Arizona Road
“Provocative Pole” installation, video, text-image plate (2002)
Commissioned by the Generali Foundation Vienna, AT
The project examines the new urban phenomena of the largest black market in the Balkans, the Arizona Market located near the city of Brčko. Arizona Road was the name given by the American military to the north-south highway in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The market provides a unique opportunity to observe a birth of a city and actively shape it from an urbanistic and architectural standpoint. The informal market system invites conflicts with the formal system, while being parasitic upon the latter’s inefficiencies. As the formal market begins to fail or becomes too inefficient, the informal system becomes more powerful. In an urban context, this proposition implies a new kind of thinking about an architect’s impact on the evolution of the city. It suggests that directed assimilation of informal activities can become a tool for achieving more formality. The Arizona Road project envisions urban planning as a negotiation between actions and programs that come from both the formal and the informal systems.
As a result of such negotiation, a new and unpredictable process of urban communication emerges—the process I call Urban Navigation. The role of the architect is to be more of a sensor, a provoker, and a guide through urban processes than a master planner; open-endedness becomes not something to suppress, but something to make more navigable. Architectural intervention accompanies and inspires the ever-evolving process of sustainable urban development. Arizona Road questions the very premises of the master plan developed by the local government: in this case, the imposition of a shopping mall and entertainment center over an improvised popular market. As an alternative, I proposed a so-called Provocative Pole, an infrastructural element for electricity, water, canalization, TV, and advertisement. Here, Urban Navigation can be understood as a method of informal provocation. It uses existing conditions to create new ones that continually evolve in relation to urban conditions and communication processes. The aim is to advocate for self-organization harnessing an element of effective chaos.
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Project commissioned by the Generali Foundation Vienna for the group exhibition Designs for the Real World (2002), curated by Sabine Breitwieser and Hemma Schmutz.
Materials: Street lamp, signage, water pipes, electric cables, satellite dish, sports floor, posters, double channel-video
Dimensions: Provocative Pole, 2 x 2 x 5 m; sports ground, variable; text-image plate, 400 x 30 cm; video, 7 min 45 sec.
Concept and artistic direction: Azra Akšamija
Research and development: Andreas Mayer (conceptual contributions); Ilias Chatzis, Ismet Dedeic, Eamonn O`Riordan, Salih Hrnjic, Said Jamakovic, Hamed Jerkovic, Fahrudin Selimovic, Britt Tryding (interviewees)
Production: Generali Foundation Vienna; Martin Heigl (video editor)
Special thanks: Michael Stoiser
Also see: Akšamija, Azra, “Arizona Road,” in Designs für die wirkliche Welt [Designs for the Real World], edited by Sabine Breitwieser, 36–79. Cologne: Walther König, 2002.