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The unplanned tenant – a bike ride through the modernist neighborhoods of Subotica

Subotica, a small city in Serbia that was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, follows the layout of Central European cities. Due to the flat terrain on which the city lays upon, cycling is a popular way to get around town. On most days, and especially during warmer weather, the town is flooded by bikers and parked bicycles.

In the 1950s, now as part of Yugoslavia, single-family houses were demolished to make way for socialist housing blocks, creating a conflict situation between the new socialist planning agenda and the historic urban fabric. Historical documents indicate that the city aspired to transform into a modern socialist city by building several modern settlements. And thus the bicycles, along with their owners, moved from gardens and backyards of the single family houses into the new socialist apartments that now stand in their place.

The two biggest modern neighborhoods, Radijalac on the north and Prozivka, on the south of the city, were once supposed to be connected by a wide boulevard with lush greenery, pedestrian and bicycle lanes that cut through the old city core and connect not only the two settlements but also the two city parks in their background.

Even though this linear fast bike ride across the city has been cut short by the unfinished and unbuilt parts of the socialist Subotica, other problems occur within the builings themselves. Most of the building do not have a designated space for parking bicycles, and if they do they are usually used for holding some other belongings of the residents, forcing them to keep the bicycles either in their apartments or in the narrow hallways obstructing the normal flow. Other obstacles include elevators too small for fitting a bike or non-existing ramps which make the journey from the entry of the building to the improvised parking space quite difficult and time consuming. To this day, the bicycle remains the unplanned tenant.

VIDEO AUTHOR(S):Dezire Tilinger and Mihajlo Kiril Plankoš.

FILMMAKER CREDITS: Dezire Tilinger and Mihajlo Kiril Plankoš.

RECORDING LOCATION: Suborica, Serbia

VIDEO PARTICIPANTS & EXPERTS: Dezire Tilinger and Mihajlo Kiril Plankoš.

‘Antiparochi and (its) architects’

(https://www.facebook.com/antiparochi…. / https://antiparochi.tumblr.com / antiparochi.ntua@gmail.com) is a three-year collaborative research project conducted at the School of Architecture, National Technical Universitay of Athens, Greece (Dec.2018-Dec.2021), and funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) and the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT), under grant agreement no.1693.

The project deals with the history of ‘antiparochi’, the post-war uniquely Greek phenomenon (a land-for-flats ‘quid pro quo’ arrangement), which enabled wide access to homeownership in Greece. It unpacks antiparochi’s social history concentrating on the study of the metropolitan area of greater Athens, Greece’s capital city, and a period that spans from 1929 (when law 3741 on ‘horizontal ownership’ was introduced), to 1974, the end of the Military Junta. In a broader perspective, the research intends to offer valuable insights into wide-ranging historical issues related not only to the Greek urban environment but also to the short-lived epoch of economic and social Reconstruction, the development of the Greek Economy, politics of social integration, the construction of social identities and of the middle class in Greece.

The short documentary presents a small selection of the interviews that have been conducted within the research program. It is a short and selective story of antiparochi that arises on the one hand through the personal and subjective views, narratives and memories of the ‘protagonists’ of the phenomenon and on the other hand through the views of antiparochi’s scholars, focusing on the case of Athens.

Antiparochi – A Short Introduction (Greece, 20’, 2021) was shot between April 2019 and February 2020 as part of the ‘Antiparochi and its Architects’ research project by Stavros Alifragkis & Konstantina Kalfa on a Canon EOS 6D and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro 2020.

VIDEO AUTHOR(S):Stavros Alifragkis, Konstantina Kalfa, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens

FILMMAKER CREDITS: Stavros Alifragkis, Konstantina Kalfa.

RECORDING LOCATION: Between April 2019 and February 2020, Athens, Greece

VIDEO PARTICIPANTS & EXPERTS: Dimitris Antonakakis (Atelier 66), Suzana Antonakakis (Atelier 66), Giorgos Triantafyllou (Giorgos Triantafyllou + Partners), Dimitris Tzotzos (builder), Konstantinos Dekavallas (architect), Dimitris Koutroumbilas (subcontractor), Dimitri Philippides (professor emeritus, School of Architecture, NTUA), Dimitris A. Fatouros (professor emeritus, Department of Architecture, AUTH), Thomas Maloutas (professor of social geopgraphy, Department of Geography, Harokopio University), Maria Mantouvalou (professor emerita, School of Architecture, NTUA), Lefteris Makrikostas (builder), Vassilis Douros (builder).

Two portraits of European Middle Class Mass Housing.


As the experts of their living environmentthe resident’s explain to us what is: valuable,problematic or desirable. We explore everydayneighbourhoods of Almere Haven and NewBelgrade, using resident’s testimonies as a toolfor analysis.This Video and used material is part of twoongoing PhD projects.

VIDEO AUTHOR(S)
Anica Dragutinovic, Lidwine Spoormans, UtaPottgiesser, Svenja-Christin Voß, Marcel Cardinali.

