Abstract
This paper seeks to answer to what extent the city of Vukovar is divided and in which way this division is geographically imagined and embedded in everyday life. Since each case of divided cities is driven by different factors and consists of different manifestations, case study design is the most appropriate one for researching micro-divisions in this post-conflict area. The case study of Vukovar is interesting because war legacy influenced new local policies and politics; open border issues affect bilateral relations on State level; and micro-regional frictions show deep identity-based divisions. Regardless of the lack of physical obstacles in the urban structure of the city, the research presents multilevel divisions that are visible in a form of imagined boundaries. Although Vukovar is an ethnically divided city we presume that division(s) lacks any strong geographical (or territorial) aspect. That is why the method of mental mapping on a random based sample of local population is used to compare imagined divisions in everyday life with administrative, ethnical and political ones.
Highlights
Whether the inhabitants of the city perceive it as geopolitically divided
This visual representation establishes the geopolitical discourse that supports the idea that Vukovar is a divided city without any visual lines of divisions or concrete barriers in a territorial sense
The authors of this paper approach the term “divided cities’’ as a notion used by contemporary political geography and geopolitics where “we must not limit our attention to a study of the geography of politics within pregiven, taken-forgranted, commonsense spaces, but investigate the politics of the geographical specification of politics“ (Dalby, 1991, p. 274)
Summary
6 “Divided cities’’ is a term used by many different scholars in various fields of science: from political science and geography, sociology, anthropology, international relations, architecture, economy, psychology to civil engineering, environmental science or even materials science. This paper focuses on imaginative mental maps on local levels, micro-geopolitics of division in the case study of the city of Vukovar. 34 Out of the total number of people who stated that Vukovar is a divided city 77, 4 percent of them think that the background for divisions is an ethno-national (between Croats and Serbs). 39 the third question referred to a blind map of the city of Vukovar and the examinees were asked to draw lines of the division if answer that “Vukovar is a divided city” was chosen. The examinees that drew those maps pointed out that ethno-national divisions on the second question were one of the reasons of division in the city These are imagined borders in the urban structure of the city, the examinees pointed out the visual differences of those neighborhoods. This shows that Vukovar could not be considered territorially divided through neighborhood patterns
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