Budowanie odporności: zachowywanie „ruin traumatycznych” w miastach = Developing resilience: the preservation of cities’ “traumatic ruins”

Abstract

The analysis in this paper revolves around sites associated with conflict, memory and memorialisation, as it seeks to evaluate ruined cityscapes, and hence non-functional buildings or parts thereof that almost by definition ought to be unwelcome in most cities, given the premium put there on production and traffic density and efficiency. But ruins do serve functions in a city, giving material shape to urban memories, thus conveying a social and political message, sometimes with great impact. This paper resorts to the adjective “traumatic” as it refers to ruins arising out of catastrophic events such as bombings, and thus differing markedly from counterparts developing as a slow process of degradation continues. The latter ruins are valued for their age, the former for their historicity. In most cases, pain experienced has combined with a will to rebuild to prompt stakeholders to cancel or liquidate traces of the disaster occurring, with preservation of ruins mostly only taking place where local authorities take conscious, and often much-disputed decisions (Sauvageot, 1995). Such difficult decisions have at times been explained in terms of the political benefit accruing where continued staging in regard to catastrophes is possible, but also in relation to a will to see ruins preserved as a kind of preventative tool.” Traumatic ruins” may indeed represent real urban scars reminding a local population steadily and/ or repeatedly of disaster. On the other hand, memorabilia of this kind are sometimes presented as if they were “medals of merit on a community’s chest” (Sauvageot, 1995), and they can also be considered a necessary step in the direction of risk consciousness and the constituting of a risk culture. In other words, the preservation of the traumatic mark a disaster or catastrophe has left can be a tool giving effect to urban resilience, since an urban system integrates the trauma involved, rather than cancelling it, with the open purpose of risk being mitigated (Jackson, 2005). This specific process can be called a proactive form of resilience (Vale and Campanella, 2005). However, such an instrument of risk management entails major urban-planning issues. Should ruins be preserved as traces of history and as tools by which remembrance and risk prevention can be achieved, or should the trauma experienced be erased, with urban functionality also restored? And if a massive ruined element is to be retained in urban space, how is that to be integrated? Ultimately, many municipalities in a whole host of countries have decided to preserve the ruins left after tragic events have ensued. This has entailed the setting of specific standards as regards restoration and management, with various aesthetic and technical choices made, and criteria as regards access and presentation applied. In any case, it is argued that the preservation of ruins may come down to the political exploitation of a disaster, with all that that may denote.