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Architects without Frontiers: War, Reconstruction and Design Responsibility - Edited by Esther Charlesworth

Architects without Frontiers is a call to action that challenges designers to engage cities wounded by conflict. In case studies of Beirut, Nicosia, and Mostar, cities rent in two by civil strife, Esther Charlesworth describes how the process of postwar rebuilding either ameliorated or exacerbated the divisions between citizens and contributed to the cities’ current social climate. Simply rebuilding, without addressing the social realities, she observes, can lay the foundation for future troubles. Based on an extensive set of interviews and her own experience in Beirut and Mostar, Charlesworth outlines how architects might do the job better, building peace by both knitting divided communities physically and drawing citizens into the planning process to imagine a joint future. Acting on principles presented here, Charlesworth and Darko Radovic founded the not-for-profit ‘‘Architects without Frontiers’’ on the model of ‘‘Doctors without Borders’’ to assist in rebuilding communities torn by war or natural disasters. The author’s experience in several rebuilding efforts lends credence to her observations, particularly her insistence that professional designers truly engage the local situation and stay with a project through the circuitous process of negotiation that is necessary for consensus. She has seen the dashed hopes that often follow whistle-stop planning workshops, when communities have to cope with unrealistic schemes devised by foreign experts. Education is integral to the mission at every level. Charlesworth has conducted studios at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and in Beirut to immerse students in the difficult design and ethical questions that surround rebuilding a city in crisis.The results of some of these studios are included in the book. Charlesworth frames the issues by characterizing some of the roles that architects took in response to the devastation of World War II: the architect as physician responding to the most immediate needs such as housing shortages above all else, the architect as hero who rescues a city through urban design, or the architect as historicist who reconstructs destroyed buildings as collective memory. At an extreme, architects interpreted urban rubble as a tabula rasa, at times demolishing standing buildings to further clear a site, then seized the opportunity to build out favorite theories of social reform, with mixed results. Charlesworth details how these several types of architectural enterprise also characterized the response to the torn urban fabrics of Beirut, Lebanon, and Mostar, Bosnia, cities not just damaged by war but also divided by ethnic strife. In a thoughtful analysis, she suggests that architects missed critical opportunities to support social reconciliation through design. Worldwide, civil conflict is increasing just as the global economy erodes ethnic identities. The irony of these opposing forces suggests that they are linked in the complex machinations of contemporary cities, where architecture plays an important role in reinforcing power structures. Charlesworth writes of ‘‘urbicide’’ as a particularly virulent form of social predation.Yet, decisions of where and how to build or rebuild are often controlled by the same political power structures, at a level far above mere architects, as witnessed by the high-style megadevelopment project that has replaced the center of Beirut. So what can architects do? Charlesworth addresses the