Recounting Skopje. Skopje 2014: Symbolic and Citizens' Narratives

Focusing on the neoliberal symbolic urban reconstruction of the Macedonian capital, known as “Skopje 2014”, the PhD work deals with urban space production through storytelling. Embracing the criticism put forward in the political, cultural and social debates that have spun around Skopje’s reconstruction, the artistic-based research sought to relate and analyze the symbolic narratives of “Skopje 2014” and the vernacular and civic narratives of Skopje and locate overlapping, divergent, complementary or conflictual aspects of their respective narrative structures. Informed by subjective citizens’ stories and experiences of the urban as well as binaural sonic observations of the city, the research findings were presented in the form of an interactive audio guided walk through the city. The thesis is organized in three chapters, preceded by an INTRODUCTION and followed by a CONCLUSION. CHAPTER ONE sets the theoretical context, presents the case study “Skopje 2014”, and discusses the research design. The audio guided walk is presented in CHAPTER TWO. Its content consists of five tracks, or subchapters, conceptualized and named as five different aspects of the city: THE MODERNIST CITY, THE FEMALE CITY, THE MEMORY CITY, THE POSTCOMMUNIST CITY and THE TOURIST CITY, according to the discourses related to these tracks. CHAPTER THREE, the EPILOGUE, is the final discussion of the research project, in which several meta-conclusions are drawn