Unfinished Modernisations – Between Utopia and Pragmatism

The collaborative project Unfinished Modernizations explores the construction of the built environments in the countries of former Yugoslavia. It focuses on the shifting concepts of modernization as a precondition for the development of a democratic and emancipating society.

Modernization is a global phenomenon, but it can be motivated by different reasons, it can have different effects, and it can be used for different ideological purposes. Unfinished Modernizations explores the pragmatic and ideological motivations for modernization and their effects on the built environments in two different socio-political contexts: the socialist state and the transitional and post-transition societies that replaced it. It seeks to uncover the fate of socialist modernizing processes in the post-socialist period: their sustainment and transformation into affirmative experiences and practice; or their abandonment and deterioration into various regressive tendencies.