River landscapes of former Yugoslavia: urban systems in the archipelago city

The essay proposes a reading methodology focused on the urban fabric analysis of the fluvial cities, to define their identity, in the geographical context of former Yugoslavia: a territory characterized by a high degree of complexity and heterogeneity of urban phenomena and conditions. The tools used are those of the typo-morphological analysis, according to a scalar process looking at the territorial, urban and architectural dimensions. The analysis conducted on the case studies, critically selected by identifying common characteristics, has allowed to interpret and decode the urban structure of complex cities, made up of juxtaposed parts, conflicting fragments, urban islands recognizable for "an identity which reflects their history". Border towns, which have been strongly conditioned - in their development - by the many influences changing over the centuries, such as those of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empire. “Powder keg” cities, which have been destroyed and bravely rebuilt several time, and that after the Second World War became expressions of a precise cultural and political program: the socialist and modernist ones. “Cities made of cities”, which have found a model to follow in the experience of Le Corbusier and German urban planning of the 1930s. Polycentric and plural cities, with heterogeneous urban fabrics, configured as an ensemble of pieces and fragments, of types and counter-types, a juxtaposition of contradictions, a dialectical rather than a linear process. The urban forms fragmentation is a datum accepted without prejudice; an ontological truth, taken as an expression of the contemporary city aesthetic; transformed into value, it turns into an operating model for the future city.