Project presentation (english)
The partition lies in the heart of the research on Cyprus and Nicosia. As the maps n°1 and n°2 show, the intervention of the Turkish Army in 1974 caused the division of the island and its capital, Nicosia. The partition wall is an attractive urban element as it is the place for the display of nationalism by definition. However, the partition is, in specific fields, quite as permeable for the exchanges as the other urban limits are, such as the Venetian wall, which still structures Nicosia. The analyse of the demarcation lines (boundary, cease-fire line) is based on the hypothesis that they are not actors on their own, but they formulate the relations maintained between political authorities, states, nations, peoples and neighbours (Foucher M.,1991, p. 473). Contrary to Famagusta, which has become Aye-Napa in the Greek Cypriot part and Gamigouza in the Turkish Cypriot part, Nicosia is still one town, but perceived as divided. During the 1960-70, the departure of population from the old town was explained by their search for a more modern dwelling and way of life outside the Venetian walls (Attlaides M.,1981). It seems that during this period, the presence of a Turkish Cypriot enclave, delimited by three armies, inside the wall wasn’t considerated as a cause of departure. So a question may be posed about the coherence in the discourse about the town and its development. The return of population inside the Venetians wall due to improvement of the urban environment has been possible only coupled with an evolution of the attitude to the partition. We can conclude that the partition reveals the changing relations between the different Cypriot populations. The Study of Nicosia, the last divided capital of European Union, should not bring us to a descriptive or historical monographic but allow us to analyse the relationship between town planning and geopolitics.
That supposes that the political bets that take place at the regional and insular scale do not command, unilaterally, the structure and the evolution of Nicosia. Nicosia, alone, can not be used to illustrate the Cyprus issue. It’s in the capital where the first riots took place as the first program of post-partition collaboration also did. The Nicosia Master Plan, town planning program between the two Municipalities of Nicosia, Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot, proves that the lack of trust, noticed by the General Secretary of the United Nations, isn’t being confirmed at the urban scale. The specificity of the urban scale has been reinforced in 2004 with the failure of the Annan Plan. The United Nations, participating to the cooperative program at Nicosia, was not able to reproduce these local cooperative tools at the insular scale. The analyses of this program lead us to two type of questioning.
How can they help to understand the Cyprus political situation? The geopolitics studies utilized these cooperative planning programs to understand the relations between the two antagonist entities and the role played by the international organisations. These analyses neglect the urban space, which on the contrary to the conflict is not “freezed”. The differences inside the Venetian walls are, in terms of urban fabric, less important than between the old and the new town.
How can these cooperative planning programs be used for the understanding of the evolutions of the agglomeration and the urban area? The urban researches should considerate the existence of territories that are not controlled by the local authorities inside of the agglomeration. The partition couldn’t be considerated as a simple boundary, and each part of Nicosia can be understood only taking into consideration the historical entity that the city represented until the middle of the twentieth century. As the map n°3 shows, the cartographic choices express these attitudes inside the research about Nicosia.
The gaol of this research is not to considerate town planning as an image of the geopolitics balance of power. The choice not to use town planning as an expression of a battle field leads us to a new type of questions: Why the term “bi-communal” is used in town planning and not in legislation or politics? What are the consequences of the designation of the new comers as “colons” or foreigner workers on the planning of the town? If the common Cyprus identity doesn’t exist is it possible to have a common patrimony? Does the partition of the national territories have the same consequences as the partition of the historical core of its capital?
