engleski

Between Utopia and Pragmatism: Architecture and Urban Planning in the Former Yugoslavia and the Successor States

These processes, whether intentionally or consequentially, showed a certain degree of independence or divergence from how they played out in international cetners of modernity, which was essentially affected by the ‘between’ position: between socialist East and capitalist West, the economically developed North and the underdeveloped South, progressive cultural experiments and re-traditionalisation, between innovative political conceptions and repressive mechanisms of ideological control. Under such conditions, an unprincipled blend of pragmatism and utopia may have seemed necessary both to the governmental elites that carried out the modernisations, and also to the widest strata of the citizenry who expected, if with anxiety and doubt, a better future from these modernisations. Our understanding of the Yugoslav context, then, is based on a reading of two positions ‘between’: one related to the global and the other to the inner contrasts that fundamentally marked the modern history of the region.

modernism, urban planning, ex-Yugoslavia

Lecture and essay are part of internaional research project Unfinihsed Modernisations. Unfinished Modernisations: Between Utopia and Pragmatism is a two-year research project (2010- 2012). It is part of the programme Culture 2007- 2013, supported by the European Union. Along with the Association of Croatian Architects, which launched and is the leader of the project, the partners in the project are the Institute for Contemporary Architecture (Zagreb), Museuf of Architecture and Design (Ljubljana), Oris, (Zagreb), the Fine Arts Gallery (Maribor) the Association of Architects of Belgrade and the Skopje Coalition for Sustainable Development.