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

摘要

In Designing Tito's Capital, the historian Brigitte Le Normand chronicles the modernist urban planning of Belgrade in its twenty-odd-year-long march from state to market socialism. The book explores the period marked by the two master plans for Belgrade adopted during the socialist era, the first post-Second World War master plan from 1950 and the one adopted in 1972. The city of Belgrade, the capital of present-day Serbia and, more vitally for this book's inquiry, the capital of the former Yugoslavia, serves as a case study for this analysis. The period of inquiry speaks about the city's planning during two post-war constitutional state configurations, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia and, from 1963, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that collapsed in 1991. Indeed, the title and the subject become timely with the historical distance of 35 years since the death of Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980), a leading figure of the Yugoslav resistance movement in the Second World War, the leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party and the country's lifelong President. More to the point, the historical distance from Tito's death, generally deemed to have set in motion the processes of disintegration of Yugo- slavia, gives a new impulse to a growing amount of diverse international interest and research on related aspects of the collapsed system, including the history of its urban planning. Le Normand's book, as the author herself claims, aims to engage 'both with the history of socialist Yugoslavia and with the global history of planning and modernist architecture'. The book most certainly adds to both of these histories.