Speaker
Description
Although the direct role of the public sector in housing provision in Croatia has decreased significantly since the end of the socialist system, much like in other post-socialist countries, public policies continue to influence housing provision, often through indirect mechanisms, working within broader post-socialist welfare regimes. Permissive land use and development policies in Croatia may be examined in this light, as components of a housing system which is geared toward ensuring broad homeownership and is based on small-scale forms of housing provision. In this paper, we argue that certain spatial governance and planning practices in contemporary Croatia serve as tools aimed at ensuring ample supply of construction land, with the objective of increasing the affordability of homeownership. While such practices can provide security to some households in the context of reduced post-socialist welfare systems (Mandič, 2018), on the other hand, they can be considered as mere adaptations to the suboptimal situation of a “super-homeownership trap” (Lux and Sunega, 2020), perpetuating social and spatial inequalities, and functioning as potent drivers of urban sprawl.
Despite the wide acknowledgement of the reduced quality of the built environment of Croatia resulting from urban development patterns since the 1990s, the dynamics of the housing regime as a driver of its urban development patterns remain understudied. In this paper we aim to identify the relationship between contemporary Croatian spatial planning practices and the broader housing system. The paper builds upon the comparative housing regime literature, particularly on the strand focused on housing provision forms (Barlow and Duncan, 1994; Arbaci, 2007). We seek to situate the observed spatial governance and planning practices within the framework of housing regime theory.
We argue that the housing provision forms prevalent in post-socialist Croatia represent a specific, path-dependent continuation of the small-scale segment of the housing provision system of socialist Yugoslavia. Small-scale forms of housing provision were present during the socialist period, in both formal and informal variants, often self-built by families, and consisting in large part of secondary housing. This mode of provision existed alongside large-scale social rental housing development, the former responding to housing demand in places where the latter could not satisfy it. When large-scale, publicly led housing provision ceased during the 1990s, small-scale provision remained as the dominant form.
In the context of widespread homeownership following the “giveaway privatization” of the housing stock, combined with the long-established small-scale forms of housing provision, we argue that land use policies in post-socialist Croatia evolved with the implicit purpose of stimulating individual and small-scale housing construction as the primary mode of housing production. This is achieved through generous zoning of greenfield land for construction at the level of municipalities, as well as by the absence of public land value capture mechanisms in local and national practices. Comparing European housing regimes, these characteristics were, curiously, fund to be most similar to Southern European housing systems (Allen et al., 2004).
Finally, the paper evaluates the impact of the relationship between housing systems and spatial planning on the environmental, social and economic sustainability of the built environment of Croatia. Containment of urban sprawl and the promotion of compact and sustainable urbanisation are objectives of current and upcoming national spatial and housing policies, as well as EU environmental policies. If the present patterns of urbanisation do result from deeply embedded and path-dependent characteristics of housing systems, as we argue, it would need to be taken into account in the design of public policies as a severe structural challenge to achieving the objectives of more sustainable urbanisation.
References
Allen, J., J. Barlow, J. Leal, T. Maloutas, and L. Padovani. 2004. Housing and Welfare in Southern Europe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Arbaci, S., 2007. “Ethnic Segregation, Housing Systems and Welfare Regimes in Europe.” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 7(4), 401-433.
Barlow, J., and S. Duncan. 1994. Success and Failure in Housing Provision: European Systems Compared. Throwbridge: Pergamon.
Lux, M., A. Kährik, and P. Sunega. 2012. “Housing Restitution and Privatisation: Both Catalysts and Obstacles to the Formation of Private Rental Housing in the Czech Republic and Estonia.” International Journal of Housing Policy, 12(2), 137–158.
Mandič, S. 2018. “The changing role of housing assets in post-socialist countries.“ Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 25(2), 213-226.
| Keywords | Housing Regimes; Housing Provision; Spatial Planning; Post-socialist Countries; Urban Sprawl |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
