[ Books ]

On H-Urban has recently appeared a review of the volume Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (Eds. Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik; Barcelona [sic], 2007) by Brigitte Le Normand, who writes: "Recent writings on the built environment in socialist Eastern Europe tend to highlight one or both of the following themes: firstly, that socialist regimes tried to devise a specifically "socialist" urbanism and architecture, and secondly, that they encountered a great deal of practical difficulties in putting such ideas into practice. The resulting agglomerations and spaces are thus best understood as a product of both socialist ideology and socialist practice. [T]hey are consigned to the past, strange relics of a system that no longer exists and from which nothing can be learned. That is why it is so refreshing to read Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik's Project Zagreb ... Taking as a starting point Zagreb's current status as a city in transition, they posit that Zagreb has, in fact, been in perpetual transition for the last 150 years, and that insights into how to cope with instability can be gleaned from the efforts of previous generations of architects and urban planners ... While the volume sheds a good deal of light on the practices of architects, it is less convincing in its dealings with symbolic and identity issues. Ivan Rogic presents the project of modernizing Zagreb undertaken in the late nineteenth century by the ruling elite in Zagreb exclusively as a Croatian nation-building project. This strikes me as a case of reading history backwards, looking for the seeds of a recently realized national project in the distant past." Read the full review here.