Despite the best of intentions, the Master Plan contained the seeds of urban fragmentation. The functional standards set by Skopje’s planners could not but collide with the reality of the city as a lived environment. Although the risk of social and spatial segregation had been felt by the authorities, their measures did little to increase the potential for communitisation and played an important role in the reinforcement of urban divisions.
Despite its conclusions and recommendations, the Social Survey had a very limited impact on Skopje’s planning. Despite having pointed towards the risk of division, this had not been followed by any appropriate measures or practical efforts to
counter it. The introduction to the Master Plan did recall the survey’s results and call for an abolition of the division of the city in two zones, but there is no mention of this division in the Plan itself, as if it had simply disappeared from the planners’ minds. This omission was followed by a number of mistakes. First, while the Social Survey had underlined the potential resistance of minority groups to the idea of abandoning their houses with the start of the clearing program, this aspect was underestimated by the planners. Instead of working on the reconstruction and sanitisation of the derelict northern residential areas, the official building policy was directed towards the conquest of new spaces, outside the historic urban space.
At the same time, the government rejected the idea of forced relocations to new high-rise buildings. While the Master Plan clearly mentioned that Albanian, Turkish and Roma would ‘not want to abandon their houses’, it stated that ‘based on economic changes, education and work security, the social relations of the populations living in substandard zone would change and would lead them to contribute to the new housing construction’16. Sooner or later, these ‘re-educated’ populations would, by effect of attraction, move to the new, more ‘comfortable’ and ‘modern’ places. While these inhabitants were left to their fate in crumbling areas referred to as ‘slums’ by Acevski (1996), nothing was undertaken to assist the reconstruction of these zones. Roma populations, seen as difficult to ‘re-educate’ in the short-term, were either left in Topaana or relocated and encouraged to develop their own urban enclave in Suto Orizari, where they could stay until they formed the wish of ‘entering modernity’. This predicted change never happened, nor did the planned homogenisation of urban inhabitants.
It is legitimate to hold the global approach of Skopje’s planning responsible for the problematic outcomes it had on the city. From the beginning, utopian inspiration informed the planning of the new city. Such foundations could have been fruitful, had not they been completely disconnected with the reality of Skopje as a lived environment. In Lefebvrian terms, this means that Skopje’s perceived space of everyday social life has been ignored by the ‘peopleless’ (Gronlund, 1993) conceived space of planners. The lack of consideration for societal issues is visible in an aspect of planning the Social Survey denounced from the beginning: the heavy reliance of the Office for Urbanism and Architecture on statistics dating from 1961. Given the considerable
impact of the disaster in the city, demographic, economic and urban data prior to the earthquake hardly reflected the actual physical and social structure of Skopje in 1965. Yet, as appears in the Master Plan, those statistics were chosen by the planners to establish their project. While the Plan refers to the Social Survey, it did not take into account most of its results or suggestions, such as the wishes expressed by the inhabitants. For instance, 81.5 percent of those interviewed expressed the wish to live in individual housing: how to explain the re-housing policy based solely on computer’s calculations? The Social Survey insisted on the need to take into consideration sociological factors, such as the Northern side’s structural changes. Its introduction clearly stated that the ‘national’ factor directly determined many social and economic factors, due to specific cultural reasons. It also underlined the lack of demographic prognosis (number of inhabitants, structure of the households) as a barrier to check the realism of the basic statistics provided by urban planners. As a result, it is not surprising that problems found only partial solutions.
Skopje’s planning process did not differ a lot from common socialist planning and from post-WWII Western planning either. As it is still the case today, there has never been any public debate or consultation on Skopje’s planning. The post-earthquake policy simply ‘forgot’ the people living in this urban space and proceeded as if the inhabitants did not have any concrete needs or, simply, as if they did not exist. The best example of such practices is the case of Topaana. In 1965, the planners acted as if this area were an ‘empty space’, where substandard housing removal was not even an issue: soon, a ‘new’ Topaana would rise. Unfortunately, the Old Topaana would not have it and, today, it is the poorest Roma area of the city.
Acevski (1996) is particularly critical of what he describes as a superficial, formal and unrealistic activity, limited to a sterile ‘drawing skill’ which conceived the city as an empty object on which everything was possible. To him, the plan which eventually came out of this closed cabinet was a ‘static entity’ or a ‘world in itself’ and it had completely lost ground with the everyday experience of the urban society. Home (2007:20) similarly writes that ‘the Master Plan was a creature of its time. Architect- planners of the modern movements, confident in their role of remaking the post-war world, worked with the state rather than the people’. While Acevski’s words are certainly too harsh, his and Home’s critics are grounded. As highly functional ideals governed city planning, the social sphere was mostly left outside the interest of Skopje’s planners, who favoured instead a rational and productive organisation of space. Hence
Skopje’s Master Plan closely matching Lefebvre’s (1974:38) conceived space, the ‘conceptualised space of scientist, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers’, a space which appears to be disconnected with both perceived and
lived space, the physical and mental space of Skopjani. Many reasons could be
mentioned to explain the disparity between the space of planners and that of Skopjani, from the application of an inadequate land policy to the neglect of crucial information. Planners chose a ‘prefabricated model’ for a city whose development was understood only in quantitative and physical terms. Systematic principles, stemming from the ‘city as an object’ approach, left not only a negative legacy of urban development, but also one of submissive public attitudes. By confiscating the planning process from those who would be the most legitimate to handle it – its inhabitants – post-earthquake planning left the latter with the expectation that the state and its technocrats would always be there to dictate ‘solutions’ and no room would ever be left for civic initiative – a major issue with which Skopje is confronted blatantly today. Yet, I would add that Skopje’s Master Plan is not the only one to blame: as I will show, the way it was practically implemented is also responsible for its results.