Social and Physical Planning: Two Approaches to Territorial Production in Socialist Yugoslavia between 1955 and 1963

By introducing workers’ self-management in the 1950s, socialist Yugoslavia aimed to decentralize socio-economic planning and gradually translate into practice the Marxist-Leninist theory of the ‘withering away of the State’. Although the new planning model was intended to provide a more balanced distribution of economic opportunities across the socially diverse federal territory, in practice it prioritized exponential economic growth, contributing to a rural exodus and hyper-concentration of workforce, management capacities and resources in the urban agglomerations. As a direct response to the severe consequences of post-war urbanisation in Yugoslavia, experts from the Urban Planning Institute of Croatia developed the first Yugoslavian methodology of regional planning. With a reference to Hilberseimer’s theoretical work on regional planning, the methodology aimed to integrate rural and urban areas into a coherent regional space with a greater degree of socio-economic independence from the urban centres. This paper provides a critical overview of social and regional planning in Yugoslavia between the introduction of the communal system in 1955 and the new constitution in 1963. By following the two parallel yet interwoven planning discourses, the paper analyses the transition of the State ideology and political economy into the spatial realm. The comparison of two discourses reveals the ambiguous relationship between social and regional planning and the strategic attempts of urban planners to negotiate their ideological positions within the evolving political system. The regional plan for the Krapina district is the first manifestation of the new planning methodology, which intended to reconcile contradictions between city and countryside, centre and periphery, centralisation and decentralisation.