Rehabilitation and repurposing of the cooperative centres in the context of socialist built heritage

Abstract

Mass construction of cooperative centres after the Second World War in the territory of ex-Yugoslavia and Serbia represented the first step in the envisaged general socialist transformation of villages and rural settlements in the urban border zones. As facilities that were supposed to be the engine of social and cultural life, the cooperative centres, by rule, have occupied central positions in villages and suburban settlements where the inhabitants were primarily working in agriculture. These buildings were the linchpins of planned (ideological) organization of rural settlements, buy they in effect represented only the best visible part of violent, and from scientific point of view, chaotic urbanization of villages.

When the ideals and value systems of the previously proclaimed and implemented social system were discarded in the last decades of the twentieth century, the paradigm of the socialist rural settlement organization model also changed in Serbia (as well as in other countries in the region). This rejection of the principles which were generally accepted for half of a century until that moment, created the possibility (which soon became reality) of increasing disregard for the architectural and built heritage of that period.

The surviving built heritage of the socialist period in the villages and city areas of Serbia is, from the viewpoint of the modern context, in various ways interesting for wide research, and conservation and revitalization projects. This paper aims to shed light on considerable opportunity for rehabilitation of the existing building inventory in Serbia (on the example of cooperative centres), thus contributing to the understanding of a very wide range of options for approach to heritage in rural and suburban spaces, i.e. the possible desired outcomes and benefits of such actions.