This is the story about Banja Luka, known as the second largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina and political, administrative, financial, university and cultural centre of one of the post-war entities of the country, i.e. Republika Srpska. Here, through an inventory of ideas, (urban) affairs and behaviours, and agencies and objects, one gets to learn how what I here portray as an ethnically clean city (in the making) comes to life and how, why and by whom it has been negotiated and questioned, altered and contested on a daily basis.
Simultaneously, I shed a light on the legacy of an ordinary (wo)man that I praise as the post-Yugoslav Homo Faber and the phenomenon of the do-it-yourself informal alterations of the built fabric. Taking on the different roles of an architect gone anthropologist, a curator, Banja Luka native, a scholar, I here alter between a range of spatial, temporal and institutional scales, offering an understanding of a specific form of the local melancholy, while advocating for creative approaches and unconventional methods, such as architectural anthropology (Stender et al. 2022) and curating cities (Chaplin & Stara 2009).
This, however, is not just another lecture: it is a personal diary of a local who recalls of the 1990s political-regime-initiated evictions of fellow citizens; a conversation with a researcher who reminisces her thus-far practice; a contemplation of the grand histories under construction and a debate on the importance of urban memory and what could, finally, be considered a heritage.