Research Cluster 15 15.2 The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014 15.3 Figs. 15.1 – 15.4 Maria Charalambous ‘Territorial Devices: Land Reform in Cyprus’. The project addresses the landscape of the Buffer Zone in Cyprus as an operative ground. It proposes a series of structures in selected locations across it, which has the potential to reorganise the whole island. Land ownership and the bi-communal dispute have been elemental in the development of the project. It focuses on the case of agricultural land and proposes the establishment of a new system of land ownership on the island, with land redistribution and the design of a new grid consisting of parcels, in sizes and shapes that allow cooperation between owners, as well as a new system of agricultural production, available machinery, logistic spaces, production units and settlements. The Buffer Zone is used as an experimental site to rethink the relationship 62
between the two communities of the island through a land reform project, as well as the role of infrastructure in relation to the land ownership system. The project does not attempt to solve the bi-communal conflict, but uses the tools and instruments that were historically used to determine and control space and its population. It is an attempt to reconceptualise the conflict as what it is: a dispute over the land, resources and production, and to reposition the conflict on a new base by proposing a new territorial condition.