51 Ideas at Home. Housing Concepts in Architecture Between Political Agenda and Common Desire: Genealogy of Socialist Dwelling in Postwar Croatia (1945-1960) Sanja Matijević Barčot, Ana Grgić Assistant Professor | Assistant Professor, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Geodesy, University of Split, Croatia sanja.matijevic@gradst.hr | ana.grgic@gradst.hr KEYWORDS: socialism; modernization; Croatia; socialist dwelling; informal housing Introduction: Te Socialist Dwelling “Do spaces have politics?” With this question, raised in the introduction to their acclaimed book Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, historians David Crowley and Susan E. Reid open their research into the interactions between space and politics. 1 Are there any physical and aesthetic characteristics that allow spaces to be classifed according to a particular political ideology? In the public urban domain of the Eastern bloc it is fairly easy to detect spaces that, in the context of socialist ideology, answer this question in the afrmative. For the most part these are ceremonial spaces, monuments, people’s palaces, often with recognizable Socialist Realism aesthetic features. However, Crowley and Reid’s book also ofers a whole range of examples that demonstrate how ideology permeated those spaces that did not necessarily possess the potential for representation, but rather belonged to the intimate domain of everyday life. Our paper follows this thread, examining the implications that socialist ideology had on the domain of housing in post-war Croatia, which was at that time part of Yugoslavia. Early eforts to create a new architecture steeped into the communist ideology can be detected in the articles that were published in the federal architectural magazine Arhitektura (Architecture), founded in 1947 with this very agenda in mind. In the editorial to the frst issue the editors wrote that their mission and their most pressing task is to “form the conceptual basis of the new architecture.” 2 To create this new architecture, however, a radical break with prewar practices was required, as well as a clear distinction from the architecture of the “capitalist West.” 3 In the beginning, the Soviet architecture served as a model, but this changed following the break between Yugoslavia’s President Tito and Stalin and the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Inform-bureau (the East European association of Communist parties) in 1948. Soviet-style socialism was thus replaced with a new yet untested experiment in “self-management socialism.” As a result, series of social and economic reforms implemented during the 1950s induced the shift from a planned economy towards a so called “market socialism” and in that process a unique model of a socialist consumerist society was developed. 4 Subsequently, only a few short 1 David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (eds.), Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, Socialist Spaces (New York: Berg Publishers, 2002). 2 Arhitektura 1–2 (1947): 3. 3 Ibid.; Neven Šegvić, “Zablude i kriza buržoaske arhitekture” [“Misconceptions and the Crisis of Bourgeois Architecture”], Arhitektura 13–17 (1948): 129–131. 4 During that period, the country experienced its own “economic miracle.” The GDP grew at an average rate of 6.2 percent with the annual industrial growth rate of no less than 13 percent. This prosperity was based on increased investment in light industry and fnancial and technology support by the West. Nevertheless, the miracle ground to a halt, and subsequently the two economic reforms in the 1960s reduced the role of the state and brought the country closer to international trade and customs associations. This “market socialism” differed signifcantly from the highly centralized Soviet-type economic system on which the frst post-war fve-year plan was based. Igor Duda, “Jugoslavija u europskom društveno-gospodarskom