The project examines the production of everyday living space in socialist Yugoslavia in the period from 1945 to 1991. Its aim is, through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and methodologically innovative approach based on an analysis of the actions of three groups of actors – the authorities, producers (urban planners, architects and the construction industry), and citizen-users – to generate new insights into the key phenomena of dwelling and the housing community in the socialist state: housing policies, housing estates, forms of citizen participation in the context of self-management, and the associated systems of knowledge exchange.

During the existence of socialist Yugoslavia, a federation of six republics – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia – between 60 and 70 percent of the present-day housing stock of its successor states, now EU members or candidate countries, was built. In this period of intensive construction, Yugoslavia implemented a series of globally unique experiments in housing construction, generating a vast body of knowledge that is now threatened with disappearance due to temporal distance, the limited lifespan of the actors involved and systematic neglect of archival material.

Socialist Yugoslavia began as a poorly developed, agrarian, largely illiterate and war-devastated country which, over the following decades, underwent rapid modernization, strong economic growth, and then stagnation and crisis. In a society whose declarative value system placed the working person at its centre and whose constitution guaranteed the right to quality housing, housing construction was one of the key modernization projects.

The housing standard explored in this project encompasses not only the dwelling itself, but also the wider housing estate, understood as a territorial and social unit that forms the basis for planning and constructing cities and whose characteristics must meet the needs of everyday life. Housing policies were inseparable from the social and economic policies of Yugoslavia and therefore had to respond to the challenges and specificities of a multinational and multilingual federation whose constituent parts were at different levels of economic and cultural development. At the same time, housing policies reflect the transformation of a centralized Soviet-type state into a state of worker self-managers who, in an emancipated manner, decide on all aspects of work and everyday life, including housing.

From 1950 onwards, Yugoslavia implemented three political, economic and social – and consequently housing – reforms with the same task: to establish the legislative, executive, material and professional frameworks for mass housing construction. Within this framework, experiments were conducted with different forms of housing standards, typologies of residential buildings and estates, forms of ownership, models of financing, and models of organizing production.

The project brings together researchers from different scholarly disciplines, countries and academic communities, who establish a network of cooperation and knowledge exchange and, through diverse activities, create lasting links with the scholarly, educational, professional and public fields in which they operate.

The research is also technologically innovative: the collected data are structured in a digital system that enables analysis of the contacts and influences among the actors of socialist housing construction in Yugoslavia, as well as temporal coincidences and relations that could not be identified and analysed by analogue means.

Due to the uniqueness and relevance of the material under study and a methodology that transcends traditional architectural history research, the project has the potential to exert a strong influence on the scholarly and educational community, professionals, architects, spatial planners and public policy makers, as well as on the wider public, both in the countries where it is being carried out and at the European level. The project contributes to the valorisation of the authenticity of the Yugoslav socialist housing project and its position within the pan-European project Homes for All People, which came to an end in the 1980s in Western and in the 1990s in Eastern Europe.

Finally, the project establishes a valuable repository of knowledge and practices for addressing the contemporary housing crisis and the broader social and environmental challenges of today’s Europe.

The project is structured into two research cycles – the first, from month 1 to month 36, focused on research and knowledge production, and the second, from month 36 to month 60, focused on the synthesis of results and their dissemination – and into four research strands.