A Place-Based Methodological Approach to Measure Urban Memory in a Post-Urbicide Context: The Case of Sarajevo

This research examines the impact of urbicide on urban memory, using the city of Sarajevo as a case study. Urbicide is defined as the deliberate destruction of the built environment, including both its tangible and intangible aspects. This study proposes a place-based, multilayered methodological framework to analyze the effects of urbicide on the erasure of urban memory among inhabitants, as well as on traumatic and transformed urban memory. The methodological approach proposed and used in this research includes desk research; urban analysis to reveal the material evidence of destruction; sampling to categorize the level of destruction; visual documentation; surveying to measure the impact of urbicide on urban memory; thematic analysis to interpret the results; and mapping to locate both the tangible and intangible aspects of the survey results. The suggested methodological approach is tested through a pilot study in the city of Sarajevo, 31 years after the end of the 1992–95 siege. The results of the pilot survey presented in this paper, although partial due to the sample size, allowed us to explore the feasibility of the method and to implement the necessary improvements to measure the impacts of urbicide on city memory. Furthermore, the pilot study highlighted the need for a holistic, mixed-methods approach to investigate both the tangible and intangible aspects of urbicide, with a specific emphasis on the use of visual questionnaires.