Transformation by Method of Sanation – Unregulated Residential Settlements of Sarajevo

In the second half of the 20th century, the industrialisation and deagrarization of Bosnia and Herzegovina had a strong impact on the dynamics of urban development and economic growth of the post-war Sarajevo, which intensified immigration from its relatively underdeveloped regional environment. This was accompanied by accelerated housing construction, and it encouraged the spatial expansion of the city. Planning guidelines were set by the city administration and were based on the long-term development plans. They identified the disposition of urban functions necessary for housing, work, recreation and traffic, and the policy of building multi-residential buildings was aimed general social interest. At the same time, the planning activities neglected the actual socio-economic status of immigrants who had lesser opportunities for housing through the social distribution system of apartments, began the process of self-organized unregulated settlement construction with single-family houses on the city's slopes. This began an era of two parallel but controversial actions within town space: planned and unregulated housing construction. Spontaneous possession of the city's territory with unregulated construction today is characterised by: complex property-legal relations, high degree of construction, absence of public space, pedestrian communications and service functions, low quality of the infrastructure network, and that settlements are formed on unstable terrains and on active landslides. Since the consequences of the complexity of the situation cannot be addressed through radical urban transformation, we see an alternative in the idea of partial spatial interventions – transformation by method of sanation. Starting with the thesis that construction is always deeply connected to society's understanding of the function of space and the place of man in it, we have opened up a central question, and searching for answers is the basic goal of this paper: Is it possible to solve problems accumulated by decades within Sarajevo's unregulated residential settlements through means of transformation by method of sanation? Or: Can partial spatial interventions improve the overall quality of individual and social life? For the purpose of finding answers, we conducted an analysis of the causes of the formation and genesis of these settlements, as well as a series of problems produced by the accumulation of separate spatial interventions without elementary professional guidance. The results of this analysis showed that the answer to the questions asked can be positive, by establishing a critical relationship with the potential of the space of specific settlement sites, in terms of the degree of functional usability, correlation with utilities and user interactions with the environments they inhabit. We have concluded that it is precisely the potential of individual sites, by logically applying the transformation by method of sanation, will enable dual achievement – the merging the solution within the technical and structural aspect of potential landslides with the articulation of the public on new pedestrian communications. Also, it has been shown that the application of this method enables the typification of technical solutions, functions, contents, activities, urban design, and even the public itself. And this means that the conclusions on the characteristics of individual Sarajevo unregulated residential settlements, endangered by landslides, can offer general guidelines for design concepts, within them, an overall improvement of individual and social life.