Authors

Discussion

On the early morning of 26 June 1963, an earthquake struck Skopje, the capital city of state socialist Macedonia, taking the lives of 1,070 people and destroying more than two-thirds of the urban fabric. The politically non-aligned Yugoslav leadership immediately issued a call for help for its third-largest city and the erstwhile southernmost federal capital which got picked up by more than 80 states and many international organizations. The United Nations took the baton for coordinating the foreign support to Skopje, passing a resolution to support Yugoslavia in the post- earthquake reconstruction of the city in October 1963, setting up a Special Fund, and assembling a team of international experts for its so-called Skopje project. The UN involvement in the reconstruction facilitated the federal and state authorities’ decision to reimagine Skopje as a “City of World Solidarity”, that is, a symbol of the cross-bloc cooperation in the heights of the Cold War. 

The paper deals with one neglected episode pertaining to the post-earthquake reconstruction of Skopje: from December 1964 to April 1965, a team of Polish- Macedonian experts conducted the first-ever large-scale sociological survey as a preparation for the development of the UN-sponsored Skopje’s General Urban Plan. The survey, I argue, beside the extensive demographic overview of post-catastrophic Skopje, revealed some of the major interethnic tensions in the city and even recommended several solutions: for instance, reimagining the city center as a space for intercultural exchange. However, few of the social study findings were included in the final reconstructing project, while the survey was set aside only to reappear in the 1990s. I argue, drawing upon archival materials and interviews with the Polish and Macedonian conveners of the survey, that the Skopje social survey is still relevant for unpacking some of the key urban planning and political decisions related to the post- earthquake reconstruction and the interethnic relations in the city. In addition, I claim that the survey is relevant from a wider perspective since it came in a moment when social surveying for urban planning purposes was gaining worldwide traction as the criticism of the dominant modernist urbanism – and its lack of sensitivity to cultural particularities – was increasing. The paper also frames the survey within these global dynamics.