Minecraft as a technology of postwar urban ordering: the situated-portable epistemic nexus of urban peacebuilding in Pristina

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.

KEYWORDS:

• cities
• co-production
• knowledge
• Kosovo
• urban peacebuilding

1. INTRODUCTION

Cities often emerge as key sites for the dynamic, at times devastatingly violent, convergence of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 27; Hommels, 2020). In their now decade-old contribution to a ‘new urbanism’, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue that cities are best understood as transnational sites that are produced by and productive of various social and material forces (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 3). The city emerges in and through enmeshed socio-material practices, which in turn may have generative effects on, for instance, knowledge production (DeLanda, 2006, p. 94; Farías & Blok, 2017, p. 563). Cities are thus always ‘potentials’. They are amalgams that emerge in and through practices situated in as well as at a distance from the urban environment (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 4). Indeed, cities force us to consider how the transnational and the portable are in a continuous relationship to the situated; to consider transnational circulation while at the same time ‘stay[ing] put and study how urban sites are made and unmade’ (Farías & Blok, 2017, p. 574).

A relatively recent domain into which debates about cities and urban environments have entered are discourses of war and peace. There has been a renewed scholarly, military and peacebuilder interest in the intricate relationship between cities, war and peace (Björkdahl, 2013; Evans, 2009; Graham, 2004; King, 2021; Ljungkvist & Jarstad, 2021). In peacebuilding scholarship specifically, studies explore how peacebuilding unfolds in and is shaped by urban environments, at the same time as peacebuilding projects fundamentally (re)shape the urban (Björkdahl, 2013; Björkdahl & Kappler, 2017; Bollens, 2011, 2013; Martín-Díaz, 2014; Pullan & Baillie, 2013). For example, urban peacebuilding demonstrates the entanglement of space- and place-making (e.g., Björkdahl & Kappler, 2017; Björkdahl & Mannergren Selimovic, 2016). Moreover, the urban is often seen as an arena in which a truly ‘bottom-up’ and inclusive peacebuilding process can be achieved (Björkdahl & Strömbom, 2015; Cunningham & Byrne, 2006; Erfan, 2017).

In many debates on urban peacebuilding, the question of knowledge is at the centre – linking the literature on urban peacebuilding to the broader study of peacebuilding knowledge production (e.g., Bliesemann de Guevara, 2014; Danielsson, 2020a; Goetze, 2017; Sending, 2015). Scholars have, for instance, enquired into how actors situated within and/or at a distance from the urban environment in question produce knowledge (including meaning) of the city (Björkdahl & Mannergren Selimovic, 2016; Smirl, 2015). However, works on urban peacebuilding epistemics have not paid sufficient attention to the constitutive importance of situatedness in the urban environment.¹ That is, we know little about the potential co-production of urban spaces and urban socio-material conditions, on the one hand, and knowledge(s) of the urban, on the other. The literature has focused on the solely human dimension of knowledge production, that is, on how actors produce knowledge of the urban in a way that is constitutively detached from the urban environment (Danielsson, 2020c; see Smirl, 2015, for a partial exception). As noted in an earlier study (Danielsson, 2020c, p. 655, original emphasis), such a focus ‘reduces meaning- and knowledge-making to processes that are situated and that unfold in urban environments but that are not (also) (co-)constituted by them’. At the same time, and as mentioned, cities are phenomena that exemplify how situatedness is a condition amid the transnationally portable.

In this article, I argue that what I call a ‘situated-portable epistemic nexus’ characterizes postwar urban peacebuilding. The concept’s focus on situated epistemics captures how knowledge in urban peacebuilding is produced by/productive of situated discursive and material conditions that pertain to a particular urban environment (cf. Haraway, 1988). At the same time, the notion of portability denotes how that knowledge can simultaneously be produced by/productive of discursive and material conditions that are transnationally emergent and circulating. Put differently, the here proposed situated-portable epistemic nexus requires analytical attention to the effects of urban situatedness on the production of peacebuilding urban knowledge and to this knowledge’s global span, composition and portability.

The argument is somewhat inspired also by Latour’s (1990) ‘immutable mobiles’. For Latour, scientific representations, instruments and tools (such as maps and books) are portable and of an immutable character. This gives scientific knowledge its often-authoritative position. However, in peacebuilding scholarship many observers argue that epistemic authority does not arise from claims of a totalizing position and/or a distancing from the local context. Instead, peacebuilder claims to local knowledge are key (e.g., Bliesemann de Guevara, 2017; Danielsson, 2020a; Moe & Müller, 2018; Sending, 2015). Nonetheless, and as discussed in the introduction to this special issue (Lopez Lucia & Martin de Almagro, forthcoming), it is easy to conflate terms such as ‘local’ or ‘international/global’ with particular knowledges and/or actors, when the epistemic dynamic is in fact more complex (see also Salehi, forthcoming). Peacebuilding epistemic dynamics may cut across any North/South or local/international divide, and demand a multiscalar approach to the question of knowledge production and the constitution of social (in this case urban) orders.

