Urban Geopolitics in ’Ordinary’ and ’Contested’ Cities: Perspectives from the European South-East

Abstract

ABSTRACT Connecting urban geopolitics with critical geopolitics, this article highlights the urban geopolitical significance of learning from the European South-east. Urban geopolitics has often made reference to the European South-east in discussions of urban warfare, conflict and contestation. In particular, Sarajevo and discussions of urbicide played a seminal role in understanding the contemporary relationship between conflict and the built environment. Beyond this attention to the 1990s wars, this article shows that contemporary urban transformations in the region reflect novel processes and alignments that can contribute to the larger project of rethinking urban geopolitics: allegedly ‘contested’ and ‘ordinary’ cities in the region reflect today a reshaping of practices of material and immaterial urban geopolitics highlighting transnational and global entanglements beyond the East-West and North-South conceptual and geopolitical divides. By employing a critical geopolitical analysis of the urban, the article discusses performative acts of power in urban space and the reconfiguration of the built environment in two cities in the region as a nexus of geopolitical processes, well beyond the wars of the 1990s: Sarajevo, arguably a divided city in a contested state, and Belgrade, an ‘ordinary’ capital city of a nation-state, albeit uncontested capital of a country with contested territories. The article highlights the emergence of newer relationships beyond the East-West divide, particularly with the Middle East, specifically articulated through urban space reconfigurations. It shows how the European South-east reflects that the urban geopolitical goes beyond the usual lens of ‘contested’ urban space to ‘ordinary’ cities, which become arenas of multi-scalar geopolitics.