City Makers, Urban Reconstruction and Coming to terms with the Past in Sarajevo 1 Gruia Bădescu This thought piece explores post-war urban reconstruction in Sarajevo from the perspective of the societal process of dealing with the past. In the complicated canvas of urgent reconstruction needs, including housing shortages and infrastructure repair, funding considerations and local and national politics, the paper inquires what is the place of the process of 'coming to terms with this past' in urban reconstruction. It introduces key threads of the multidimensional relationship between reconstruction and dealing with the past for the volume Reconstructing Sarajevo, produced by LSE Cities. The author coordinated the LSE Cities Programme urban design workshop which originated the publication. In the hustle and bustle of Sarajevo’s old town, a Western tourist is taking photos of a rare ruined building, cautiously glancing around, perhaps not to be noticed as yet another ruin fetishist. In Sarajevo, ruins or pockmarked walls evoke, to the visitors at least, direct mental associations with the 1990’s attacks on the city. However, in the post-socialist urban landscape of Sarajevo, a ruin can similarly be an insight to the political economies of uncertainty and fuzziness of property rights, which often prevents reconstruction. As many residents indicate, with time they stopped noticing bullet holes and ruins, which melted somehow into the background. Yet reactions to Lebbeus Woods' proposal of a reconstructed Sarajevo floating amidst ruins were met with significant local opposition. Woods called for the city to be rebuilt in a way that new buildings would be constructed alongside ruins, leaving the ruins to be invaded by greenery and perhaps even haunted by memories. His vision condemned residents to perpetual sightings of these ruins, to possibilities of either perpetual memorialisation or mere trivialisation of the ruin. The proposal, utopic and daring, did not fit the vision of the local communities, architects and planners who wanted to move on, and as many of them have shared, to reconstruct the city the way it once was; that pleasant, picturesque and diverse city surrounded by mountains. Yet at the end of destruction waged upon a city, how should city-makers actually approach ruins, war damage and the process of reconstruction? How should reconstruction problematise the act of destruction itself? In the complicated canvas of urgency, of immediate housing and infrastructure needs, of funding considerations, of politics, what is the place of the process of ‘coming to terms with this past’ in urban reconstruction? I started pondering about what it means to reconstruct a city as I visited Warsaw in the summer of 2003 and found the reconstruction of its Stare Miasto (Old Town) an intriguing act of moving forward by reclaiming a destroyed past. I later researched the post Second World War reconstruction of three of West Germany's most damaged cities, exploring connections between architecture and 1 Cite as Bădescu, Gruia. ‘City Makers, Urban Reconstruction and Coming to Terms with the Past in Sarajevo.’ (2014) Kotzen, B. and Garcia, S. (eds.) Reconstructing Sarajevo: Negotiating Socio-political Complexity. London: LSE Cities: 15-21.