The concept of a situated-portable epistemic nexus serves to avoid the conventional linking between certain knowledges and certain actors. It opens up for an analysis of peacebuilding knowledge production as it unfolds across scales as well as across situated/portable materialities and discourses, without suggesting an absence of epistemic hierarchies. Indeed, I further argue in this article that epistemic authority in urban peacebuilding is conditioned upon transnationally emergent and portable discourses, technologies and artefacts that in and through an urban situatedness can claim to draw on and address local perspectives and needs, although this unfolds in a relatively narrow manner. In this way, these discourses, technologies and artefacts condition their own continuous global portability and the peacebuilding authority of a certain type – a visually focused – of urban knowledge. This further means that neither the situated nor the portable component of the urban peacebuilding epistemic nexus is distinct and preformed. The situated and the globally portable in urban peacebuilding knowledge production constitute and make each other possible – with any resulting epistemic hierarchies being necessarily temporary and malleable by multiple forces.

After a discussion of why a co-productionist theoretical framework offers suitable tools with which to explore the proposed situated-portable epistemic nexus, I illustrate the article’s argument empirically by reconstructing the main features of an urban peacebuilding project in postwar Pristina. The 1998–99 Kosovo conflict brought about large-scale urban destruction (Garstka, 2010, p. 86). Mundane urban sites such as apartment blocks, cafés and public squares as well as historic and cultural artefacts were targeted by (para-)military violence, and either completely destroyed or disfigured (Herscher & Riedlmayer, 2000, p. 109; Todorovski et al., 2016, p. 320).

UN-Habitat, the United Nations programme for human settlements and urban development, has played a major role in Kosovo’s urban peacebuilding and reconstruction process, alongside national governmental agencies, municipalities and other actors.² Some of the early initiatives included the 2000 establishment of the Kosovo Cadastre Agency and the Kosovo Cadastral Support Programme, followed by other UN-Habitat programmes (Todorovski et al., 2016, pp. 323–325). Since 2002, UN-Habitat in Kosovo has focused on institutional strengthening and ‘capacity-building’ (Boussauw, 2012).³ The notion of inclusive urban peacebuilding, planning and reconstruction has been key (D’hondt, 2008, p. 9). Indeed, UN-Habitat has long stressed, in Kosovo and elsewhere, the incorporation of ‘the voices of local community members about the vision they have for their community via inclusive, participatory, and multi-disciplinary approaches to planning’ (Garstka, 2010, p. 92).

In line with this emphasis, UN-Habitat started in 2012 to use the computer game Minecraft, mainly for urban planning projects, but also – as in Pristina – for urban peacebuilding (UN-Habitat & Block by Block, 2021, p. 7). In 2015, this work was further institutionalized with the establishment of the Block by Block Foundation, which is a collaboration between Mojang Studios (the creator of Minecraft), Microsoft and UN-Habitat. The Block by Block Foundation’s use of Minecraft in urban peacebuilding as well as in planning has since gained a global outreach (Andrade et al., 2020). Particularly following the Habitat III conference in 2016, the work has spread to over 30 countries (Block by Block, 2022b).⁴

In 2017, Kosovo’s first skatepark and a broader recreational area were inaugurated, constructed at the site of a former green market in the Sunny Hill residential neighbourhood in Pristina. Led by the Block by Block Foundation, the Pristina project used Minecraft as a tool with which to make known, (re)imagine and (re)design the urban site. Moreover, the project can be understood as an assemblage made up of a heterogeneity of actors – peacebuilders, urban planners and architects, municipal and city representatives, and members from the public – as well as various material and discursive elements. Further, despite being situated in the urban environment of Pristina with its particular socio-material conditions, the project and its Minecraft technology engaged various transnationally emergent, arranged, and portable discourses and material artefacts.

Through a co-productionist lens, I find that the simultaneously situated and globally portable discourses, technologies and artefacts of the Pristina project conditioned the production of an urban knowledge and space that formed around a visual conception of the urban environment. Throughout such production, the project could discursively claim to be driven by local perspectives and needs, and contribute to peace and inter-ethnic dialogue. At the same time, the project’s production of knowledge and space was conditioned by a technology and related epistemology that hid from view alternative, grounded, historically wired, and affective knowledges and urban forms that could more broadly have constituted the urban. The project’s discursive primacy to the urban local and situated was thus at the same time conditioned by the project’s materialities and visual epistemology. This reduced the urban local and situated to different viewpoints, and obscured its broader historical and material contexts and their various knowledges. Nevertheless, the way in which the Pristina project was discursively claimed as informed by local perspectives and needs helped further the global portability and circulation of the epistemology, materialities, and discourses that in Pristina conditioned the production of a certain type of urban knowledge and space in the first place.

