Housing. Yu · Right to Housing: The Production of Spaces of Everyday Life in Yugoslavia (1945-1991)

Housing.Yu researches the production of spaces of everyday life in Yugoslavia (1945–1991), which still constitutes about 60–70% of the current housing stock of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. The project will employ a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and methodologically innovative approach to the government’s actions, urban planners, architects, contractors, and citizen-users. The project aims to understand the critical phenomena of mass housing in a socialist state, including its policies, estate development, citizen participation and related knowledge exchange between Western and Eastern Europe.Housing policies were an essential part of the development of the self-management of socialist Yugoslavia, in which the workers decided on housing. Yugoslavia carried out three political-economic and housing reforms with an aim to generate legislation and implementation, as well as material and professional frameworks for mass housing, experimenting with different forms of standards, financing, organization of production, and ownership. In these overlapping processes, it relied on the inherited pre-war and then-contemporary practices from the East and the West, mediated by dynamic knowledge exchanges. Investigating the housing production through the relationship among social processes, construction and knowledge exchange, project transcends the traditional field of art history by using digital tools. It valorizes the housing project of socialist Yugoslavia and its contribution to the Pan-European Project Homes for all People, which ended with Right-to-buy.Housing.Yu will generate a valuable, open-access repository of knowledge of interest to the scientific, educational and professional community, both in the countries where it is implemented and at the European level. The project’s results warrant a social impact at a time when Europe is facing yet another housing crisis and broader social and environmental challenges.