(Middle Class) Mass Housing in Serbia Within and Beyond the Shifting Frames of Socialist Modernisation

Abstract

In many aspects middle-class mass housing development in Serbia/Yugoslavia was unprecedented, determined by a growing and unacknowledged formation of a middle class in the context of Yugoslav socialism, and a widely proclaimed but elusive social ideal of “housing for all”. Two types of MCMH were the most prevalent in the period considered here (1945-1991): a multi-storey collective residential building, in or outside the city centre, and the individual private house, built in formal and informal or so-cold “wild”settlements. The Yugoslav housing experiment emerged mostly within the collective residential estates. The appropriation, innovation and even invention of different industrial building methods was further enhanced by excellent standards in urban planning and architectural design, exemplified in this study by selected MCMH cases in New Belgrade, Novi Sad, Bor and Subotica. Due to aging, lack of maintenance and the impoverishment of its inhabitants, the present state of this large housing stock is poor, its future uncertain, and yet, its lessons are of vital importance today. In response to what would be the lessons and contemporary implications of the Yugoslav housing experience, in this brief review we have outlined the specificities and the unique historical conditions of the emergence of middle class mass housing in Serbia.