By making this argument, the article pushes the literature on urban peacebuilding toward a greater attention to the epistemic significance of situatedness, in terms of the co-production of the urban and knowledge of the urban. Still, the article does this in a way that departs from the in peacebuilding scholarship conventional (but increasingly questioned) view of a unidirectional transfer of knowledge – from the ‘global’ to the ‘local’, or vice versa (Danielsson, 2020a; Lopez Lucia & Martin de Almagro, forthcoming; Martin de Almagro, 2021; Moe & Müller, 2018). By unpacking the epistemic nexus of an urban peacebuilding occurrence, the article explores how a project that involved a heterogeneous set of actors and was clearly informed by local perspectives was nevertheless conditioned by a globally circulating epistemology that narrowed what kind of urban knowledge and space could be produced, and that further conditioned the portability of this epistemics. By thus reconstructing a seemingly modest, perhaps unremarkable, urban project, the article demonstrates the co-dependence not only of urban knowledge, socio-material conditions and space, but also of the situated and the portable, the ‘local’ and the ‘transnational’ in urban peacebuilding.

2. TOWARD THE SITUATED-PORTABLE CO-PRODUCTION OF URBAN KNOWLEDGE AND SPACE

Inspired by scholarship on ‘co-production’, this section advances the theoretical infrastructure that grounds the analysis. As I detail in the first section, the merit of a co-productionist framework is that it offers the article an idiom for how to analyse the relationship between knowledge production and society. A co-productionist lens questions the idea of knowledge production as detached from the materialities and discourses of society and, accordingly, the idea of a human–non-human divide. The second section specifies these qualities in relation to how technologies and discourses co-produce urban knowledge and space, from both situated and globally portable positionalities.

2.1. The co-production of knowledge and reality, science and social order

The concept of ‘co-production’ – better understood as a generative idiom rather than a theory (Jasanoff, 2004, pp. 15, 38) – is perhaps as most closely related to the work of Jasanoff (2004, 2010) and the field of science and technology studies. Jasanoff advances co-production as a way to conceptualize how ‘the realities of human experience emerge as the joint achievements of scientific, technical and social enterprise: science and society, in a word, are co-produced, each underwriting the other’s existence’ (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 17, original emphasis). In and through entanglements, knowledge and society, society and knowledge take form through each other. Knowledge, in other words, is a product of and (co-)constituted by society in terms of material objects, tools, technologies that are intertwined with discursive structures and meanings. Likewise, societies and social orders are (co-)constituted by knowledge in the sense, for instance, of being emergent, established, legitimated and/or transformed (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 2; 2010, p. 236).

Both before and following Jasanoff’s intervention, studies of the material-discursive co-production of knowledge and (social) reality have taken many forms. Some works have focused on the intertwining of the material and the social in the emergence of new phenomena including meanings, knowledges, facts, objects and subjects (e.g., Latour, 1993; Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Pickering, 1995). Other works have focused on the production and travel of knowledge, on knowledge controversies, and on struggles over what (and whom) is to be considered expertise (and experts) (e.g., Danielsson, 2020a; Latour, 1987; Shapin, 1994; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). Central to most accounts are questions of knowledge and (constitutive) power. Traditionally, scientifically/academically produced knowledge has been in focus (e.g., Daston & Galison, 2007; Jasanoff, 2010; Latour, 1987; Nowotny et al., 2001; Pickering, 1995). In this article, however, a co-productionist thinking is used in relation to urban peacebuilding epistemics – that is, the co-productive process of producing urban knowledge and space that involves actors beyond the scientific and academic spheres (cf. Nowotny, 2000).

Co-productionist scholarship, moreover, goes beyond a purely linguistic constructivist focus. By targeting the interplay between discourses and materialities in the production of knowledge and society, co-productionist accounts exceed the purely humanly interpretational and representational. In different ways, co-productionist scholarship acknowledges the ‘agentic capacity’ of materiality (Coole, 2013, p. 457). The idea is to pay equal attention to the discursive and the material in a way that avoids any determinism of either (Jasanoff, 2004, pp. 6, 19). Exactly what this means remains disputed. For some scholars, materiality may display an agency independently of humans; a ‘thing-power’ which means that inanimate objects can act and produce effects in and on the world (Bennett, 2004, p. 351). For others, there is a risk that such approach swings the pendulum too far and ends up being ‘anti-human’ (Thien, 2005), or at least (and paradoxically) reproduces the divide between the human and the nonhuman which co-productionist accounts strive to overcome (cf. Lundborg & Vaughan-Williams, 2015).

