in a way that is not always known well by the analyst, the outsider or the planner (de Certau 1984). Moreover, it will ask what an imposed ‘neutral’ zone means in the everyday lives of the city dwellers in a particular context, and whether it is as straightforward as it sounds. In addition, it explores whether or not city dwellers can ever have ‘ours’, ‘theirs’ or ‘neutral’ places in their everyday lives in the divided city. Finally, it posits whether or not a place can be ‘neutral’ at all for the everyday practitioners in the city. This thinking finally leads to one of the crucial questions in urban sociology: how are people really tied to places? The empirical material that forms the basis of this work comprises narrative interviews conducted with 79 city dwellers in the divided city of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and is part of a wider project that deals with the processes of identity-formation and place-making in the post-war divided city. The theoretical and methodological perspectives in this chapter are guided by a research
focus that is defined as a provisional link among three key concepts in social sciences: space, identity and boundaries (‘we/they’ divides). This study employed a qualitative, inductive, interview-based approach to the study of boundaries and ‘we/they’ divides and the way they are constituted, represented and reproduced in the urban context.