The research made by Bollens in “Peace Building and Town Planning” has for assumption that the urban space is animated by dynamics differing it from the national scale (Bollens S.A, 2006, p.118). But these studies about the substantive rationality of cooperative town planning program have for effect the obliteration of the urban space: inside the “divided towns’ tour” the town planners’ discourses become the only point of comparison. The hypothesis of this research is that the characteristic of the town planning must be used in the peace building process:
« Urban intervention can engage productively and proactively in the creation of inter-group co-existence and societal building and can constitute a bottom-up approach able to complement top-down peace-making negotiations» Bollens S.A, 2006, p.118
Using town planning in the peace building process produces normative theories. This way has for paradox effect a minimization of the importance of the local actors by making the goals that guide their every day actions less visible or valid. Nicosia shows us that its Municipalities had to administer for more than thirty years the partition and also an urban sprawl, the restoration of urban network and the safeguard of the historical building. For more than twenty years, these different programs participated in peace building via training of cooperation and in the reconstruction of Nicosia via urban operations. « Through analysis of the urban system, [we] seek to contribute on theoretical level to a better understanding of relation between planning, power, and societal transformation » (Bollens S.A, 2006, p.73)
The cities are never fully controlled by extra-urban forces nor fully disconnected from the regional or global geopolitical context. To understand this context doesn’t mean to come back to the genesis of the Cyprus issue but to take up the present effects on the city. That means to take into consideration the different aspects of the sovereignty, which exist in Cyprus and in Nicosia. We make distinction between two types of sovereignties, internal and external, which have a particular expression in Cyprus. The first one consists in the authority that the political organization proclaims to have on all people (individuals and enterprises) located on their territory. The external sovereignty resides in the independence of these political organizations face to the foreign powers and the capacity to make political alliances . It’s a formal vision; sovereignty becomes more visible when it contests, by the formation of a new state or by evolutions coming to limit the territorial integrity and the exclusive rights of the State. Since the Westphalia treaty in 1648, this key notion organises the modern international political life. Today this order is defied by the development of the international right and the institutional experiences like European Union and the World Trade Organization, all included in the process of globalization, which also affects the city. The research made by Eki Berg on Cyprus and Moldavia shows, that in the case of freezed conflicts, the sovereignty is paradoxical: the sovereignty de facto, effective, is reinforced by the organization who don’t have the de jure sovereignty (Eki B, 2006, p. 228). The geopolitical situation in Cyprus and Nicosia characterizes by a type of sovereignty that we call “differential sovereignty”. The third states and the international organizations recognize the Republic of Cyprus’ de jure sovereignty all over the island, but it can’t be applied in the northern part of the insular territory. The sovereignty of the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of North Cyprus isn’t recognized, except by the Turkish Republic, even though it is the only political organization which can apply, actually, the accords about Cyprus in its northern part. But this analyse put the State as the only scale of expression of the sovereignty. Some cities want or have to develop their control over their urban territories; and town planning can be considerate as an expression of the de facto and de jure sovereignty.
In this construction of sovereignty the cultural heritage, particularly the urban patrimony, takes an import part in the construction of iconography. The iconography is a set of symbols, representation that unifies a human group and participates in the definition of territory. This notion, introduces by Jean Gottmann, makes a link between politics and culture inside the field of geography but also in urban studies. For a town planner, the rich architectural landscape located in the urban historical core can’t be reduced to the management of “historical building of common interest”. In the research about the construction of nationality some basic strategies emerge, the construction of meta-story to link a group with a long historical continuum and the necessity of differentiation from the “neighbours” . The cities, especially a Mediterranean city likes Nicosia, faces difficulty to enter inside this national framework. Those elements give another way for understanding the physically divided cities, “which are generally characterized by prolonged episodes of violence centred on the historic urban core, or at least on highly emblematic spaces and structures” .
“Destruction of cultural heritage is a product of rational, politically motivated iconoclasm rather than purely ignorant and venal impulses.” Calame J. and Charlesworth E. (2002)
We want to broaden this proposition: not only the episodes of violence and the direct physical destruction should be taken into consideration but also the post-partition period and the lack of protection for historical buildings. For the city, the interest for this cultural heritage is not guided only by its tourist value, the most basic “common interest”, but also as a way to reaffirm its capacity to manage the diversity and the insertion in different kinds of networks in the age of globalization. To realise it, local power tends to create a new form of iconography through the constitution of its sovereignty.
