engleski

Architecture as a Surrogate for Urban Planning - The Case of Housing Development in Split (Croatia) in the First Decade of the 2000s

After decades of well-developed public housing programs in the Yugoslav socialist state, the socio-political shift of the 1990s introduced new challenges into the housing domain: privatization, ownership redistribution, and market liberalization. These processes were accompanied by deindustrialization as well as economic and refugee migrations, which caused a new housing crisis. The withdrawal of the state from housing investment on the one hand, and the instrument of the ‘detailed urban plan’ on the other, led to increasing fragmentation of urban development. While socialist urban planning guaranteed a layer of common and public infrastructure, well embedded in zoning, the new development policy, which was overshadowed by the primacy of ownership, omitted those features, imposing the main question: How to deal with the impoverished city? This paper examines the strategies undertaken within the scope of architectural design, which continued to provide the tools to revive the public domain and consequently the public space. Two prominent examples of multi-dwelling buildings in Split are discussed – the Turska Kula housing complex by architect A. Kuzmanić, and P10-Sukoišan North by Studio UP. The former was supported by the Housing Care Program for Homeland War Victims while the latter was a private investment. Both examples, however, demonstrate a specific design approach that acts as an ingenious substitute for urban planning and advocate of the public domain. While thoroughly responding to the given spatial and program limitations, these two examples subtly refer to the existent socialist housing architecture in their immediate vicinity, as well as following up on the prominent, but subsequently disregarded urban ideas of the late 1950s.

housing, Split, detailed urban plan, public space, architectural design

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