In this article, I follow Anna Leander and conceive of material agency as ‘performative effects’ that go beyond an absolute and purely human control. Various kinds of materialities, such as objects, tools, and technologies, may from this perspective enable, condition, ‘authorize, make possible, encourage, make available’ certain ways of knowing and certain knowledges (Leander, 2013, p. 815). Material objects, tools, and technologies – necessarily together with discursive structures (Coole, 2013, p. 454) – are thus co-producers of knowledge and society, while also being of society. As the next section details, technologies, for example, ‘generate classifications, ways of seeing and ways of presenting. They are at the origin of (re)interpretations and representations of things’ (Leander, 2013, p. 815). What this further means – and significant for this article – is that materialities and aligned discourses may also prevent certain ways of knowing and certain knowledges. Here, then, material agency is both constitutive of and constituted by human agency. The human and the nonhuman are co-constituted and jointly productive of knowledge in a simultaneous rather than sequential or hierarchical relationship (Leander & Aalberts, 2013, p. 787). The following section explores this idea further in relation to technology.

2.2. The agentic capacity of technology

From a co-productionist perspective, technologies such as the computer game Minecraft carries an agentic capacity and a potential (always in conjunction with discourses) to co-constitute knowledge and reality (Lindskov Jacobsen & Monsees, 2019, p. 24). Technologies can in this sense have effects that go beyond an absolute human control and that condition and make possible, or hinder, the production of certain knowledges and certain realities. An example illustrates this reasoning. Rothe (2017, p. 339, original emphasis) explores the ‘co-evolution between the emergence of a global visual assemblage of satellite remote sensing and the emerging discourse on environmental security in the 1980s and 1990s’. For Rothe, co-evolution refers to how visual technologies and environmental security discourses jointly produce multiple realities of environmental risks. There is in this production no ‘divide between the technological, the discursive, and the visual’ as they co-produce ‘environmental security in multiple ways’ (pp. 349–350).

This article targets the co-production of urban knowledge and urban space as it unfolded in a peacebuilding project that deployed Minecraft as its main technology. For the analysis, the article adheres to a proposal by Katja Lindskov Jacobsen and Linda Monsees as way to guide and structure the analysis. Lindskov Jacobsen and Monsees suggest an analysis of two interlinked processes: ‘the production by technology’ and ‘the social production of technology’ (Lindskov Jacobsen & Monsees, 2019, p. 26, original emphases). In the forthcoming analysis of the Pristina project, the production by technology refers to the constitutive and ‘beyond the purely human’ functions of Minecraft and other material objects, tools, and instruments in making certain things visible, possible, and desirable. The production of technology, moreover, refers to how a technology or material artefact is made sense of, de/legitimized, and considered, for example, ‘objective’, ‘safe’, ‘reliable’, ‘efficient’, or ‘inaccurate’ in and through particular discursive framings (p. 27). Key is thus which discourses surrounded the use of Minecraft in the Pristina project, and the ways in which they co-constructed this particular technology and its material artefacts. In sum, the analysis uses the analytical divide proposed by Jacobsen and Monsees to explore the simultaneously situated and portable materialities and discourses that co-produced urban knowledge and space in the Pristina urban peacebuilding project.

3. RECONSTRUCTING AN URBAN PEACE AND RECONSTRUCTION PROJECT

In 2017, a former green market site located in the neighbourhood Sunny Hill in Pristina was transformed into a ‘well-planned and enjoyable public space for Prishtina citizens’ that included Kosovo’s first skatepark (UN-Habitat, 2016). The UN-Habitat and Pristina municipality jointly initiated the project, as part of the postwar urban reconstruction work led by UN-Habitat in Kosovo since 1999. The Pristina urban peacebuilding project engaged a heterogeneous set of actors, cutting across any straightforward ‘local/international’ divide. Alongside municipal and city representatives and urban peacebuilders from the Kosovo branch of UN-Habitat, there were people working for the Block by Block Foundation, Minecraft engineers, as well as stakeholders and citizens from the Pristina urban community. The project also engaged various objects, tools, and technologies as well as discourses around these materialities – particularly concerning Minecraft as a peacebuilding technology.

The following analysis enquiries into the situated-portable epistemic nexus that constituted the Pristina urban peacebuilding project. In line with the analytical distinction proposed above between the ‘production by technology’ and the ‘production of technology’, the analysis is divided into two main, largely descriptive, sections and a final, synthesizing and more analytical one. In the first section, I trace and describe the evolution of the Pristina project with a focus on the production by urban materialities and technologies, particularly Minecraft. The second section targets the main features of the discursive dimension of the co-productive process, with a particular focus on the production and legitimation of Minecraft as a peacebuilding tool with which to enhance inclusivity and promote local knowledge. The third and final section analyses how the situated and simultaneously globally enframed and portable materialities and discourses of the Pristina project co-produced a certain urban knowledge and space, the former forming around a visual conception of the urban. Given the project’s situatedness in the urbanity of Pristina, claims about local ownership and inclusion local perspectives and needs could legitimately be made. At the same time, the project’s production of knowledge and space was from the start thus conditioned by a technology and related epistemology that obscured alternative, non-visually focused epistemic modes from which to make known and (re)construct the urban. This, in turn, helped secure the further global portability of the project’s key epistemic elements.

