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In the history of the built environment, interior design and urban planning have always responded to epidemics by designing architecture and urban spaces to resist the different viruses and pathogens while preventing their spread. The architectural design strategies used in the past centuries, including Modernism, were a reaction to creating pandemic-free built forms and spaces, thus creating a healthy and sustainable built environment. The Italian piazzas, modernism, minimalism, decentralization of urban cities, urban renewal, etc. were a few of the design outcomes of a pandemic-resistant environment. This research study will help architects understand and evaluate the design strategies used to achieve a healthy, sustainable built environment, thereby adding progressive layers of protection against the virus. Future-built spaces must be designed by taking into account what we’ve learned from the past and moving in the right direction toward sustainability.

Most accounts of European integration stress the positive role that EU conditionality and other accession tools play in the process of institutional adjustment to EU standards. This paper explores whether the EU can influence the domestic politics of conflict management in divided societies within the framework of European accession. It examines the role of the EU in the failed negotiation process of constitutional reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005–2006. The EU's role is analysed on two dimensions: as a traditional third-party player in conflict management; and as an agent imposing conditionality in the process of European integration. Drawing from personal interviews and documentary research, the article claims that the failed constitutional reform outcome not only was driven by irreconcilable domestic differences, but also was a product of the weak leverage of the EU despite its assumed conditionality power. The EU's inability to secure constitutional reform was shaped by the uncertainties that h...

This dissertation focuses on post-conflict Bosnia, one of Europe's most divided post-conflict societies, and where the external leadership of the state building process has been pronounced. The specific goal is to delineate a framework of analysis that accounts for the elite dynamics involved in the state building process in Bosnia in the context of the EU accession process. The main research question is: how and under what circumstances can external actors shape domestic change in deeply divided societies. How may external actors affect the interests, goals, and strategies of domestic actors in post-conflict, divided societies. Can local actors resist external pressure. In order to explore these issues empirically, this dissertation examines the process of constitutional reform in Bosnia in 2005-2006, and draws from 80 personal interviews with the key players and other actors involved. The thesis brings a large body of evidence into a process that was, heretofore, largely unknown and shrouded in secrecy. The dissertation is framed within the paradigms of state building and international conditionality; which I argue do not adequately capture the nuances and complexities of post-conflict Bosnia. Drawing from the literature on conflict regulation and other plural society theories, I propose a unique three-tiered framework, and argue that this approach represents a more comprehensive construct for analyzing post-conflict Bosnia. More specifically, this approach dissects the process of constitutional reform from an inter-ethnic, intra-ethnic, and what I term 'supra-national' level (the latter referring to the interactions between domestic and external actors). The study of these interactions is likely to help us define better policies in post-conflict state building processes. I conclude that the international push in Bosnia, and the transformative power of the EU were blunted by an ethnic power game. While external actors did play a substantive role, the neglect of intra-ethnic dynamics rendered external actors' efforts at shaping the process of constitutional reform in Bosnia ineffective.