{"id":825,"date":"2019-06-03T13:07:24","date_gmt":"2019-06-03T13:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horizon.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=825"},"modified":"2019-06-03T13:07:24","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T13:07:24","slug":"the-forensic-architects-piecing-together-the-story-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/825\/the-forensic-architects-piecing-together-the-story-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The forensic architects piecing together the story of war"},"content":{"rendered":"
by Caleb Davies<\/div>\n

Around the world there are 10 wars<\/a>\u00a0are being fought, according to recent figures. That covers humanity\u2019s most deadly clashes, but the figure rises to 49 if you count those state-based conflicts where \u2018only\u2019 1,000 people or fewer have been killed in the past year. The captain\u2019s share of all this fighting happens in cities.<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Cities are a kind of beautiful mess, where mazes of streets tangle and millions of lives are played out on top of one another. That can make it difficult to keep track of what\u2019s going on when conflict strikes. But it\u2019s crucial to do so, not just because reliable records of war crimes can help bring the perpetrators to justice later, but because the story of what happens to a city and its inhabitants during wartime shouldn\u2019t be forgotten.<\/p>\n

One of the foremost experts at cataloguing what happens in urban warzones is Professor Eyal Weizman at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. In 2011, he founded the independent research group\u00a0Forensic Architecture<\/a>\u00a0(FA). The organisation\u2019s goal is to document human rights abuses around the world and now has a team of roughly 30 people.<\/p>\n

Working at the request of human rights organisations or international prosecutors, the team begins investigating reports of crimes or abuse by gathering evidence such as videos, social media posts, photographs and eyewitness statements. Then they use precise architectural models, fleshed out with the media they have collected, to build a story of what happened.<\/p>\n

Prof. Weizman says he realised early on that he needed a way of spatially organising the information in the videos in order to be able to understand what they were telling him. \u2018In fact, we realised that the only way to do this is using architectural models,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n

One of the most striking examples of his team\u2019s work concerns the dropping of two chlorine bombs on the Syrian city of Douma on 7 April 2018, as the regime of Syria\u2019s dictator Bashar al-Assad was pushing to seize control of the city from rebels.<\/p>\n

Reports of people suffering from the effects of the gas quickly emerged. But the regime\u2019s attacks were successful – government forces rapidly gained control of the city and only allowed Russian journalists access to the bomb site. These journalists reported that the attack had been staged. A telltale yellow canister could be seen in one building in their footage, but the reports said it had been placed there by the rebels themselves, not dropped from the air.<\/p>\n

But was that the truth? To find out, Prof. Weizman\u2019s team constructed models of the building using architectural information together with multiple videos of the site. The models showed that the\u00a0damage to the building was consistent with the bomb being dropped near-vertically<\/a>from, for example, a hovering helicopter. They also showed that some of the wreckage surrounding the bomb must have fallen from above.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Forensic
Forensic Architecture’s reconstruction of a 2018 attack in Douma, Syria, based on a Russian TV report, showed that the canister came in a harness (in blue) made for aerial ammunition. When it was dropped, the canister tore through a wired fence (in brown) before discharging the chlorine gas, confirmed by the discoloration caused by corrosion near the nose. Image credit – Forensic Architecture<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Pieced together, all the evidence made it highly probable that the bomb had dropped from the sky \u2013 and with the airspace controlled by the regime, that pointed the finger squarely at Assad. In March this year, a report from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons also stated that there were reasonable grounds to believe\u00a0toxic chemical weapons were used in Douma<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Legal work<\/strong><\/p>\n

Using\u00a0computer models<\/a>\u00a0to bring all this evidence together might seem a simple idea, says Prof. Weizman. \u2018But it has unlocked whole new possibilities for\u00a0journalism<\/a>\u00a0and for humans rights legal work.\u2019 Following this work, he has been appointed one of the technology advisors for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. As an entirely new form of evidence, it was a battle to get forensic architecture admissible in courts, he says, but now it is being used in multiple cases across the world.<\/p>\n

Now, in a new project called\u00a0FAMEC<\/a>, Prof. Weizman is turning his attention to artificial intelligence to speed up the work. \u2018We need to know to collect, triage and analyse all the material. But sometimes there are just too many videos,\u2019 he said. \u2018So we want to train machine vision algorithms to do some of this work for us.\u2019<\/p>\n

Machine learning algorithms usually need a large library of images on which they can be trained. But when it comes to things like chemical weapon bombs, there are not many images out there, says Prof. Weizman. But he says computers can help here too, by taking existing images and creating multiple renderings at different angles, increasing the library of available images that machine learning algorithms can be trained on.<\/p>\n

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\u2018It has unlocked whole new possibilities for journalism and for humans rights legal work.\u2019<\/p>\n

Prof. Eyal Weizman, Goldsmith University, London, UK<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While Prof. Weizman is focused is on human rights abuses, other architects are interested in documenting what happened in war zones in order to help us get a more accurate picture of what living through war is like, countering some of the sensationalised representations in the press. One is Dr Armina Pilav, an architect and designer at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Sarajevo<\/strong><\/p>\n

