Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity

"Bringing a folklorist's love of language and everyday practices to a study of European urban growth, Veronica Aplenc offers a vivid and wonderfully textured account of the development of Ljubljana's Trnovo neighborhood in its socialist decades. Churches, gardens, villas, and postwar high rises coexisted in this place long associated with famed architect Jože Plečnik—a combination that provides rich material for this careful and illuminating analysis." —Kimberly E. Zarecor, author of Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960

"An engaging, tightly researched, yet very accessible evocation of a historic neighborhood in Ljubljana and of its modernist transformation. The book enriches our accounts of socialist urban planning to include debates about preservation, local architectural forms, self-built vernacular, and the single-family house, and reveals how rapid urbanization came hand-in-hand with the construction of tradition." —Juliana Maxim, Associate Professor of Architectural History, University of San Diego, and author of The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1949–1964

"Aplenc's thoroughly researched book—it is important to note that it is also smartly written—engages with the entwined notions of the socialist city, past and tradition, and postwar housing at an unusual scholarly scale of a single neighborhood in an already relatively small Ljubljana. Aplenc's book makes a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on architecture and urban planning of state-socialist Yugoslavia." —Austrian History Yearbook