The Right Balance, a Video Animation

My second animation, The Right Balance (Pravo razmerje, 2013), was something I developed between 2012 and 2013 and was a result of my research on the Slovenian city of Slovenj Gradec, which was mainly focused on the local self-sufficiency of that city. It was after doing this research that I created the public sculpture and public breakfast The Golden Egg, which I describe in section 10.2, Animals in the City. Here I will present my second artwork, which was also derived from research on Slovenj Gradec and its self-sufficiency.

Slovenj Gradec: a Garden City?

Slovenj Gradec is the main administrative centre for the municipality of Slovenj Gradec, and is similar to many smaller cities across Slovenia which are located far from larger centres and left to transition in a hinterland of greenery. A comparison with the well-known Garden City of E. Howard, which I heard many times during my research of Slovenj Gradec, is only partially appropriate. All too often we compare every smaller country town with this concept, so I took the comparison between Slovenj Gradec and Garden City and deconstructed it in my animation with a critique of Garden City by American writer and activist Jane Jacobs, who put it forth in her famous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.¹⁷⁸

178Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York, 1961.

Polonca Lovšin, The Right Balance, video still HD, duration 13 min 38 sec, 2013

Slovenj Gradec is a city with a rich history and lies in a valley near the Austrian border. In the period after the independence of Slovenia and the opening of the market it experienced significant changes. The collapse of its industry began before that, most dramatically in the nearby city of Ravne, which had grown in tandem with the steel industry. With Slovenia’s independence (1991) there were high hopes because of the encouragement of private companies. The company Prevent is the famous “big story” from Slovenj Gradec, as it is a symbol of the wild privatisation of social enterprises in Slovenia and the immense increase of wealth for the new owners. The collapse of the big company, which began bankruptcy procedures in August 2010, had the greatest impact on Slovenj Gradec, where many jobs were lost, while smaller subsidiaries survived.¹⁷⁹

After the market was opened to foreign investment, the shopping centre at the edge of the town, full of large foreign retail chains (Intersport, Hervis, Hofer, Interspar) slowly started causing many of the small stores in the town to close down. The large number of closed stores in the very centre of the old town, which I photographed and showed in my animation, creates a sad atmosphere as the streets take over the function of trade and socialising, and the town is slowly being transformed into a commuter town.

Even the marketplace, which is the centre of the town’s social life, is partially closed, with just two vegetable stands open on only certain days of the week. A few farmers who sell home-grown vegetables have moved to the front of the Mercator Center supermarket, a Slovenian supermarket chain, to the so-called shopping centre. The town is full of half-finished construction projects, an unfinished music school in the centre of the town, a half-finished youth incubator, and all of this is tied to both the economic crisis and the collapse of the Slovenian construction industry between 2008 and 2010.

In any case, the wealth of the town lies in its natural resources, in the green hinterland of the town, the surrounding hills and forests, and the clean drinking water which flows from Uršlja mountain (1699m). The vegetable gardens around the private houses, which are characteristic for all of Slovenia, including Slovenj Gradec, have always provided a great deal of

self-sufficiency to the residents. The town also has a few smaller apartment block neighbourhoods, and to meet the needs of the residents who live there allotment gardening sites developed at nine locations in the town. Self-sufficiency had also been an important part of the political agenda for Slovenj Gradec in previous years, but this was more theoretical in nature, and not actually realised in practice. In 2012 a new mayor was elected, and as one of his goals he committed himself to organising the allotment gardening issue.

179 Ivan Praprotnik, Slovenj Gradec je izgubil vse, a večina hčerinskih družb Prevent Globala bo preživela (Slovenj Gradec has lost everything, but most of the Prevent Global subsidiaries will survive), Delo newspaper, 5.7.2011.

http://www.delo.si/gospodarstvo/podjetja/slovenj-gradec-je-izgubil-vse-a-vecina-hcerinskih-druzb-prevent-globala-bo-prezivela.html (2.5.2014).

Allotment Gardening in Slovenj Gradec

Allotment gardening is a widespread practice in Slovenj Gradec, but like Ljubljana and other Slovenian cities, it was not organised by the municipality. The city did not have any up-to-date records on the gardeners and did not collect rent. As a result of several new investments and the expected expansion of the town in certain areas, in 2011 the illegal allotments in the district of Ozara were removed, a place where allotment gardening had developed in the most informal shape possible, with the occupation of larger plots of land and the construction of buildings which exceeded size limits and design regulations. In that time the gardeners worked in different conditions, without garden sheds and with them. Some of the buildings, just like at many other locations in Slovenia, such as the illegal allotment gardening site in Črnuče, grew into smaller houses, or cottages. At all locations together there were 250 allotment gardeners, which the municipality gradually took records of. Gradually, the allotments were re-designed and the allotment sites came to be in accordance with the standards of the Community Urban Eco Garden in Borova Vas, Maribor (fences, pathways, a children’s playground, raised garden beds for people with disabilities), and according to the example of Ljubljana’s regulated allotments (unified garden sheds).