FILMMAKER CREDITS: Svenja-Christin Voß

RECORDING LOCATION: Detmold, Germany

La Pallaresa

La Pallaresa complex is an interesting example of Contemporary Architecture planed by the Iberian ArchitectsStudio. The authors of the project are Roberto and Esteban Terradas and Eduardo Souto de Moura.

They were asked to create a new centrality by building 112social dwellings and 120 middle class apartments together with amenities on the urban scale such as a hotel, a multi-screen cinema, a bowling alley and a shopping Mall
Roberto Terradas, one of the authors, explains how they decide to build vertical buildings in order to free the land.He also explains that both housing types share the same structural concept: The supporting façades free the area between the façade and the central communication core, in order to be able to easily modify the plan of the dwellings when housing needs change.

They also aimed to created, through the formal dialogue between the two high-rise residential buildings a symbolic element, a gate to the existing neighbourhood.

For them it has been important to keep the sense of the site, to create a new green space, and to build vertically to allow the inhabitants from the third level up, to have a view of the sea.

La Pallaresa Complex was built from 2004 to 2011. It is located in Santa Coloma City, close to Barcelona. The video include photographs, plans and drawings from the authors archives.

VIDEO AUTHOR(S): Teresa Rovira, Carla Herrera.

FILMMAKER CREDITS: Alexia Roca de Viñals. Agencia TSC.

RECORDING LOCATION: Roberto Terradas summer residence.

VIDEO PARTICIPANTS & EXPERTS: Roberto Terradas, Alexia Roca de Viñals, Teresa Rovira.

Central Committee Kameraschwenk

The residential neighbourhood of New Belgrade is filmed here from the tower constructed to house the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. We chose this vantage point to underscore the political set-up, social and ideological background of the1960s. The construction of the Central Zone of New Belgrade was a unique, Modernist architectural endeavour of its time. The concept of mass housing is explored as it was originally conceived: as a structural part of a complex urban landscape, of both social and spatial milieus. Large housing settlements, built worldwide after the Second World War, were supposed to overcome the problems with stand-alone buildings or neighbourhood units. They were themselves a performance of urban structure and as such.

The rather simple filming technique – Kameraschwenk – allows for “capturing” a wider perspective, while highlighting the intertwined social and spatial dimensions of modern urban planning. The shooting was performed as an act of construction: the elements of a segmented panoramic image dovetailing one another cinematically. Archival material inserted into the editing cuts illustrates or questions the historical narrative of the background.

The film pays tribute to Yugoslav mass housing by presenting one of its most impressive projects – the residential core of New Belgrade. It also reveals the emergence of a middle class, an inner contradiction of socialist modernisation, and opens the discussion about new forms of relationships between architecture and politics.

VIDEO AUTHOR(S): Marija Milinković & Marija Zurnić

FILMMAKER CREDITS: Sonja Dedić (video editing), Edward Djordjevic (text editing), Edvarad Djordjević and MarijaZurnić (narrators).

RECORDING LOCATION: Belgrade, Serbia.

VIDEO PARTICIPANTS & EXPERTS: Dejan Vesić, Dragana Ćorović, Radovan Cukić, Oleksandr Nadtoka, Dezire Tilinger,Svetlana Tolić.

Thermal comfort problems in mass house buildings

Dr Žana Stevanovic Institute of nacional importance Vinca- institute for nuclear science. The study provides a useful evidence base of the formulation and targeting of policies on improving the housing stock as part of a carbon reduction policy on one hand but on another how is reception based on this polices reflected on consumer- resident thermal comfort.Main target is balancing with these two strategies but more favorable on resident thermal comfort.Based on that when the information on consumers point of view is defined than it can be approached to upgrading scenarios and upgrading thermal identity for types of residential stocks with high population density. In such way concept of risking great dissatisfaction with residents is slightly controlled and processes.

The current regulation aims to define the thermal identity status of mass residential complexes. What is the goal is to establish strategies that have proven to be the best approach to this topic and a package of basic measures on how to start the transformation of mass housing complexes. What have been shown in practice are the risks of climate change on the one hand and the response from people from different backgrounds. The goal is to warn of possible risks of transformations and their stagnation. The goal should be to identify risk of climate change, doing measurements by methodology of EN 7730 and using different software depending what identification of problems are.

VIDEO AUTHOR(S):Dr Žana Stevanović

FILMMAKER CREDITS: MCMH Projects, CA18137, Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, Dinamiacet-Iul ISCTE, Institute of Nuclear Science Vinca.

RECORDING LOCATION: Belgrade, Republic of Serbia.

VIDEO PARTICIPANTS & EXPERTS: Dr Žana Stevanović, VojislavPopović, Bojan Stevanović.

Videos

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Home-Land: Zionism as Housing Regime [2019]
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Middle-Class Housing. The Portela Development [2014]
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Housing Block for Relocation promoted by Sociedade de Turismo e Diversão de Macau (STDM) [2016]
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