For the analysis, I rely on three main types of secondary sources. First, I use reports and other documentary sources published by UN-Habitat and the Block by Block Foundation that are both on their general work in Kosovo (and elsewhere) – with a focus on Minecraft – and on the specific Pristina project. Second, I use a documentary on the Pristina project shot and published by UN-Habitat. The documentary is particularly telling for what it displays and represents as meaningful about the project and how this is done, that is, as one entry into the situated discursive frames that conditioned the project and its use of Minecraft. Third, the analysis draws on secondary works on wartime urban destruction and postwar urban development in Kosovo. It is also informed by studies of Minecraft as a tool for urban planning and development. Finally, and although no primary material has informed the analysis, the article springs from my own long-time research engagement with Kosovo and its post-/conflict dynamics. Given that the article pursues a theoretical argument – contributing to the literature on interventionary knowledge production and urban peacebuilding – the secondary material is considered enough to illustrate and exemplify the theoretical reasoning.

3.1. The materialities of the Pristina project

This section describes some of the main features of the Pristina project from the perspective of the production by situated-portable material objects, tools and technologies. The initial steps of the project involved the selection of ‘the site to be redeveloped’ and the production of adequate knowledge of that site. These steps in turn enabled the creation of a ‘Minecraft world’, that is, a ‘Minecraft model of the existing site’ (Block by Block, 2022c). In this type of project, the selected urban site may be a public space in need of an upgrade or a vacant site in the city (UN-Habitat & Block by Block, 2021). In Pristina, the selection of an existing but claimed abandoned former green market in a residential neighbourhood was made by UN-Habitat and the Block by Block Foundation, in collaboration with the Municipality of Pristina.

Next, the selected site was to be discerned and made known through an extensive ‘data gathering’ (UN-Habitat & Block by Block, 2021, p. 27). In Pristina, various objects, tools, and instruments conditioned the production of knowledge of the chosen site, including cameras, computers, images, photographs, city plans, maps and web mapping platforms such as Google maps that provided access to satellite images, aerial photographs and street maps (Block by Block, 2022c). Already in this first step, then, the project’s knowledge production was not only driven by human faculties and interpretation but co-constituted by different materialities – with the aim of producing a type of knowledge that would make a Minecraft model or ‘world’ possible (UN-Habitat & Block by Block, 2021, p. 60). Moreover, the people tasked with constructing the Minecraft world – the ‘builder team’ – did this at a distance from the physical urban space (p. 60). As further discussed below, distance contributed to how only a certain type of urban knowledge was not only required but also could be produced.

The next steps led to the work of reconstructing the urban in the Minecraft world. For this, recruitment of people from the local urban community was required. The project had as a goal to select a mix of people, particularly youth and women. Initial training workshops were then given to educate the participants in the Minecraft game, alongside workshops that ‘brief[ed] participants on public space basics and general design considerations for the selected space’. Participants also had a chance to physically visit the urban site. Some further training in Minecraft was then provided, before the participants were divided into smaller groups of two to four people. Each group then began their work in the Minecraft world (Block by Block, 2022c).

Minecraft is a pixelated ‘sandbox video game’ that, as argued, provides players with a great degree of freedom as they set out to combine 3D blocks and build cities and urban environments. The blocks function as representations of buildings, streets, public spaces, parks, or pavements. Minecraft is also said to provide a ‘reality-immersed’ experience, as the immersion of players in a 3D virtual reality is claimed to increase the players’ spatial understanding (Andrade et al., 2020, p. 4). There are, moreover, different modes in which to play the game. In Pristina, as in other urban peace and reconstruction projects, the game unfolded in the ‘creative mode’. This mode is said to ‘enabl[e] gamers to easily create buildings similar to those produced by complex 3D modelling software, with the additional benefit of being able to collaborate through the multiplayer setting. As a result, the building process is more similar to real-life construction projects with multiple workers carrying out different roles simultaneously, than traditional digital 3D model-making tools with only one designer’ (UN-Habitat, 2015, pp. 3–4). In the Pristina project, the respective groups could use around 500 differently coloured blocks that represented different artefacts and materials (such as grass, wood, and concrete) to rethink, redesign, and rebuild the former green market. As the work in the Minecraft world begun, however, there was no opportunity for the participants to question the rules of the game – the Minecraft ‘game mechanics’ – and this despite their alleged freedom and creativity. There was, in other words, a certain irony in how the narrative of Minecraft concerns how players are invited to ‘exercise their mastery over nature’, while they at the same time are trapped by the nature of the game (Dooghan, 2019, p. 68).

Furthermore, the Minecraft game mechanics involve certain epistemic conditions that shape what type of knowledge and space can be produced. As mentioned, the Minecraft world is constructed in 3D graphics. As such, it relies on scientific developments in geometry and mathematics (including linear algebra) to represent space (Peddie, 2013). As will be further discussed below, in the Pristina project this conditioned 3D-shaped visual representations of the site in Sunny Hill. These representations, in turn, provided varied and claimed objective conceptions of the physical urban site, yet in a way that was dehistoricized, deaffectivized and narrow in relation to what the urban was and could have been. As the project unfolded, and apart from the initial visit to the physical site, the Minecraft world with its 3D and visually conditioned representations became the dominant precondition for how the participants experienced and made the urban site known. Put differently, Minecraft and its mediation in and through computer screens flattened the urban site into its visual representation and turned it into a predominantly visual phenomenon. The final section of the analysis details the further epistemic implications of this.

