“Contested Fronts” is an exploration of architecture’s role for commoning practices in ethnically and socially contested spaces. It focuses on the agencies of architecture’s ad-hoc technologies that contribute into conflict transformation by advocating reconciliation processes to go hand in hand with urban reconstruction processes. “Contested Fronts” introduces three levels of frontiers’ investigation where architecture claims an active role: geopolitical, disciplinary and everyday urban politics’ frontiers. To do so, it concentrates on the agencies of ad-hoc technology’s materiality and use that encourage the emergence of collectives, with their members coming from areas across divides. Ad-hoc technology has to do with means of spatial engagement, of cartographic representation and of visual communication. It assists tactful organization of physical spaces and of events.
“Contested Fronts” is an open source that departs from archiving the Cyprus operating “Hands-on Famagusta” project that is a collective platform for reconciliation through the creation of common urban imaginaries across the Cypriot divide. The “Contested Fronts Open Source Archive” includes international practices, networks and pedagogical programs, which are complementary to the “Hands-on Famagusta” project, to build a decisive critical mass of resistance to the dominant trends of post conflict reconstruction. It addresses two major challenges emerging from the case of Famagusta: firstly to operate in actual hostile environments where institutions produce narratives based on division. Secondly, to confront actual trends of post conflict reconstruction processes based on either large scale segregating private developments or on inflexible bureaucratic, non-transparent produced plans, both unable of encouraging commoning practices nor of handling the ever changing contested urban environments.
