engleski

Answer to the pressure of tourism in Split historic core : centralization and decentralization as equal aspects of the transformation of public space

Urban development of Split is an example of adaptable growth of a peripheral city. The ever changing influences and administrations during its history were never reflected in an appropriate urban form. Instead, the urban form of Split itself had a strong self-generating role. Following the urban explosion in the interwar period, Split becomes a regional center. Socialist and post-socialist detached development of the city center and the periphery has led them to a relationship of coexistence without interaction. The lack of spatial hierarchy between the center and periphery leaves us confronted with the problem of fragmentation. The causes of fragmentation are the incomplete and disconnected urban planning policies and self-organizing processes of growth. The city’s identity remained restricted to the historic core and Marjan Forest Park. Although not far from each other, not even these two dominant urban areas are mutually connected. Historic center of Split is a World Heritage site listed by UNESCO. Tourism, which is emerging as a dominant economic force in urban development of Split, will escalate the current crisis between the center and the periphery and cause an extreme congestion in the center, bringing in danger city’s identity, center’s residential uses and accessibility of historic public spaces, and eventually the long term prospects of tourism industry itself. The answer to the problems of the city core we find at the periphery: by decentralization, but not in the sense of forming an alternative center, but through a polycentric treatment of spaces between the center and the periphery. Consideration of historic suburb of Manuš as an extension of the center also establishes a vivid urban link to the main roads that connect two major urban attractors: Marjan to the west and the University campus in the east of the city. The road between them could be transformed into a route which reflects the identity of its urban environment and creates platform where their culture and subculture can be expressed. The goal is a broad urban structure that would prevent the identity of Split from staying behind, locked in a superficial quasi-historical identity, and would instead allow interlinked dispersed urban nodes to build a dynamic, living identity of the city. Instead of economic and social forces determining the physical space, form would again become the primary carrier of change, of the idea of the city.

historic urban core; public space; Split; tourism; urban form

nije evidentirano