engleski

Shopping as a Part of Political Agenda: Emergence and Development of Shopping Centre Typology in Socialist Croatia (1960-1980)

The paper explores the contextual sources of design and development of the architectural typology of the shopping centre in Croatia while focusing on the social role that that typology had in the construction of the socialist reality. In Yugoslavia (with Croatia as one of its constituent republics), architectural typology of the shopping centre first appeared during the 1960s, when state economic reforms that marked a conscious shift from centrally planned economy towards market economy were introduced. Along with those reforms, encouraging consumer spending became one of the state economic strategies. With that in mind, throughout a country that was up until then ruled by a 'dictatorship over needs', a construction of numerous shopping centres was initiated. Those facilities, financed from public funds, became an indispensable factor of urban planning, with programs whose complexity ranged from the department store to the first shopping mall built in Split in 1980. It might be said that the construction of those shopping centres represented, to some extent, the institutionalization of shopping. However, it is yet another example of the contradictions present in the bivalent political system of Yugoslavia, which constantly tried to balance its 'inbetweenness': in-between the East and the West, socialism and market economy, the promoted socialist egalitarianism and consumerism. By analyzing the examples of the erected shopping centres, this paper examines the ways in which this architectural typology, although commercial in its very nature, established itself in a society where profit making was seen as a negative goal in itself. The research also follows the fate of the observed buildings after the shift of the political system in the 1990s.

architecture; shopping; Socialism; Croatia

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