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T. Viderman, D. Berc:
"What meaning for modernity? Politics of the socialist heritage in Croatia.";
Talk: International Conference on Cities and Change. Three Decades of Post-Socialist Transition., Darmstadt, Germany; 2019-05-17 - 2019-05-18.

A visibility of Yugoslavia´s architectural heritage has over the last 30
years been built within spaces of representation which have appeared
fragmented across successor countries and rather vaguely situated
within their institutional frameworks. Owing to these spaces of
representation, a wide range of various aspects of Yugoslav urbanization
from different epistemological perspectives have been pushed
into the global narrative of modernity. However, little is known about
how exactly these spaces of representation have been instituted
during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia and what kind of meaning
and aesthetics they inscribe into socialist heritage. In order to critically
reflect on these spaces, this contribution relates the curatorial and
activist praxis that discursively evokes and recreates socialist modernity
to contemporary processes of capitalist urbanization. The hypothesis
of this contribution is that such a praxis has a very territorial
dimension as it promotes a particular aesthetic of urbanization. While
inscribing into the representations of socialist heritage celebrated
notions of localized differences and informality of everyday life, they
override the heritage of macroeconomic and spatial master-planning
of territory. Based on qualitative content analysis and ethnographic
methods of participatory observation and interviews, the activist and
curatorial praxis in Croatia will be scrutinized concerning both the
contents and funding, to understand how it inscribes a particular
perspective on the political and professional role of planning and
design professionals, both in socialist heritage and the city politics.
The two key moments are recognized in the praxis: (1) promoting
socialist modernity as an emancipatory project while smoothing out
ambiguities regarding colonial dimensions of the geopolitics of
inequality, thus contributing to (2) the dissolution of the state-controlled
planning framework in favour of a patchwork of institutions,
institutionalized NGOs, and (global) market players.

modernity, planning, territory, representation