3.2. The discourses of the Pristina project

In this section, I map and describe the main discursive features of the Pristina project’s co-productive process that brought about a particular urban knowledge and space. The section focuses specifically on the discursive production of Minecraft as peacebuilding technology, and how this connects to broader peacebuilding discourses on ‘inclusion’, ‘local knowledge’ and ‘local ownership’. The production by discourses in the Pristina project was thus both a situated affair that concerned the specific project’s framings and legitimations, not least in relation to Minecraft, and a broader affair in and through globally circulating peacebuilding and planning discourses.

As mentioned, an initial step in the Pristina project was the selection of the urban space to be reconstructed. In Pristina, the UN-Habitat, Block by Block and Municipality of Pristina chosen site was discursively portrayed as an ‘abandoned place’ that was ‘very cold and unsafe’ (UN-Habitat, 2016). These types of descriptions of selected sites are generally common in Block by Block projects. Indeed, UN-Habitat and the Block by Block Foundation consider it an advantage if the site is ‘challenging’ and characterized by ‘issues like safety, accessibility, under-us[e], social segregation’, as this is understood to enhance the societal impact of the project (UN-Habitat & Block by Block, 2021, p. 25).

Next followed, as also mentioned, the initial knowledge production of the selected site. This was considered an objective, reality-near process of data and information gathering. The task was to ‘collect relevant information about the site’ in order to construct a world in Minecraft that ‘closely resembles the reality of the site’ (p. 60). Suitable pictures and images of the site, preferably in landscape format, were seen as crucial: ‘collecting pictures will be the best resource you can provide to the builders. The more pictures you submit, the better understanding the builder team will have of the public space’ (p. 60).

Furthermore, the recruitment of participants from the local urban community was framed in a certain way. The use of Minecraft as a ‘participatory tool’ was portrayed as a way to create ‘socially inclusive, integrated, connected, environmentally sustainable and safe streets and public spaces’ (p. 13). From this followed a need to recruit people that would also demonstrate the project to be socially broad and inclusive. In Pristina, the selection of participants focused particularly on youth, children, and women. As the project unfolded, the ideas and work of children were showcased (UN-Habitat, 2016). In addition, the situated discursive production of the project represented it as bridging inter-ethnic tensions between Pristina’s Albanian, Serbian and Roma communities (Block by Block, 2022a).

In the Pristina project, the Minecraft technology was discursively produced as enabling and promoting inclusivity, local knowledge, and local needs. It was also framed as a tool that would remake the people involved (UN-Habitat, 2015, p. 17). Indeed, generally in the discursive production of Minecraft as a tool for urban peacebuilding and reconstruction, it is often more about what the technology does for and to the people involved, than about what it does for and to urban spaces:

The game increases youth’s interest in urban design and planning, enables them to express themselves in a visual way, provides new ways to influence the policy agenda and helps youth develop skills and network with other people from the community. The deliberative process also encourages youth to develop a broader understanding of the urban environment, speak in public with greater confidence and improve social relations. (p. 4)

Specifically, Minecraft was discursively produced as a ‘participatory tool’ (UN-Habitat & Block by Block, 2021, p. 10) and a ‘community participation tool’ (UN-Habitat, 2015, p. 1) that in the Pristina project offered a ‘powerful way to include non-traditionally stakeholders in decision-making processes’ (p. 17). The technology – being ‘very easy to learn’ (UN-Habitat & Block by Block, 2021, p. 10) – was framed as enabling ‘people who are not trained in spatial thinking, reading maps or drawing’ to participate and have a say (p. 9). Indeed, a documentary of the Pristina project that was produced by the Kosovo branch of UN-Habitat described Minecraft as unlocking the ‘authentic creativity’ of ordinary people and as being an example of ‘direct local democracy’ (UN-Habitat, 2016).

The situated discursive production of Minecraft during the Pristina project was furthermore linked to globally circulating peacebuilding and urban planning discourses. In the 1980s and 1990s, urban planning discourses increasingly shifted toward the participatory, the local/community-based, and the cooperative (Allmendinger & Tewdwr-Jones, 2002). Within postwar urban planning, this has meant a shift from the purely physical (and aesthetic) rebuilding of urban fabrics toward a ‘rebuilding’ of the urban community and the people as such. This underlying idea was clearly visible throughout the Pristina project. As Garstka (2010, p. 87) summarizes the goal of postwar urban peacebuilding and planning in Kosovo: ‘the aim is to physically rebuild a more sustainable post-conflict city by making the planning process a tool for peacemaking and rebuilding a sustainable society’, whereby ‘the public becomes the expert on the situation via a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘action-oriented’ approaches’. The Pristina project can be described as a localized example of how the claimed expert in urban peacebuilding and reconstruction has shifted from the architect, the peacebuilder, and the urban planner to the ordinary citizen (and in the Pristina project even the youth and the child).

