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

The project examines transformation in the urban periphery of the industrial city of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the early socialist period (1945-1960s).

The empirical focus is on three mining communities in the city’s western periphery, all constructed in the first ten post-war years: one built as a completely new settlement (Šićki Brod), one as a new settlement next to the original village (Mramor Novi) and one as a new urban-like centre of an existing village (Lipnica-Centar). The settlements were built for the needs of the newly opened coal mines in the industrial region surrounding Tuzla, often referred to as the Tuzla Industrial Basin. The construction of the settlements was financed by the Tuzla mining enterprise “Kreka”, the area’s largest company and major employer.

In light of this, the settlements are interesting case of urban planning during Yugoslavia’s socialist period, indicating that urbanisation in the early socialist period was dictated by the needs of production rather than by any urban master plan. This had some interesting implications in terms of urbanisation in the Tuzla Industrial Basin, leading potentially to several conclusions being are at odds with traditional historical and sociological definitions of town and countryside and the still dominant research approach to urbanisation, departing from assumed preconditioned hierarchies between urban and rural places.

First, in this early post-war period, a substantial portion of the new apartments in the Tuzla Industrial Basin were constructed next to mines and industrial plants, rather than in the region’s urban centre, as one might otherwise have expected. The result was that urbanised and semi-urbanised settlements in the Basin were scattered across the region, while many of the immediate outskirts of Tuzla remained mostly rural. Correspondingly, once established and due to their urban layout and infrastructure, as well as to their population working in mining and industry, Šićki Bod, Lipnica and Mramor Novi became parts of the Tuzla’s urban area, despite being designated as independent settlements, being physically separated from the town of Tuzla and at best still only semi-urban.

In consequence, the Tuzla Industrial Basin became typified by an interesting liminality between rural and urban, with an extended peripheral zone comprising both villages in the immediate outskirts of Tuzla, these new-established semi-urbanised mining townships, as well as several larger semi-independent industrial towns (Lukavac, Banovići and Živinice). In this regard, the Basin has much in common with similar, although much larger, mining-industrial agglomerations, such as the Ostrava industrial agglomeration in Czechia, the Upper Silesian industrial area around Katowice in Poland, and the Ruhr Valley and Rhineland in Germany. This indicates that urbanisation in mining-industrial agglomerations takes a distinctive shape and, hence, affects socio-cultural transformation differently.

Against this background, the project seeks to place the establishment of the three mining townships and the physical and socio-cultural transformation of the Tuzla Industrial Basin in the broader socio-historical context of early socialist Yugoslavia’s urbanisation. The focus is on everyday life, political activities and housing policies (including locals’ reactions to them), as well as the general socio-cultural transformation in this in-between, semi-urban/semi-rural peripheral zone of Tuzla.

The project relevance pertains to the scarcity of research on semi-urban/semi-rural peripheral areas in early socialist Yugoslavia. Existing research has primarily – with a few exceptions – focused on urban cores and new towns, while the peripheral areas have mostly been ignored. This means that the everyday life and socio-cultural impacts of urbanisation, housing policies and urban planning affecting a substantial proportion of the population living in these peripheral areas remain under-researched. The current project aims to address this and potentially offer a different reading of the urbanisation and modernisation processes in early socialist Yugoslavia.