The Fracture and Destruction of the Memory of a City and a New Hope: Famagusta Ecocity Project

Abstract

This presentation will address the competing narratives and memories through which current and former residents of Famagusta create their attachment to place. Using the author’s experiences of growing up in a house that looked onto the ghost town of Varosha, the presentation will discuss the often contradictory ways in which Famagusta has been and is today created as a place by displaced Greek Cypriots and the heterogeneous current residents of the city. Today Famagusta is inhabited by original Turkish Cypriots residents, displaced Turkish Cypriots (such as the author’s grandparents) who live in abandoned Greek Cypriot houses, immigrants from Turkey, and a large, multicultural student population. While displaced Greek Cypriots may long for homes in Varosha, a closed town under military occupation, displaced Turkish Cypriots living in Greek Cypriot houses have fears for the future, afraid of being displaced again. Moreover, Famagusta has a different meaning to a third-generation Greek Cypriot refugee or a twenty-year-old Turkish Cypriot resident of the city than it has for their grandparents.

The presentation will explore the ways in which the present of the city is lost between ; and fears for the future, as well as how different attachments to place represent what in social planning is today called a ‘wicked problem,’ i.e., a set of incompletely known or contradictory issues that are difficult to resolve through planning. The paper presents these conflicting attachments to the city as a problem that needs to be resolved through dialogue in the context of an opening and gives the Famagusta Ecocity Project as an example of the sort of dialogue that may allow us to create a new and empathetic language for discussing the future of the city.