Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council awarded to Dr. Tamara Bjažić Klarin for research on housing in Yugoslavia

Dr. Tamara Bjažić Klarin, scientific advisor at the Institute of Art History, has been awarded the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant, one of the most competitive funding programs for experienced scientists. In competition of 2,262 applicants, the project is approved among 327 projects selected for funding. Confirmed by the Humanities Panel of the European Research Council, the project will be conducted over five years with a budget of 2,370,438 euros.

The project titled „Right to Housing: The Production of Spaces of Everyday Life in Yugoslavia (1945–1991)“, which will be implemented at the Institute of Art History, was selected among 103 out of 733 proposals from the field of social sciences and humanities applied for the competition. This is the tenth project of the European Research Council that has been awarded to scientists from Croatian scientific organizations and, after the AdriArchCult project led by Prof. Dr. Jasenka Gudelj, it is the second ERC project in Croatia in the field of art history.

Under the acronym Housing.Yu, the project will explore the production of everyday living spaces in Yugoslavia (1945–1991), which still constitutes about 60–70% of the current housing stock of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. The project will employ a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and methodologically innovative approach to the actions of the state, urban planners, architects, contractors and citizen-users. The project aims to understand the critical phenomena of mass housing in the socialist state, including its production, policies, estate development, citizen participation and related knowledge exchange between Western and Eastern Europe.

Yugoslavia carried out three political-economic and housing reforms with an aim to generate legislation and implementation, as well as material and professional frameworks for mass housing, experimenting with different forms of standards, financing, organization of production, and ownership. In these overlapping processes, it relied on the inherited pre-war and then-contemporary practices from the East and the West, mediated by dynamic knowledge exchanges. Despite the ideological differences of these three systems, they shared the principle of social justice and public responsibility in the issue of social security of citizens. These reforms led to an increase in housing standards, the quality and number of housing units, and the standards of development of housing estates.

The project will include public forums and panel discussions, film screenings, guest lectures by experts in the field of housing, transfer of knowledge workshops on the topic of digital humanities, two international scientific conferences and numerous other activities. The great impact will undoubtedly be the publications, books and an open access digital repository for the dissemination of knowledge about housing. It will be assured by the further development of the information-system established as part of the scientific competitive projects by Dr. Ljiljana Kolešnik ARTNET and GLOBE Exchange that were conducted at the Institute of Art History and funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. The expected project results warrant a social impact at a time when Europe is facing yet another housing crisis and broader social and environmental challenges.

Along with the project leader Dr. Tamara Bjažić Klarin, the interdisciplinary research team consists of art historians, historians and architects Dr. Ljiljana Kolešnik from the Institute of Art History, Prof. Dr. Igor Duda from the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism at the Juraj Dobrila University in Pula, Dr. Lidija Butković Mićin from the Departement of Art History at the University of Zadar, Dr. Martina Malešič from the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana and Dr. Mejrema Zatrić-Šahović from the International University of Sarajevo. The project will employ six doctoral and postdoctoral students through public competition. Member of the project team is also art historian Irena Šimić, who will provide support in application of open science concepts.

The official announcement and results of the ERC Consolidator Grant 2024 under the program Horizon Europe are available here. List of all selected researchers and projects here.