The Post-socialist City and the Revaluation of Public Space. Case Study Velenje
The Post-socialist City and the Revaluation of Public Space. Case Study Velenje

Author(s): Daniel Grünkranz
Subject(s): Museology & Heritage Studies, Architecture, Recent History (1900 till today), Policy, planning, forecast and speculation, Politics and Identity, Identity of Collectives
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Slovenia; Velenje; Post-socialist city; public space; identity;
Summary/Abstract: This text discusses the revaluation of the public space of the so-called post-socialist city by the example of the town of Velenje. Velenje is located in the northeast of Slovenia and has 33.000 inhabitants. Once a small market place, belonging to the vast Habsburg Empire, Velenje became a major industrial hub after the Second World War and a regional economic centre of the newly founded Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. At the same time a new Velenje emerged. Today, after Slovenia's independence a quarter of a century ago, the town stands out as an example of modernist town planning of the socialist period in East and Southeast Europe. Velenje is currently promoted both as an important business location and as a tourist destination emphasising its heritage as a modernist model city. The transition from socialism to market economy has been accompanied by a revaluation of Velenje's modernist architecture and design of public space. This is evident in processes of aestheticisation and reorganisation. On the one hand, the built environment is now associated with a different system of meaning. On the other hand, parts of the public space of Velenje have been reorganised. The effective redesign and reprogramming of a vast pedestrian zone in the centre of the town serve the production of a different form of publicness in contradiction to the notions of the socialist period.

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