Bratislava - the (un)planned city

摘要

Today Bratislava - in Hungarian: Pozsony, in German: Pressburg - the for-mer Hungarian coronation city is the capital of Slovakia, after a more than eventful history directly on the fracture line of the great European cultures and empires along the Danube. Recently the Slovak Academy of Sciences under the direction of architektur.aktuell author Henrieta Moravčíková undertook a pre-cise survey of the city's history of buiLd-ingand planning in the 20th and 21st Century and documented, interpreted, and published it. The result is a 623-page book in two lan-guages (English/Slovak) that illustrates the city's permanent morphological change in an impressive and vivid way. This reflects on the one hand different "imaginaries" of the power elites as planning goals while on the other hand reacting to the drastic historical caesuras of the years 1918, 1939 and 1945, but also 1993 when Slovakia achieved sovereignty. The description of the project reveals that "Two thirds of the current area of Bratislava was built according to the principles of modern architecture and urbanism. At the same time, however, paradoxically many of the urban and architectural concepts influenced urban fabric not in the sense, but rather against the mean-ing of their original intention." This realisation is probably one of the fundamental lessons of urban planning. It would be wonderful if many other European metropolises had at their disposal a similarly profound and practi-cal history of their respective city - the history of urban design, a specialist area of great rele-vance for the future, has to date not received sufficient attention and is certainly capable of being developed much further. Were one to look for an overview of the development of the Austrian capital Vienna, which lies only 60 kilometres to the west, nothing comparable could be found. Among the reasons for this is this lack of innovative methods for research-ing, visualising, explaining and conveying the themes of urban design: today the data, statis-tics, and diagrams traditionally available no longer suffice. Here digital methods could help to make the ideas of urban design visually understandable in Virtual space. Commen-dably, the study by Moravčíková and her four co-authors also addresses the important ques-tion of urban historiography and develops a hybrid method of architectural, urbanist and historical research and visualisations. The book is divided up into three main chapters: first of all, there is a timeline 1740-2020, this is followed by the history of modern urban design in Bratislava and, finally, by a valuable classification of urban situations into 12 different types. The ribbon city is to be found here as well as riverbank situations, the ring road and districts that are dominated by certain building types (transportation, industry, hous-ing...). At the end there are biographies of urban planners who in conventional architectural histories are often left unnamed. A valuable new look at the phenomenon of the city.