Balkanization as Development Strategy
Ivan Kucina
Unstable condition of Balkans within the framework formulated by EU from the outside is the result of missing formulation of the development strategy from the inside. Process of applying European standards to each Balkans state has created a rejection toward local that is loaded with too negative stereotype - while Europe has been taken as civilized, reasonable and tolerant, Balkan on the other side, signified as European subconscious, has been declared as the place of wilderness, irrationality and continual conflicts. Strongly supported by both sides, this stereotype has created a belief that Balkans could not be developed and sustained without the interventions from Europe. However, both Europe and Balkans are currently in a dilemna with the pace of the development and question exactly what it means to be a part of the new integrated organism. The danger is that Europe may simply assume the mantle of a rigidly administrated meta-state apparatus impressed with its own order and comfort, unable to compete with the dynamic evolution and flexibility of Balkans. At the same time, Balkans is still bound by the political, social and economical problems of the transitional decades and exists disconnected to the general European movement. Both seem to lack a convincing vision of future. Contemporary European incapability to identify its own concept of unity could become a chance for Balkans to formulate its own potentials Instead of awaiting instructions from the outside. These potentials, formulated by European subconscious, like in an imaginable psycho geographical therapy could help Europe to find its new consciousness. Real mutual exchange would then influence Europeanization of Balkan and simultaneously Balkanization of Europe.
Since the beginning of XX century, the term - Balkanization in English language has been attached to the process of geopolitical fragmentation. Meanings of the Balkanization have expanded until today to connote any kind of disintegration across the world. Such interpretations are offering opportunity to the term Balkanization in becoming a counter strategy to the integrating and homogenizing effects of globalization. That could truly shift the meaning form the originally negative connotation into a developing potential. Its potency is coming out from the multiplicity of individual initiatives that are taking advantage over proclaimed regulations creating dynamic and complex self-regulated system. Entropy that is delivered continually through the non-linear interactions among individuals and institutions is the eternal resource for material production and environmental transformation in which the uncontrolled urban development has become its largest manifestation.
Urban structures are reflecting, as material facts, the history of the societies that were creating them as well as today’s relations. Contemporary urban condition is determined by domination of individual initiatives and institutional retreats within the framework of the global market competition. Following the interest of profit without reliable institutional control, cities are growing informally, developing fragments rather than totality. They are becoming heterotopias of uncontrolled dynamics of people, traffics, buildings, garbage etc. Within the institutional planning system, this is considered as mistake while achieving integrity is highly evaluated and instrumentally defined. All of the social and economical resources are directed in creating and sustaining the proclaimed totality that is always, during the time, eroding and disintegrating. The fact of today massive environmental erosion might finally suppress planners and architects to review their agendas. Instead of insisting on unsustainable integrative policy they should start researching the ways of making entropy instrumental. They should learn to convert disintegrating energy into constructive power navigating individual building initiatives for the common goals.
Balkan cities are the physical witnesses of the ideologies that have gone forever and ambitions that are loudly stepping ahead. Forgetting the tradition that has stayed captured within the unsolved relation between the Ottoman and European influences, socialist states were projecting the ideals of universal humanity onto urban structures following the most progressive concepts of modern architecture and urban planning. High ideals of universal humanity - such as equality, solidarity and unity - were, unfortunately, realized with underdeveloped building technology and senseless administrative control reducing the concepts of modernism to the mass reproduction of uniformed collective buildings. Transition from socialism to capitalism as defined by neoliberal tendencies toward privatization, market growth, and profit increase has effected massive changes in social and cultural ideals all around the Balkans. New standard of neo liberal singularity has been proclaimed in place of the ideal of collectivity reducing the complexity of social relations to a continual competition. Orientation towards ultimate personal success has given sufficient reasoning for the abandonment of public issues. The result of such process is disintegrated urban structure assembling discordant buildings that are competing in dominating environment by radiating a globalized image of luxury.
Following the collapse of the socialist centrally conducted planning system and rising of arrogant neo liberal development, millions of individual illegal buildings activities have taken place besides. As the result of crisis in the nineties, Balkan’s cities experienced an abrupt change becoming complex and unstable ground on which the rules for the building production has constantly being reinvented. The trigger for the massive urban transformation was given by the grey economy blast as a compensation for the collapsing institutions. The unleashed individual action started to produce innovation in literally every urban domain - from commerce, to housing production and public services. A new, non-regulated urban layer appeared, flooding the public spaces and existing buildings, disintegrating the urban logic by upgrading it as a serial of mutants plugged into the inherited infrastructure. Fulfilling personal ambitious, they were egocentric and non-correct. Tracing instant profit, they were reckless and wild. Achieving blasting effect they were bragging and exceptional. Although these building activities have been realized with a low urban consciousness, the bottom-up capacity of the new self-regulated system is providing a fertile ground for cultivating critical alternative in confronting utopian modernization of socialist state as well as progressive globalization of neo liberal state. Emerging through illegal building sprawl, Balkanization defines itself as an alternative strategy producing the self-regulated system of disintegrated entities.
Balkanization is providing an innovative model of urban development that is abandoning the ideal of the planned and synchronized unification of the socialist system and the pressure of hostile and uncontrolled fragmentation of the neo liberal. Development strategy does not presume permanency but an open serial of temporary events. Ones they are on the run, urban future unfolds its own dynamic through unpredicted multitude of interactions. Mutual recognitions and reexaminations within the interactive process are keeping the direction of development always on question. Continual questionings are creating a flow in which any event could be connected and disconnected to any other. The networking flow becomes the present form of expression of the future potential.
The complexity that arises from the networking is maintaining the character of the heterogeneous and vivid organizations. Its material product is heterarchical; newness is produced through conflict and negotiation between the spatial agents, both institutional and individual. In the urban domain, these processes feature a remarkable degree of innovation and therefore open possibilities for redefining professional participation in the creation of urban space. Learning from the self-regulated urban systems of the Balkans, planners and architect can start developing new set of instruments for converting the resourceful disintegrating energy and for cultivating unbounded individual building will to re-qualify existing social and spatial relations. Variety of complementary concepts may be recognized as a patterns for creating meaningfull alternatives, such as:
fragmentation - reduction of authority and the growth of self organized bottom-up initiatives
concurrency - spatial implications of the various simultaneous states of existence
hybridization - invention resulting from the fusion of multiplicity
convertible border - potential of distorting limitations into space of exchange
temporary hierarchy - ability to take over particular initiative for the limited time
minimal commons – a bit of coexistence where there’s nothing left to lose but a lot to add
raw end - unintentional result of the most literal application of the basic constructing tools
expandability – capacity of hosting body to adapt to the uncoordinated external
partitionsleftovers – free spaces in between fulfilled desires
under construction – continual delay due to undetermined constructing process
These concepts of Balkanization that have been emerging as respond to unstable condition are empowering discussions on programs envisioning alternative European future. Confronted within Europenan context, Balkanization is giving insights to the alternatives to, both socialist and neo liberalist misinterpretations of the ideals of universal humanizm - liberty, equality and brotherhood are taken away from their original revolutionary context to be imprinted into constitution of each European state. Instead of the lost ideal of liberty, Balkanization is finding suffuciancy of everyday practice, instead of the equality - diversified network, instead of the brotherhood – self-regulated system. Suffuciancy, networking and self-regulation are creating the new provisional horizon for social and environmental development in the future.
