Aleksandar Staničić
Assistant Professor
Aleksandar Staničić is an architect and Assistant Professor at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, the Chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination. Previously he was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at TU Delft, research scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University, and postdoctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. Aleksandar’s work stems from two book projects, War Diaries: Design after the Destruction of Art and Architecture (coeditor, University of Virginia Press, 2021) and Transition urbicide: Post-war reconstruction in post-socialist Belgrade (sole author, forthcoming). His is recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from the Graham Foundation, the European Commission, Government of Lombardy Region, Italy, and Ministry of Education, Republic of Serbia.
Staničić Aleksandar and Milan Šijaković, ‘(Re)building Spaces of Tolerance: A “Symbiotic Model” for the Post-War City Regeneration’, Architecture and Culture, 7:1 (2019): 113-128.
Abstract:
Crossovers seldom occur in academic research on social tolerance and post-war urban reconstruction. Social scientists often call for a deeper analysis of the impact of spatial context on intergroup tolerance thresholds, but repairing social relations alongside damaged buildings is rarely the focus of post-disaster resilience design. This article bridges these two areas of study by proposing a pioneering regeneration model, that is, a “symbiotic model” for choosing the most socially and environmentally sustainable approach for site-specific post-conflict city regeneration. More precisely, it demonstrates that the concepts of commensalism, mutualism and parasitism, taken from biology, clearly define the spectrum of the relationships between the existing city tissue and new intervention in post-conflict city regeneration. It is argued that this model (re)builds places of social and political tolerance through (1) the meaningful interaction between social groups; (2) sustainable environmental and economic development; and (3) stratification of symbolic readings in the spatial, collective memorialization of conflict.