The Constructed City

New cities constructed according to plan always spark the imagination. Creating something out of nothing is a fascinating process. Despite this, the experience of recent centuries in building the ideal city has not produced very many successful or practical results. Rather, most attempts have turned out to be nightmares for the people who live in these places. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Different ideologies have produced numerous models of urban utopia. By and large, these are comprehensive, rationally organized, ideal projections that do little more than reproduce a conceptual model. These projects, as a rule, singularize the city and its inhabitants, understanding them only as a unified, homogeneous community and never as a multitude of different voices, groups, or individuals. And this is the point where all such models fail.

The city of Velenje grew up out of nothing after World War II, at a time of socialist construction and national renascence in Slovenia. The Geographical Encyclopedia of Slovenia gives Velenje a short but typical description: "a planned industrial and mining city." The "prehistory" of the town reads like something from the Bible: "before coal, there was a great void … only fields, the Paka River, a castle, ruins."

And then there was coal! Socialist Yugoslavia declares coal to be an important strategic product and so issues the command: "Let a mining colony be built!" And so, at the beginning of the 1950s, right next to the mineshaft, they build the first settlement for miners. When large deposits of coal are discovered, another political decision is made: a city must be built. The mining town is born under the motto, "We Must Live Better," and the demands of the political leadership are that the newly constructed city be beautiful, bright, airy, modern and in accord with "the new socialist citizen." The socialist city revives the utopian project of modernism, which we should understand as an aesthetic and political statement. The leading architects of the day even made the assertion that "modern urbanism has become another weapon in the national and political struggle."

The urban plan for Velenje makes use of a tried-and-true array of what were at the time generally accepted modernist concepts and views of the urban environment, including such typical elements as widely dispersed buildings, clean straight lines of construction in a north-south direction, etc. The intense construction of residential buildings reaches its peak by the end of the decade; a thousand apartments a year are being built. The ideal city must, as a rule, have an ideal center, and so, in 1959, the city center, complete with a huge square, is officially opened.

Less than two decades later, the square gets a monument: a gigantic, six-meter-high full-length statue of President Tito on a four-meter-high pedestal; it still adorns the square today. A new generation of architects follows a different philosophy: they ignore the original plan for the city and position their buildings in quite "selfish"” ways. In place of a unified urban vision, expressive flair and original spontaneity come to the fore, in a kind of counterpoint to the rationalist model.

According to the residents of Velenje, the banalities of everyday life were not allowed to impinge on the city’s grand skyline. Drying laundry on the balconies of the new apartment blocks was frowned on; it was, after all, not aesthetic.


Tadej Pogačar





 

 

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