With this concise study, Veronica E. Aplenc manages to provide a fresh take on a now well-established topic: city planning in state socialism. Whereas most scholars working in this area have argued for the centrality of the cities they study—whether because they are capitals, industrial centers, or paradigmatic cases of socialist modernity—Aplenc is not interested in Trnovo for its centrality. Trnovo was a small town that gradually became incorporated into the suburbs of Ljubljana, itself a city that was not particularly urbanized at the beginning of the 1950s. Yet Aplenc convincingly argues that we can learn a lot about socialist modernity and planning practices by looking at places like Trnovo.
Aplenc is a folklorist by training, and for that reason, she is interested in looking at how socialist authorities treated places that did not fit with their ideas of modernity and, in turn, how locals and other actors articulated and...
University of California Press