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ABSTRACT
In this article, I argue that a ‘situated-portable epistemic nexus’ characterizes postwar urban peacebuilding. The concept captures how knowledge in urban peacebuilding is produced by/productive of discursive and material conditions that are both, and simultaneously, situated in a particular urban environment and transnationally emergent and circulating. I illustrate this argument in an analysis of an urban peacebuilding project in postwar Pristina, Kosovo, that relied on the computer game Minecraft as the main technology. Despite a heterogeneous group of actors involved, and a primacy devoted to local perspectives, the at-once-situated and globally portable discourses, technologies and artefacts of the Pristina project conditioned the production of a relatively narrow urban knowledge and space that formed around a purely visual conception of the urban – overall limiting what the situated urban was and could become.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My warmest thanks to Annick Wibben and the editors of this special issue for helpful comments on previous versions of this text, and to the journal editors and reviewers for the very constructive critique and suggestions that helped improve the paper.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The term ‘epistemic’ is used to make a distinction from epistemology, and highlight the focus on how actors practically involved in a peacebuilding project produce and use knowledge.
2 This section cannot give a full account of the postwar urban peacebuilding and reconstruction process in Kosovo, for instance, with regard to its inherent links to politics and informal economic processes (e.g., Boussauw, Citation2012; Todorovski et al., Citation2016).
3 One example concerns how, in 2005, UN-Habitat, in collaboration with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), launched the Municipal Spatial Planning Support Programme (MuSPP) (UN-Habitat, Citation2014). MuSPP was to support the spatial planning capacity in Kosovo municipalities, with a particular focus on urban reconstruction, development and multi-ethnic reconciliation (Garstka, Citation2010, p. 92).
4 It is interesting that, in 2022, Minecraft began a collaboration with the Nobel Peace Center around a new Minecraft ‘learning experience’ in which students can follow and engage with the work of previous Nobel Peace Prize laureates (Minecraft Education Edition, Citation2022).
5 Indeed, the point here is not to discuss the outcomes of the project, for instance, whether it reached its stated goal of promoting inter-ethnic dialogue, but to explore such statements as part of a broader production by discourses that made the project possible in the first place, and that furthermore were in constant interplay with the project’s materialities in conditioning the production of a particular urban knowledge and space.
6 My thanks to a reviewer for making this point.