Here I will present different forms of allotments which appeared in Ljubljana in the past, the first example being from before the Second World War. These examples are not the
5 THE ILLEGAL (from the bottom up) AS AN INDICATOR OF STRUCTURAL INCONSISTENCIES OF THE FORMAL SYSTEM (from the top down)
How was it possible that allotments in Ljubljana in the past occupied public land without major problems? And it was not only allotment gardeners, but also individuals with unsolved housing problems who occupied this public land, some of them building their illegal single-family residences homes since the 1950s, but most intensively in the 1980s.
If we look at the “informal” as an answer to what official formal solutions are unable to solve, then informal spatial practices are also an indicator of the structural inconsistencies of formal management. In the case of illegal residential buildings in Ljubljana the circumstances have been presented very well by spatial sociologist Drago Kos in his study The Rationality of Informal Spaces (Racionalnost neformalnih prostorov).74
Typical cases of illegal and informal individual housing in Ljubljana in the 1980s can be even an aid in understanding illegal allotment gardening. The analyses presented in the above mentioned study help this research reflect on wide-spread illegal and informal spatial practices within a Slovenian and Yugoslavian context. The practical examples, which were chosen for this analysis have shown various models of how official and formal suggestions meet with informal solutions. The most interesting example of informal individual residential buildings is the largest illegal residential neighbourhood in Ljubljana, Rakova Jelša. Towards the end of the 1930’s low-quality social housing of immigrants to Ljubljana began to appear in this area. “The actors in this story of informal residential practices undoubtedly confirm the suspicion that it is a difficult residential situation, that is to say there is an existential pressure, which faces the unresponsive formal residential system, the fundamental mobilisation factor for informal work [...]. Stimulation for illegal building practices is an almost complete ‘physical’ absence of formal regulations in concrete spatial situations. In fact, illegal building practices rarely run into real resistance, i.e.
the prompt reactions of the administrative spatial management apparatus. This kind of practice therefore accelerates the epidemic of this occurrence.”75
From this practical example we can conclude that the illegal occupation of spaces and informal construction appears when it strikes against the unresponsiveness of the official system.
In the case of Rakova Jelša, as well as in the case of the illegal allotment garden sites in Žale, Črnuče, and Barje, for many people the obvious absence of control also meant a quiet acceptance on the part of the city. In the case of the Črnuče allotments, where many of the rules were violated, mostly in terms of the sizes of plots and garden sheds which grew into
74 Drago Kos is a sociologist and professor of environmental and spatial sociology at the University of Ljubljana and Maribor.
He is head of the Centre for Spatial Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana. Among his many influential texts is the book Racionalnost neformalnih prostorov (Rationality of Informal Spaces, 1993) where he presents an analyses of illegal and informal building strategies in Ljubljana. I have referred to this text several times throughout my thesis, most specifically to the chapter Neformalno nelegalno vrtičkarstvo v suburbanem okolju (Informal illegal allotments in the suburban environment), where he analyses the illegal allotment gardening settlement in the district of Črnuče.
75 Ibid.
smaller houses, the formal system began to experience the fear that a new illegal residential neighbourhood would develop at this allotment garden site.
As Elke Krasny writes, in Vienna around 1918, and in a similar atmosphere of crisis, workers began gardening at the city’s limits, where 60,000 allotments appeared. Due to the additional residential crisis the gardeners began to arrange smaller residences on their allotments. This is where the “settlement movement” originated.
However in Vienna we are talking about a well organised group of people who, prior to that, united themselves in an allotment gardening association which contributed to allotment gardening becoming a constitutional part of social rights within Austrian Legislation (in July, 1919). Gradually, out of the allotment gardening association, the “Siedlerbewegung” movement began to develop, and it became a paradigmatic example of the negotiations between the formal and informal; between illegal activist appropriation and the dichotomy of social self-help and municipal administration. They developed a system of non-profit community ownership through their experience of community work. Every one of the participants had to contribute between 1,000 and 3,000 hours of unpaid work for the construction of their house and common or communal infrastructure.76
The method of using communal work was also a common practice in the socialist system of former Yugoslavia, and therefore also in Slovenia. For example, there was one form called
“youth work brigades”; organised youth work actions which took place on a voluntary basis immediately after the Second World War. They carried out works of public interest, such as the construction of roads and other kinds of infrastructure. One example, almost entirely built through work brigades, was Cesta bratstva in enotnosti (The Brotherhood and Unity Highway), a highway that stretched over 1,180km across former Yugoslavia. Another example of volunteer public works, similar to the volunteer work requirement for the abovementioned Vienna
movement, was the construction of the abovementioned new socialist city of Velenje, officially opened in 1959.77
If I return to illegal allotment gardening in Ljubljana, we can also understand the informal spontaneous activities of allotment gardeners as providing a kind of relief to the system.
Kos writes: “Perhaps it is difficult for westerners to understand that such a degree of illegal construction of allotment gardening is even possible. Allowing this also speaks to the laxity of the network between the market and urbanistic planner, which was characteristic for all socialist systems. What made the Yugoslavian system, or the Slovenian subsystem, unique from this
76 Elke Krasny, Hands-on Urbanism 1850-2012, The Right to Green, ed. Elke Krasny, Architecturzentrum Wien, Vienna, 2012, pg. 20-21.
77 Rok Poles, Velenje sprehod skozi mesto moderne (Velenje, a walk through a modern city), Mestna občina Velenje, Velenje 2013, pg. 13.
point of view is mainly the fact that it tolerated spontaneous, informal reactions to the blockades of the formal system.”78
78 Drago Kos, Racionalnost neformalnih prostorov (Rationality of informal spaces), Fakulteta za družbene vede, Univerza v Ljubljani, 1993, pg. 214.
Samograditeljska vrtičkarska arhitektura (Self-built Allotment Gardening Architecture) Nina Vastl, Vrtičkarstvo, specialistična naloga, Fakulteta za arhitekturo, Univeza v Ljubljani, 2000.
(Nina Vastl, Allotment Gardening, specialised postgraduate research, Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana, 2000.)
Polonca Lovšin, Between the Urban and the Rural, 2014 13 collages, 29.7 x 42 cm
Collage No. 8
6 THE FORMAL TOP-DOWN APPROACH IN ARRANGING URBAN GARDENING IN