Meanings of the city: Zagreb's new housing communities since the 1950s (original) (raw)

The paper focuses on housing communities built in Novi (New) Zagreb (capital of Croatia) in the second half of the 20th century according to premises of modernist architecture and urban-planning and in the framework of socialist ideology of the state (Yugoslavia). Based on interviews, participant observation, as well as autoethnography, the paper analyses the processes by which newly built hosuing estates grew to symbolise the communities as perceived by inhabitants. The dominant discourses of the city - the functionalism of modernist architecture, the socialist vision of the city, and the statistics of urban sociology - are opposed by the voices of personal, individual narrative on experience and everyday life, which becomes the basis for a different interpretation of the city in the second half of the 20th century.