Passive agents or genuine facilitators of citizen participation? The role of urban planners under the Yugoslav self-management socialism

Abstract

Socialist Yugoslavia refrained from the polarisation provoked by the Cold War. Besides turning back to the war ally of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1948 to take the leading position in the non-aligned movement in 1961, Yugoslavia followed a distinct path of socialism known as self-management, an emancipatory project in pursuit of a democratic socialist society. As such, Yugoslavia was assigned different roles and attributes: for sure, it was a melting pot of criticism (from both East and West); more positive prospects saw it as a hybrid between East and West; inevitably, Yugoslavia was condemned to be somewhat distanced from both power centres, thus being a periphery to both East and West. Though the periphery is challenging to de!ne due to the heterogeneity of the countries forming it (Becker et al. 2010), during the Cold War, southeast Europe (SEE) has mainly been considered a periphery to the western world (Göler 2005). Despite the existence of the so-called Western European peripheral countries, the absence of capitalism was considered the most in"uential parameter for diversifying SEE from the West (Bohle and Greskovits 2012; Bohle 2018). However, due to unstable political relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the latter was considered detached from the communist ideology, too. This was particularly seen in the architectural and planning discourse, which after 1948 was informed almost exclusively by Western sources, while references to the communist bloc became exceedingly rare (Kulić 2009). Although nowadays the so-called Western Balkans region (that largely coincides with the former Yugoslavia) is considered to be a “super-periphery” (Bartlett and Prica 2013), in the Cold War period, Yugoslavia “was softening the contrast between socialism and capitalism, between the planned economy and the free market, and between liberal democracy and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’” (Kulić 2009:129)...