Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade

Six. Modernism under Fire: The Changing Attitudes of Social Scientists and Urban Designers in 1960s Yugoslavia

189 six Modernism under Fire The Changing Attitudes of Social Scientists and Urban Designers in 1960s Yugoslavia THE DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED in the construction of New Belgrade and the struggle against rogue construction in the 1960s highlighted the difficulties Belgrade’s urban planners faced in applying the Athens Charter to the Yugoslav context. The charter had not turned out to be the panacea that town planners had promised in 1950. Although many of the problems that compromised the success of New Belgrade and other new settlements on Belgrade’s periphery, such as the insufficient and late provision of landscaping, shops, and community centers, could not be blamed on modernist planning principles, this planning approach came to be equated in the public mind with monotony and isolation. The coalescing of this unflattering image coincided with increased scholarly and professional scrutiny. Yugoslav scholars, particularly sociologists, taking a cue from their colleagues abroad but also motivated by local discontent, began to question whether people should live in towers at all and to ask questions about the social inequality perpetuated by these housing developments. Journalists then spread popular awareness of these criticisms and debates. Ar- 190 MODERNISM UNDER FIRE chitects and urban planners themselves began to critique and propose modifications to the modernist planning approach after taking stock of what had been realized. The various criticisms that town planners confronted fell into three categories . Some accepted the essential correctness of the Athens Charter approach but acknowledged that the resulting neighborhoods were somehow incomplete and tried to determine what those missing elements were. Town planners responded to this critique by acknowledging the compositional monotony of the “towers in the park” concept and attempted to remedy this problem by creating more intimate, atmospheric spaces. In parallel with the new global focus on promoting “reidentification” and bringing back the traditional street, they tried to introduce an “urban” quality into their plans and to pay greater attention to the aesthetic qualities of the spaces they created, while keeping established hygiene norms. But other criticism was more threatening. Some called into question the very validity of the Athens Charter, either for Yugoslavia and its specific heritage and conditions or for all societies. Others, equally damning, postulated that the Athens Charter had misdiagnosed the ills of the modern age and was thus incapable of curing them. The Sharpening Gaze of the Social Sciences Social scientists in Yugoslavia played an important role in criticizing modernist urban planning, following a similar pattern as in the United States and Western Europe. Sociologists like Herbert Gans, in the United States, and Peter Willmott and Michael Young, in Great Britain, had drawn attention to the positive qualities of neighborhoods that had been labeled slums and slated for demolition.1 Willmott and Young had shed a critical light on the consequences for community life of moving the members of an East End London neighborhood into high-rise housing. Their research was in fact highly influential on Team 10, the group of young modernists within CIAM who revolted against it and effectively ended the organization.2 Modernist settlements had come under attack by sociologists and psychologists in France as early as 1959, only a few years after the settlements were built. Eminent sociologists such as Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe and Henri Lefebvre raised serious concerns about the sterility of the Grands Ensembles. In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the attack on modernist settlements by social scientists like psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich began a bit later, starting in the 191 MODERNISM UNDER FIRE mid-1960s. These ideas were popularized in publications for a broader public, ranging from novels (Christiane Rochefort, Les petits enfants du siècle, 1962) to journalistic accounts (West Germans Wolf Jobst Siedler and Elisabeth Niggemeyer , Der Gemordete Stadt, 1964; Christiane F., Wir Kinder vom Banhof Zoo, 1978) and polemics (American Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961).3 In most cases, this critique coincided with a generalized social crisis: the growing racial and social tensions in 1960s America, the Algerian independence war in the French case, and the discontent that climaxed in the 1968 student protests in the FRG. Objectively, there were aspects of modernist town planning that merited criticism, ranging from the reinforcement of social inequality through certain projects and poorly thought-out designs that created problems for dwellers. But the attack on modernist settlements was also a symptom of a much more defuse malaise, a perception that society...