Socialist modernisation and urban transformation in the periphery: The case of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina

The project examines transformation in the urban periphery in the industrial city of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The empirical focus is on two mining communities in the city’s north-western periphery: Lipnica-Centar and Mramor Novi. They are interesting cases of urban planning during Yugoslavia’s socialist period. Next to the original villages new urban-type neighbourhoods comprising small apartment buildings and the accompanying infrastructure were built. However, the new urban layout and infrastructure did not automatically bring an urban lifestyle. Rather the settlements’ lifestyle became a kind of in-between urban and traditional rural lifestyles.

In addition, while officially counted as villages, the two settlements had ethnically mixed populations typical for larger Bosnian cities and not as much for the rural areas. Yet, what distinguished the settlements from Tuzla (and other larger Bosnian cities) is that theirs was mostly a working-class population, with very few holding upper-class administrative jobs. Nonetheless, even in these small settlements the urbanisation process spurred social stratification, as those better off moved into new modern apartments and in continuation thereof started aspiring for a modern secular lifestyle, while the poorer segments of the population remained closer to the soil and more traditional lifestyle.

Against this background, the project seeks to place the settlements’ and Tuzla's physical and socio-cultural transformation in the broader socio-historical context of socialist Yugoslavia’s planned urbanisation and thereto relating housing policies. The goal is to examine how Yugoslavia's socialist modernisation project worked in semi-rural and semi-urban peripheral areas of larger industrial cities.