The goal of my research is to understand the role of this differential sovereignty for the town planning program of the Cyprus capital. The bets around the de jure sovereignty focalize the action of state power at the expense of town planning. On the opposite, this differential sovereignty was for Nicosia a source of enterprise and innovation in the field of town planning. The assumption is that the sovereignty participates in the construction of the representation of the urban space for the city dwellers and the town planners. The sovereignty shouldn’t be confused with the governance issue. Nicosia is the example of a city where different kinds of sovereignty are claiming; that makes them more visible and so far analysable. Nicosia is also a good example of the difficulty to manage an urban multicultural heritage during a process of nationalization of territory and identity. Considering town planning as an expression of the sovereignty, in these both senses, leads us to analyse the link between cultural heritage, iconography and town planning.
That supposes that the political bets that take place at the regional and insular scale do not command, unilaterally, the structure and the evolution of Nicosia. Nicosia, alone, can not be used to illustrate the Cyprus issue. It’s in the capital where the first riots took place as the first program of post-partition collaboration also did. The Nicosia Master Plan, town planning program between the two Municipalities of Nicosia, Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot, proves that the lack of trust, noticed by the General Secretary of the United Nations, isn’t being confirmed at the urban scale. The specificity of the urban scale has been reinforced in 2004 with the failure of the Annan Plan. The United Nations, participating to the cooperative program at Nicosia, was not able to reproduce these local cooperative tools at the insular scale. The analyses of this program lead us to two type of questioning.
How can they help to understand the Cyprus political situation? The geopolitics studies utilized these cooperative planning programs to understand the relations between the two antagonist entities and the role played by the international organisations. These analyses neglect the urban space, which on the contrary to the conflict is not “freezed”. The differences inside the Venetian walls are, in terms of urban fabric, less important than between the old and the new town.
How can these cooperative planning programs be used for the understanding of the evolutions of the agglomeration and the urban area? The urban researches should considerate the existence of territories that are not controlled by the local authorities inside of the agglomeration. The partition couldn’t be considerated as a simple boundary, and each part of Nicosia can be understood only taking into consideration the historical entity that the city represented until the middle of the twentieth century. As the map n°3 shows, the cartographic choices express these attitudes inside the research about Nicosia.
The gaol of this research is not to considerate town planning as an image of the geopolitics balance of power. The choice not to use town planning as an expression of a battle field leads us to a new type of questions: Why the term “bi-communal” is used in town planning and not in legislation or politics? What are the consequences of the designation of the new comers as “colons” or foreigner workers on the planning of the town? If the common Cyprus identity doesn’t exist is it possible to have a common patrimony? Does the partition of the national territories have the same consequences as the partition of the historical core of its capital?
The research made by Bollens in “Peace Building and Town Planning” has for assumption that the urban space is animated by dynamics differing it from the national scale (Bollens S.A, 2006, p.118). But these studies about the substantive rationality of cooperative town planning program have for effect the obliteration of the urban space: inside the “divided towns’ tour” the town planners’ discourses become the only point of comparison. The hypothesis of this research is that the characteristic of the town planning must be used in the peace building process:
« Urban intervention can engage productively and proactively in the creation of inter-group co-existence and societal building and can constitute a bottom-up approach able to complement top-down peace-making negotiations» Bollens S.A, 2006, p.118
Using town planning in the peace building process produces normative theories. This way has for paradox effect a minimization of the importance of the local actors by making the goals that guide their every day actions less visible or valid. Nicosia shows us that its Municipalities had to administer for more than thirty years the partition and also an urban sprawl, the restoration of urban network and the safeguard of the historical building. For more than twenty years, these different programs participated in peace building via training of cooperation and in the reconstruction of Nicosia via urban operations. « Through analysis of the urban system, [we] seek to contribute on theoretical level to a better understanding of relation between planning, power, and societal transformation » (Bollens S.A, 2006, p.73)
