Common Space in Post-Socialist Housing in Serbia: The Comparison of the Preferences of the Two New Condominium Building Dwellers in the City of Sremska Mitrovica

Abstract

After the fall of the Berlin wall, all socialist societies in Europe started with transition. Nevertheless, they have differently passed through post-socialist transition. Due to the Yugoslav crisis in the 1990s, Serbia has had harsher and postponed transition. This state, known as a “blocked transformation”, has caused many unordinary situations, where some new capitalist phenomena have emerged side by side with the preservation of old, socialist ones. In the case of Serbian housing, the construction of new multi-family housing is such example. The first private investments of this sector began in the early 1990s and boomed during the 2000s. However, the system of solidarity funds for housing construction from socialist Yugoslavia existed since the early 2000s. Although both types of housing construction existed parallel, they have different characteristics, such as the selection of new apartment dwellers. Proposed research aims to understand has this difference between two mentioned types of new multi-family housing influenced to newly formed communities in these buildings – how dwellers function as a community? The research polygon is two buildings in the city of Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia. The first example is the last multi-family building built from the solidarity funds; the second one is the example built at the same time, but it was a private-investment project. Used method is a survey that is created to cover main issues about community space - collective space in buildings and around it. The dwellers of these buildings are the survey participants. It is expected that survey results will present how noticeable is difference in the opinions of the respondents of the buildings. Using this method, the research intends to clarify if different procedure for the selection of apartment dwellers influences to the dwellers’ opinion and behaviour towards collective place. This clarification will be the foundation for new recommendations to improve current state and regulation in multi-family housing.