engleski

City Building Representing Finance: The Transformations of Socialist Housing Models and Their Spatial Outcomes In Croatia (1945-1965)

Beginning with the ideological premise that a flat, a place to live, was a basic human right, the socialist state assumed the obligation of securing this particular right for its citizens. Therefore, in the midst of the post-war housing crisis, Yugoslavia (of which Croatia was one of the constituent republics) introduced the so- called 'socially organized strategies of housing construction.' The financial aspect of these strategies, often defined through the syntagm 'state-financed' or 'publicly-financed, ' consisted of a complex network of financial mechanisms and administrative tools. This paper follows the evolution of the Yugoslav 'socially organized model of housing construction' while focusing on its financial aspects. Although the organizational and financial aspects of construction are generally omitted from architectural history, which primarily focuses on design features and architects’ intentions, here, the forms of investment and finance are inevitably linked to the ideological foundations of the socialist state. We argue that these repercussions of investment and financial mechanisms are in fact deeply inscribed in post-war city development. The aim of this research is to detect a cause-and- effect relationship between the financial aspect and the final design outcomes. The methodology is thus based on a historiographic reading of the two parallel lines of investigation. The first line follows the institutional development of the housing construction model and its investment and financial aspect. The second line of research provides an overview of the housing typologies produced by the different investment models. The direct cause-and-effect relationship between the financial aspect and the final design outcomes can be traced from the choices of housing typology to the final decisions on aesthetics, and indirectly in terms of building technology and site development.

post-war housing, urban planning, socialism, financial mechanisms, administration

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