Publication of the book “FROM FRAGMENTED CITY TO RESILIENT CITY. Continuous Performative Landscapes for Skopje” by MSc Dana Jovanovska d.i.a

Our team member MSc.Dana Jovanovska d.i.a, has published her first book as a part of the collection of thesis “0-n” by the Italian publisher Maggioli Editore. The book, which is master thesis dissertation worked at Politecnico di Milano and supervised by the prof. Elisa Cristiana Cattaneo, can be ordered here

ABSTRACT:The contemporary city of Skopje is dialectical, it is both thesis and antithesis. Its urban-scape is a diffuse result of unfinished layers. Throughout the history, different concepts have left their marks on the city web, making Skopje a small and intense conglomerate of diverse ideologies, none of which was influential or long-lasting enough to establish a homogenous city structure.
The dissertation departs with the presumption that the current state of the city is the result of a non-context based utopian standardization and control over the city through the past exercises of urban and architectural concentrations. It accepts the phenomenon of the fragmentation as it is, and steps forward towards investigating possibilities for producing positive urban effects out of given urban reality (as a total opposite of practices throughout the history).
Understanding the constitutive potential, the inclusive capacity of the contemporary landscape, and above all the ‘power’ of the landscape medium to organize large urban fields, the thesis sets a field condition within the city of Skopje. It is based on the relational forces and flows between physical urban fragments and residual urban voids, referred to as post-urban fragments, which constitute Skopje’s contemporary urban state. They are all structured in an open flexible system of continuous urban landscapes, which slide conceptually and physically through different physical and open parts of the city, bringing all of them together, while still respecting their autonomy and identity.
As a system that has gone through dissolutions and reconstructions, Skopje had become a system of constant disturbances that lead to its discontinuous development. Therefore, the goal of programming the urban surface of Skopje, through the matter of continuous performative landscapes, is to create a flexible urban system with increased capacity for accommodating unpredictable circumstances and ever evolving demands. The disintegrated and unfinished urban state of Skopje needs to become adaptive, fluid and responsive system capable of accepting disturbances, without changing to a different system. In this way, we can establish a city capable of extending its own continuity – a RESILIENT CITY!

The collection “0-n” is a platform of heterogeneity, whose works find their common field in the theory of weakness, as imperfect and manifold way of knowledge. The aim is to experience an alternative method for contemporary spaces, able to regenerate the stabilized ideas of design. They are more experimental and vital texts/tests than verification procedures: this attitude brings them away from a strictly educational approach. They can be read according to two levels of meaning: in their specific contexts and as open platforms for contemporary researches. Almost all of them are focused on processual values and on project transdisciplinary, in order to promote a cognitive space before a real one.