A formative experience for Dr Pilav was moving to Sarajevo in 2000 to study architecture. The Bosnian war was a recent memory, and the city of Sarajevo itself had been under siege for four years to 1996. During this time, snipers and tanks were stationed in the mountains surrounding the city and its people were under almost constant fear of shells and bullets.<\/p>\n

Even just a few years later, Dr Pilav says that in her architecture course the war was barely a topic of conversation. \u2018We did not really discuss the war, which was kind of striking,\u2019 she said. \u2018It was all about looking to the future. But I wanted to take account of the direct experience of the people. Because post-war reconstruction is not simply reconstruction of the buildings.\u2019<\/p>\n

Unlike Forensic Architecture, Dr Pilav is trying to understand the lives of those people in the city at a broad level, not produce rigorous evidence about specific events. But she has used methods that are similar to those of Prof. Weizman, harvesting old media reports, eyewitness testimonies, photographs and architectural plans, cataloguing them in order to build an understanding of what people\u2019s lived experience of the city was like during the siege. Through these she has come to look at urban war spaces in terms of how areas of violence and areas that were relatively violence-free \u2013 which she calls \u2018un-war spaces\u2019 \u2013 mingled together and created a new way of life.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly,\u00a0Dr Pilav\u2019s research<\/a>\u00a0showed that the pre-war and un-war spaces were very different. During the siege, people\u2019s movements were restricted to a network of tunnels, semi-underground and covered spaces away from snipers\u2019 lines of sight. The actions of the armies and citizens not only damaged many buildings, but resulted in new architectural facets. Shipping containers were used as barricades; semi-submerged trenches were dug, enabling people to get from one building to another. She also showed how people made makeshift heating stoves and, because many buildings did not have chimneys, poked their smoke outlets through holes punched in walls or windows.<\/p>\n

Dr Pilav\u2019s work takes the form of art exhibitions and an online repository of her research materials called\u00a0Un-war space<\/a>. She says that urban war, in all its messy detail, provided her with a unique window onto the way people and built environments interact.<\/p>\n

\u2018During war, people are really relating to their space: they are building shelters and they are trying to normalise their lives,\u2019 said Dr Pilav. \u2018I think it is one of the more intense relationships between humans and architecture \u2013 not just buildings, but streets, and the environment too. When war breaks out, you are suddenly aware of how a building can be dangerous to you.\u2019<\/p>\n

Originally published on <\/em>Horizon<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Caleb Davies Around the world there are 10 wars\u00a0are being fought, according to recent figures. That covers humanity\u2019s most deadly clashes, but the figure rises to 49 if you count those state-based conflicts where \u2018only\u2019 1,000 people or fewer have been killed in the past year. The captain\u2019s share of all this fighting happens … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[265,274,79,24,28],"class_list":["post-825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences","tag-architecture","tag-forensics","tag-research","tag-science","tag-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nThe forensic architects piecing together the story of war - Horizon Magazine Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/825\/the-forensic-architects-piecing-together-the-story-of-war\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The forensic architects piecing together the story of war\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"by Caleb Davies Around the world there are 10 wars\u00a0are being fought, according to recent figures. 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BY ALEX WHITING Cities are central to the battle against global warming \u2013 they consume two-thirds of global energy and account for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Earth, Energy & Environment"","block_context":{"text":"Earth, Energy & Environment","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/category\/earth-energy-environment\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/09\/8-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/09\/8-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/09\/8-scaled.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/09\/8-scaled.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/09\/8-scaled.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/09\/8-scaled.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1655,"url":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/1655\/what-urban-nature-really-means-for-insect-biodiversity\/","url_meta":{"origin":825,"position":2},"title":"What urban nature really means for insect biodiversity","author":"Sandrine Ceurstemont","date":"March 8, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Parks and green spaces in cities provide health and wellness benefits to human inhabitants, but they\u2019re not necessarily beneficial for other urban dwellers \u2013 like insects. Researchers are investigating urban biodiversity with approaches such as \u2018bee hotels\u2019 to see how cities can better foster insect life. 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Reducing air pollution from vehicles has been an important focus of the campaign since its launch 20 years ago; and despite significant progress, it\u2019s an issue where sustained effort and innovation remain\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Earth, Energy & Environment"","block_context":{"text":"Earth, Energy & Environment","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/category\/earth-energy-environment\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2021\/09\/1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2021\/09\/1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2021\/09\/1.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2021\/09\/1.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1340,"url":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/1340\/qa-what-lockdown-air-pollution-reductions-mean-for-the-future-of-urban-transport\/","url_meta":{"origin":825,"position":5},"title":"Q&A: What lockdown air pollution reductions mean for the future of urban transport","author":"Horizon Magazine","date":"July 6, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"by\u00a0Aisling Irwin People in cities experienced cleaner air during lockdowns, but a permanent shift to greener modes of transport and habits is \u2018extremely complex to achieve\u2019 given how much space is devoted to cars and the groups resisting change, says\u00a0Dr Basile Chaix, who studies the health trade-offs we make as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Health"","block_context":{"text":"Health","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/category\/health\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"More than half the space in some European cities is devoted to cars, which are parked 90% of the time, says Dr Chaix. 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