Developmental Affordances of War-Torn Landscapes: Growing up in Sarajevo under Siege

Young people growing up in war zones experience significant changes of their physical and social environments caused by urban destruction. Employing the methodology of narrative inquiry, this work theoretically explores environmental and spatial affordances enabling sociocognitive development among young people growing up during the 4-year military siege of Sarajevo. The theoretical analysis focuses on two environmental contexts war school and the Sarajevo war tunnel and examines how affordances of physical environments, symbolically enacted in language, scaffold developmental activities during this highly specific wartime period. The developmental meaning of environmental affordances comes to life in contemporary narratives written by 16 adults who as young people attended war schools or worked in the Sarajevo war tunnel. Theoretical foundations of sociocultural and ecological psychology are employed to illuminate how environmental affordances contributed to the development of psychological functions well suited to everyday life in circumstances of war and urban destruction. (C) 2016 S. Karger AG, Basel