Urban Transcripts (Nov 2020)
A counter-project about land regeneration and land use in Larnaca, Cyprus; or, an everyday little utopia
Abstract
…Cornelius then takes the lead. “Yes! The garden is temporal, as well as other structures you see around you. The ‘Reverse Memorial’ will remain, even after the complex is handed over to its Turkish Cypriot owners after the island’s reunification”…’. The main body of this article is an imaginary story, a narrative. It is part of a counter-project, a design competition proposal that takes a critical stance on contested issues surrounding land regeneration and land use in Larnaca, Cyprus. It addresses the collective denials of the Greek Cypriot community in Cyprus, while also highlighting those of the Turkish Cypriot community. For these collective denials the questions such as ‘Who owns the land? Who can develop it? Under what rules, for what purpose, and to whose benefit?’ are relevant. These questions have been at the heart of the Cypriot conflict during the last half century. The architectural competition under discussion concerns the regeneration of a mostly Turkish Cypriot owned complex called Zouchouri. The aforementioned questions come into play because of Larnaca Municipality’s initiative to launch the competition amid the unresolved conflict and in the absence of the property owners. I argue that the Zouchouri design competition proposal is part of the counter-project culture in architecture, as it critically addresses the aforementioned questions with the help of an imaginary narrative. Architecture as counter-project in Cyprus can advocate new imaginaries of a shared material world and show how to reconcile by design.
