Open Urban Studies and Demography Journal
2015, 1 : 35-40Published online 2015 December 31. DOI: 10.2174/2352631901401010035
Publisher ID: OUSDJ-1-35
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Operating Urban Elements for Cities in Transition from Socialism to
Capitalism
* Address correspondence to this author at the University of Split, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture & Geodesy, Urban Planning Department, Matice hrvatske 15, 21000 Split, Croatia; Tel: +385 (0) 91 785 0093; E-mail: visnja.kukoc@gradst.hr
ABSTRACT
The main research topic is the city in the period of transition from socialism to capitalism and the associated attitudes towards urban planning. A case study was conducted on the city of Split, in particular the area called Split 3. The aim was to establish the mode of operating in contemporary conditions of urban planning and reconstructing small cities of up to 300,000 inhabitants by learning from local good practices. We used textual and graphic materials as the basis for exploring the programming, planning and realization of city construction for 50,000 inhabitants that took place during socialism, and its subsequent development under capitalism. Establishing usability of the then forms in present-day life followed. To this end, we analyzed the neighborhood unit proposed by C.A. Perry in 1929, the typical neighborhood proposed by the Urban Task Force headed by Richard Rogers in 1999 and the fused grid proposed by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in Canada in 2012 – and compared it with the urban unit used in Split 3.
In the concluding section we extracted common elements and common dimensions of analyzed units and proposed them as references of the operation of modern urban planning and reconstruction of small towns of up to 300,000 inhabitants, bearing in mind that “Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories” [1].