The Pristina project’s discursive framing of how Minecraft as an urban peacebuilding technology enabled inclusion, local knowledge, and local ownership also drew on as well as furthered broader peacebuilding discourses about ‘the local’ and epistemic and social ‘inclusivity’ that began to circulate in the 1990s (e.g., Does, 2013; Donais & McCandless, 2017; Mac Ginty, 2015; Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015). In relation to urban peacebuilding, specifically, there has been an at least decade-long critique of the lack of local ownership and inclusion of local knowledge (Büscher & Vlassenroot, 2010; Esser, 2013). Minecraft as urban peacebuilding technology is claimed to counter such failures through its inclusion of actors and (assumedly) knowledge that have not conventionally been part of urban peacebuilding initiatives (UN-Habitat, 2015, p. 17). In sum, all of the aforementioned varied yet interconnected discursive framings made possible an overarching discursive production of Minecraft as a suitable peacebuilding technology that would form around inclusivity, local knowledge, and that would contribute to the ‘building [of] peace in Kosovo’ through its enabling of inter-ethnic dialogue among the citizens of Pristina (Block by Block, 2022a).

3.3. The situated-portable co-production of urban knowledge and space

As each working group finished their work in the Minecraft world, the different proposals for how to reconstruct and redesign the site were debated among an audience of urban planners, architects, and representatives from the municipality. A final proposal was agreed upon, and in 2017, a skatepark and a broader recreational area were constructed at the site. As previously described, this particular production of urban space was conditioned upon the production of a particular type of urban knowledge. This knowledge was partly produced by situated and globally portable discursive elements. For example, the key technology of Minecraft was discursively portrayed as a neutral tool well suited to create peacebuilding inclusivity, inter-ethnic dialogue, and to ensure that local knowledge informed the project. The urban knowledge and resulting space were also produced by objects, tools, technologies, and instruments such as cameras, computers, photographs, satellite images, city plans, maps, and aerial photographs. These material elements exerted an agentic capacity by making the physical site in Pristina available, discernible, representable, and possible to make ‘known’ in the first place – in and through vision as dominant human faculty. Moreover, the centrality of Minecraft for the reconstruction and redesigning of the urban site meant that the project participants continued to rely on their visual faculties to experience, make known, reimagine, and reconstruct the urban – that is, the game mechanics of Minecraft had epistemic effects that went beyond a strict human control.

Looking at this more closely, Minecraft as peacebuilding technology together with the other material and discursive elements of the Pristina project meant that the knowledge produced was a knowledge generated mainly from at a distance from the physical urban site. It was an urban knowledge of a representational type, informed by an epistemology of vision. A representational knowledge (cf. Danielsson, 2022) seeks to make known that which is not immediately at hand (Pels, 2000, p. 1), and this without questioning the relationship between that which is represented and its representation (Bleiker, 2001, p. 512). Indeed, the material elements of the Pristina project were visually focused technologies and artefacts. Such elements are conventionally assumed to generate a knowledge that is objective, correspondent to external reality, and as such authoritative (Bleiker, 2001, p. 513; Dodge & Perkins, 2009, p. 498; Jay, 1988, p. 3; Rothe, 2017, p. 336). The discursive framing of the Pristina project helped cement the belief in the objective nature of this type of urban knowledge.

Jointly, the at once situated and portable material and discursive elements of the project thus conditioned the production of a particular type of urban knowledge, while at the same time preventing other types of knowledge from being produced. The project’s epistemic inclusivity was thus quietly conditioned. The produced representational urban knowledge depended on a mode of knowing centred on visuality over other human–technological faculties in and through which an urban space may be experienced and made known (for instance hearing/sound). It was also a static knowledge. By denying the urban’s constant emergence in and through grounded and more fully embodied practices, a representational urban knowledge tends to dehistoricize and deaffectivize the urban environment (cf. Dodge & Perkins, 2009; Turnbull, 2007). The Pristina project was hence characterized by a narrow way of knowing the urban. Indeed, Shannon Mattern argues that urban epistemologies and urban knowledges are necessarily plural. Urban knowledges that involve urban fabrics are often deeply historical, and cannot be reduced to ‘data’ or ‘information’ that can be processed, represented, and made portable via computer cables and screens (Mattern, 2021, pp. 4, 12, 68). Even if one could object and say that the very participation of Pristina citizens in the project meant that they imbued the project with urban emotions and memories, this would still be linked to specific individuals rather than to the urban space as such in its various epistemic dimensions.

