Re-Imagining the Cyprus Buffer Zone

In 1964 inter-communal violence between Cyprus's two largest ethnic groups, Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots, led to the creation of a UN-administered Buffer Zone between the two communities.

After further military hostilities in 1974, the UN peacekeeping mission, known as UNFICYP, was significantly reinforced and the Buffer Zone extended across the entire width of the island. Cyprus was split into two.

Vast swathes of the island were captured within the Buffer Zone.

Few places represent the hopes that were shattered by the "Cyprus problem" more profoundly than the Nicosia International Airport.

This spectacular terminal building was inaugurated in 1968. Six years later (in July 1974) it was the site of some of the fiercest battles between Cypriot forces and the Turkish military.

It would never reopen.

The terminal was the latest in European Modernist architecture. Large windows and sky-lights flooded the lounges with natural light.

For many Cypriots, the building was a gateway from Cyprus to the world.

Today, the now-decaying airport remains trapped inside the fortified confines of the Buffer Zone under the jurisdiction of the UN.

In 2003, the UN opened a crossing point through the Buffer Zone to allow ordinary Cypriots to visit the entire island for the first time since 1974.

For many, fear and suspicion persist and for most Cypriots the Buffer Zone remains an inaccessible and intimidating no-man's land.

In 2015, the No Man's Land project teamed up with the Cyprus Friendship Programme, a bi-communal initiative for youth peace-building.

A group of young Cypriots was given a rare challenge: to re-imagine the Cyprus Buffer Zone not just as a place of conflict, but as a potential space for future dialogue and reconciliation.

This wasn't easy. Most of the participants had never entered the Buffer Zone.

The UN, which still administers the Buffer Zone, arranged a special visit – opening up this space to those who live only a short distance away but who had never set foot inside before.

Although parts of the Buffer Zone are cultivated and other parts have been re-purposed for economic development, much of the Buffer Zone is abandoned, ruined and overgrown - the UN having neither the mandate nor the budget to maintain the crumbling infrastructure.

The iconic airport and the crumbling remains of Ermou Street - the dividing line within the old city of Nicosia - have become iconic of the Cyprus "dead zone".

Can this change?

During a week-long workshop, the group surveyed sites within and around the Green Line (the name given to the Buffer Zone within the old city of Nicosia), collected archival material, and developed a set of new designs that reimagined the future of the Buffer Zone.

The workshop presented a diverse and exciting set of visions for the future of the UN Buffer Zone.

Some groups envisioned new parks, play areas and cultural institutions – spaces and places designed to reoccupy a part of the city that has been largely empty for 40 years.

Others thought about uses of colour in the built fabric of the city, the adoption of multi-communal street names, and the acknowledgement of past divisions in order to create a more sustainable peace in the future.

For too long, the Cyprus Buffer Zone has been a space of near-total exclusion – a space locked away behind barbed wire, chain-link fences and oil-drum barricades.

The views, opinions and creative imaginations of communities directly affected by the Buffer Zone and other no-man’s lands have been similarly excluded; rarely being heard within policy-making and diplomatic processes.

Yet the future of spaces like the Cyprus Buffer Zone hinges on their re-integration into the living fabric of the city or state as a space of social interaction and economic vibrancy.

The "re-imaginings" by young Cypriots in September 2015 may, one day, become a template for a wider re-imagining of the Buffer Zone as a space of social encounter and reconciliation, rather than conflict.