From Transition to Integration: New Prospects for the European Home

Changes in society can be reflected in dwellings, as part of the process and physical expression of living. In this sense, the long term transition of the political and economic systems of the former socialist countries has affected the design of apartments quite dramatically. Although, in a greater part, houses remained an unchanged heritage from the past, and certain models continued to be repeated, their perception, use and practice were increasingly changed as a reflection of changed socio‐cultural models. Former schemes of social housing that were implemented from top to bottom, meaning spatial functional and social unification around a common ideal, essentially changed due to the pluralist and conflicting interests of their residents. While different values, backgrounds and life styles demonstrated decentralised tendencies, there remained the question of the mode of convergence of a variety of diversities, to enable coherence within a community. How could differences be expressed and how could one find the basis for their integration at the same time? Can a community be composed of an aggregation of individual inputs? Is it possible to create an integrated European city out of disparate housing? These questions are not only a metaphor of the long lasting process of the integration of different European heritages and practices, but are also essential to understanding the fundamental condition of living in residential units where the local and global challenges of European citizens meet. This research will be developed on two levels, first, through the transformation of a residential area taking as an example, the buildings originating from the 1950s in a settlement within the city of Skopje, second, by the description of two conflicting models of integration performed in two contemporary films. Thus the process of transition of the residential area and possible points of integration will be demonstrated. Searching for a shared language for the contemporary apartment, this investigation will summarize the new prospects for the apartment arising from both the contradictory processes within a defined spatial frame and contradictory transformations of the existing spatial frame of the apartment