Marginalised Mahala: The Heritage of City Islands Contesting Capitalist Urbanism

Abstract

The mahala refers to the Islamic residential quarter in the Ottoman conceptualisation of Sarajevo. Each consisting of some forty houses with adjacent yards grouped around a mosque, mahale (pl.) originally constituted independent and self-administered neighbourhoods, which made up the residential parts of the traditional town. But since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, the mahale lost their hegemonic status as an urban apparatus and were overthrown by the 20th century’s capitalist urbanisation. Though today the type, as a century-old heritage, becomes more obscure and obsolete, its structures still exist mostly unaltered in the city’s fabric. The paper discusses the mahale by historically elaborating their significance as independent neighbourhood units and links them to the metaphor of islands composing a city archipelago, which contrasts today’s hegemonic sea of capitalist dominance. In investigating current unforeseen emergences of the mahala idea, particularly in a Roma settlement in Sarajevo, the analysis then reveals a possible reimagination of the type as a bottom-up tool to empower marginalised local groups. This is used to re-evaluate the idea of heritage by extending its meaning beyond the material preservation of the mahala towards its unvoiced realms: the socio-political concepts of collective care, local independence, and group empowerment.