The workshop After the self-managed city investigates the European urban condition after the welfare state by focusing on the transformations of urbanism in Yugoslavia. Playing a historically ambivalent role during the Cold War, Yugoslavia will be investigated as a vortex of two tendencies which condition the current production of European space: the liberalization of the urban economies in the former socialist countries in the East and the deconstruction of the welfare state in the West.
The contemporary post-socialist urban condition will be investigated as constituted by ruptures, continuities and persistences between three paradigms of urban development specific to three phases in Yugoslav political history: the ’centralized city’, ’self-managed city’, and the currently dominant paradigm of urban management.
The main question posed by this symposium is whether the replacement of the ’self-managed city’ by the current normativity of urban management can be interrupted and superseded. In other words: just as the Yugoslav experience could not be inscribed into the polarity of the Cold War, its project of a ’right to the city’ might, perhaps, challenge today’s consensus between the West and the East concerning the spectacle and commodification as models of urban space.
The workshop will take place on October 28th 2009 at the Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht.
Index of state-space / Workshop 2: After the Self-Managed City
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AftertheSelfManagedCity_poster.pdf