Polonca Lovšin,The Right Balance, 2013 10 Collages, 30 x 45cm

Collage No. 9

From a conversation with architect Boštjan Temniker, who was hired by the municipality of Slovenj Gradec to organise the allotment gardening issue, it was clear that with small steps the municipality was getting closer to an exemplary arrangement for allotment gardening. Temniker says: “Even here we are dealing with allotment gardening in phases, as we don’t have the personnel or finances to do it any other way. After twenty years the town finally has records on approximately 250 tenants, among which most have been cooperative and want the issue to be settled. Even though we have adopted an ordinance and rulebook, we are trying to be as humane as possible in the field. Most gardeners have a 50m² allotment. A little less than one third (seventy) of the gardeners also have a garden shed – and here the areas of the allotments are a little larger than 120m². Until now we have completely organised two locations of about ninety allotments all together. As for the gardeners from the Ozara area, we have moved them to Sotočje near Rahtel.”¹⁸⁰ The permissible garden sheds will have an area of 2m x 3m and will be constructed by local tradesmen. Leases will be from one to five years with the possibility of extension, dependent on the development plans of the municipality. Only organic gardening will be permitted.

Every Carrot Matters, Every Egg Matters

All the circumstances surrounding Slovenj Gradec sound familiar compared to the situations in which smaller towns found themselves, both in Slovenia and abroad. The orientation towards locally grown food and an increase in the self-sufficiency of the city could be an alternative model for new employment opportunities, for better family economics, for a healthy lifestyle, and also to provide a direction for the ecological development of the city and region. In the example of the initiative Incredible Edible¹⁸¹ from the town of Todmorden in England it is clear that an important network of initiatives oriented towards local food can develop from local initiatives. The people there self-organised and did everything to create new possibilities for the development of the town out of simple activities created around local production, and this was done both for profit and to raise the quality of life. Initiatives to produce local food are connected with their slogan of “community spirit”, which is in the simple idea of producing one’s own food, breeding bees, breeding chickens for fresh eggs (Every Egg Matters), taking care of community spaces, cooking with local recipes, organising public events (public kitchens) and education with the inclusion of kindergartens and schools. The initiatives within organisations such as Back to Basics, Every Egg Matters, and community spirit motivate local residents to solve problems by themselves through self-organisation and cooperation. From its humble beginnings in 2007 focused on local food, Incredible Edible¹⁸² has become a movement which, through

180 Boštjan Temniker is an architect who was employed by the city of Slovenj Gradec in the spring of 2012. His mission was to regulate urban gardening in Slovenj Gradec. I met him for the first time in Slovenj Gradec in June 2012, while doing research.

During the month of April 2014, he updated me on the current state of urban gardening in Slovenj Gradec.

181 http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/ (21.9.2014).

182 http://incredibleediblenetwork.org.uk/ (2.5.2014).

self-organisation and the production of local food, has created changes for the better within the community and wider region, as well as encouraging similar initiatives elsewhere.

Of course, Incredible Edible is just one among initiatives which have appeared in Europe, the UK, and the USA in the last two decades. Transition Towns, Eco Villages and Incredible Edible are just among the most visible. The town of Todmorden, due to its similarities with Slovenj Gradec (in terms of its distance from larger cities, size, and number of inhabitants), is a fairly realistic comparison with the Slovenian town. In addition to the self-sufficiency of the town with the production of vegetables, the breeding or use of domestic farm animals in the city is also booming. For example, in Todmorden they created the initiative Every Egg Matters, which promotes the breeding of egg-laying hens in public and private spaces, for a fresh egg every day. In modern times, domestic farm animals, like other aspects of rural life, have been pushed out of the city, but in today’s self-sufficient city they have once again regained their position.

The future of smaller towns scattered in the rural countryside is not based on modelling

themselves after the larger urban centres, but rather in making full use of all of their advantages.

Unlike larger cities, these advantages have already been given, meaning that the relationship between the urban and the rural is more balanced, and it is only necessary to recognise that as an advantage. At this moment in time, the self-sufficiency vision of Slovenj Gradec and similar smaller towns is closer to the right balance than many places and large cities, and that was the reason for the title of the work The Right Balance. As the Bohn & Viljoen Architects wrote: “There is a paradox though: while China modernizes and urbanizes, eliminating its urban agriculture, at the very same time in New York, space is being sought out in an effort to re-establish urban agriculture. In both situations proponents of the change believe they are creating desirable cities for the future. The reality may be, that we are witnessing a rebalancing of the relationship between cities and agriculture.”¹⁸³

183Bohn & Viljoen Architects, Laboratories for Urban Agriculture: Havana to Milwaukee, published in Hands-on Urbanism 1850-2012, The Right to Green, ed. Elke Krasny, Architecturzentrum Wien, Vienna, 2012, pg. 228.