Transition Urbicide: Post-War Reconstruction in Post-Socialist Yugoslavia

The twentieth century has witnessed destruction of the built environment and heritage in armed conflicts on an unprecedented scale. In the intense competition for post-conflict reconstruction, cities are often drastically redefined and recalibrated to fit new or imposed political, social, cultural, and economic schemes. Yet, the war-time destruction is rarely the end of purposeful erasure of built environment. Post-war reconstructions, especially the ones that brought change of ideologies and regimes into the mixture, are equally detrimental to the architectural heritages of the past. “Transition Urbicide” discusses post-war reconstruction in post-socialist countries—here primarily focused on former Yugoslav republics—that is entangled with economic and political transition from socialism to unhinged neoliberal capitalism. This symbiosis caused thorough and arguably systematic erasure of modernist heritage of former Yugoslavia that is ongoing to this day. The main goal of this theoretical framing is to explain architectural engagements with violent transformation of urban morphology within the broader framework of urban geopolitics and post-war recovery in post-socialist societies. By doing do, it seeks to build unique architectural knowledge needed for post-conflict reconstruction in complex and conflicted urban environments.