Uninvited citizens: violence, spatiality and urban ruination in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina: Fid-Bau Portal

Uninvited citizens: violence, spatiality and urban ruination in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina

Hromadžić, Azra

In this article I analyze the lived, violent effects of post war and postsocialist transformations through the prism of one urban ruin in Bihać, a city located on the northwestern edge of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The building is Dom penzionera—never completed socialist retirement home. This urban ruin remains eerie, semi-empty and skeleton-like, a shadow and a symbol of the unmaterialized socialist modernity and the perpetually transitioning postwar present. Ethnographic focus on the urban ruin, and not on a ‘place’ or a ‘population,’ is conscious, and it reflects the importance of material objects in the context of regional transformations and global dispossessions. More specifically, I show how over the last 25 years this ruin, instead of its imagined inhabitants—elderly socialist workers who were going to age and die in it peacefully—has been housing multiple uninvited citizens. These inhabitants include disillusioned Bosnian youth and, more recently, refugees and ‘migrants’ from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. Highlighting the ruination of the build environment and the ‘wasted lives’ of those who occupy it, provides a powerful critique of the current geopolitical violences, and of confident and arrogant theories of transition in the Balkans and beyond.