The cities are never fully controlled by extra-urban forces nor fully disconnected from the regional or global geopolitical context. To understand this context doesn’t mean to come back to the genesis of the Cyprus issue but to take up the present effects on the city. That means to take into consideration the different aspects of the sovereignty, which exist in Cyprus and in Nicosia. We make distinction between two types of sovereignties, internal and external, which have a particular expression in Cyprus. The first one consists in the authority that the political organization proclaims to have on all people (individuals and enterprises) located on their territory. The external sovereignty resides in the independence of these political organizations face to the foreign powers and the capacity to make political alliances . It’s a formal vision; sovereignty becomes more visible when it contests, by the formation of a new state or by evolutions coming to limit the territorial integrity and the exclusive rights of the State. Since the Westphalia treaty in 1648, this key notion organises the modern international political life. Today this order is defied by the development of the international right and the institutional experiences like European Union and the World Trade Organization, all included in the process of globalization, which also affects the city. The research made by Eki Berg on Cyprus and Moldavia shows, that in the case of freezed conflicts, the sovereignty is paradoxical: the sovereignty de facto, effective, is reinforced by the organization who don’t have the de jure sovereignty (Eki B, 2006, p. 228). The geopolitical situation in Cyprus and Nicosia characterizes by a type of sovereignty that we call “differential sovereignty”. The third states and the international organizations recognize the Republic of Cyprus’ de jure sovereignty all over the island, but it can’t be applied in the northern part of the insular territory. The sovereignty of the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of North Cyprus isn’t recognized, except by the Turkish Republic, even though it is the only political organization which can apply, actually, the accords about Cyprus in its northern part. But this analyse put the State as the only scale of expression of the sovereignty. Some cities want or have to develop their control over their urban territories; and town planning can be considerate as an expression of the de facto and de jure sovereignty.
In this construction of sovereignty the cultural heritage, particularly the urban patrimony, takes an import part in the construction of iconography. The iconography is a set of symbols, representation that unifies a human group and participates in the definition of territory. This notion, introduces by Jean Gottmann, makes a link between politics and culture inside the field of geography but also in urban studies. For a town planner, the rich architectural landscape located in the urban historical core can’t be reduced to the management of “historical building of common interest”. In the research about the construction of nationality some basic strategies emerge, the construction of meta-story to link a group with a long historical continuum and the necessity of differentiation from the “neighbours” . The cities, especially a Mediterranean city likes Nicosia, faces difficulty to enter inside this national framework. Those elements give another way for understanding the physically divided cities, “which are generally characterized by prolonged episodes of violence centred on the historic urban core, or at least on highly emblematic spaces and structures” .
“Destruction of cultural heritage is a product of rational, politically motivated iconoclasm rather than purely ignorant and venal impulses.” Calame J. and Charlesworth E. (2002)
We want to broaden this proposition: not only the episodes of violence and the direct physical destruction should be taken into consideration but also the post-partition period and the lack of protection for historical buildings. For the city, the interest for this cultural heritage is not guided only by its tourist value, the most basic “common interest”, but also as a way to reaffirm its capacity to manage the diversity and the insertion in different kinds of networks in the age of globalization. To realise it, local power tends to create a new form of iconography through the constitution of its sovereignty.
The goal of my research is to understand the role of this differential sovereignty for the town planning program of the Cyprus capital. The bets around the de jure sovereignty focalize the action of state power at the expense of town planning. On the opposite, this differential sovereignty was for Nicosia a source of enterprise and innovation in the field of town planning. The assumption is that the sovereignty participates in the construction of the representation of the urban space for the city dwellers and the town planners. The sovereignty shouldn’t be confused with the governance issue. Nicosia is the example of a city where different kinds of sovereignty are claiming; that makes them more visible and so far analysable. Nicosia is also a good example of the difficulty to manage an urban multicultural heritage during a process of nationalization of territory and identity. Considering town planning as an expression of the sovereignty, in these both senses, leads us to analyse the link between cultural heritage, iconography and town planning.
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