While thus clearly situated in a particular urban context and driven by local needs, perspectives, and viewpoints, the Pristina project was epistemically shaped predominantly by globally portable discourses, technologies, and artefacts, which through an underlying epistemology of vision set certain boundaries for what type of urban knowledge and space the project could produce. Put differently, the urban local and situated were reduced to different viewpoints as held by a diverse set of people, rather than made to encompass an understanding of the broader historical, material, embodied, and sensory contexts of the urban space in question, and the knowledges carried by them. It is telling, for example, that the documentary about the project produced by the Kosovo branch of UN-Habitat does not mention neither the conflicted history of urban planning and reconstruction in Pristina, nor the relatively recent 1999 Kosovo war. The point, then, is not to say that the Pristina project obscured local knowledges and perspectives in favour of globally set ones, or that the local urban community did not appreciate the outcome of the project.⁵ The point is rather that the project’s privileging of the urban situated and local at the same time involved – due to the conditioning effects of globally portable discourses, technologies, and material artefacts – a narrowing and limitation of what this could entail.

In this way, the epistemics and power relations of the Pristina project were tilted toward global forms. It would however be too easy to frame this as a case of unidirectional global dominance. Again, the project unfolded in and through – and depended upon – a primacy given to local perspectives and viewpoints, and a situated enactment in the local urban context. The Pristina project is thus better understood as a case of how the, at the same time, urbanely situated and globally portable discourses, technologies, and artefacts constituted and made each other possible. Indeed, the manner in which the Pristina project was discursively framed as locally driven, inclusive, and informed by local perspectives and needs (e.g., inter-ethnic dialogue and reconciliation) likely help further the global portability of the materialities and discourses that made this project possible in the first place. At the same time, the epistemic dominance was tilted toward the globally portable. This in terms of how the material and discursive portable elements of the project worked – in the particular situated circumstances – to shape both how the people participating in the project were to act and focus on, and how and what urban knowledge and space could be produced (and which could not). The unquestioned confines of the project narrowed what the urban situated and relevant type of urban knowledge could be. Compared to previous modes of urban peacebuilding – which, as mentioned, have faced criticisms for neglecting the significance of local knowledge and local ownership of the process – one could say that projects such as the one in Pristina represent a step forward.⁶ While this may be, it is the contention of this article that this type of urban peacebuilding project risks claiming the primacy of the situated and the local, when, in fact, what this entails ends up being quietly narrowed, and with a plurality of epistemologies and knowledges remaining marginalized.

4. CONCLUSIONS

By taking its cue from a shortcoming in the urban peacebuilding literature, this article has pursued a theoretical argument about the significance of situated-portable epistemic nexuses of urban peacebuilding. It illustrated the argument by means of exploring key material and discursive elements and dynamics of an urban peacebuilding project that unfolded in Pristina, Kosovo, in 2015–17. As shown, this was a heterogeneous project that involved a blend of actors and that was claimed driven by situated local needs, perspectives, and viewpoints. At the same time, globally portable discourses, technologies, and artefacts that involved an epistemology of vision tacitly conditioned the Pristina project. The underlying epistemology set the boundaries for what type of urban knowledge and space the project could produce, at the expense of alternative forms.

The article’s argument about a situated-portable epistemic nexus generates several insights when it comes to postwar urban peacebuilding. First, no matter how diverse an urban peacebuilding project may be in terms of actors, and no matter the importance granted to the urban local community, its viewpoints, and needs, a project’s materialities and discourses may entail certain epistemic conditions that favour the globally portable and that narrow what the urban is and may be(come). The centrality of local actors, knowledges, and viewpoints during the Pristina project simultaneously implied an unboundedness from the broader historical, material, embodied and sensory contexts of the former green market, and the urban knowledges carried by these diverse contexts. Second, this is not to suggest an easy epistemic dominance of global forms, a unidirectional transfer of knowledge, or a co-optation of local knowledge. As the Pristina project shows, any epistemic hierarchy that favours the global is necessarily constituted by enactments in particular urban contexts. It may, as mentioned, even unfold in and through the significance granted to local perspectives. Third, the Pristina project helped strengthen – in a self-reinforcing but by no means automatic loop – the global circulation of the materialities and discourses that made the project and its particular type of urban knowledge and space possible in the first place. Via other urban, locally owned, and situated peacebuilding projects that rely on the Minecraft technology and related tools and discourses, a further marginalization of a plurality of modes of knowing the urban may be achieved. That said, further research on situated-portable epistemic nexuses of urban peacebuilding would benefit from explorations of how a global portability is conditioned as well as potentially transformed in and through a particular project’s emplacement in a certain urban environment.

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.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the svenska forskningsrådet Formas för hållbar utveckling (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) [grant number 2019-01361].

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, 2012; Todorovski et al., 2016).

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, 2014). MuSPP was to support the spatial planning capacity in Kosovo municipalities, with a particular focus on urban reconstruction, development and multi-ethnic reconciliation (Garstka, 2010, 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, 2022).

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.