The establishment of alternative model of urbanism for the fragmented city of Skopje Essay

This dissertation is about establishing alternative model of urbanism for the fragmented city of Skopje.
The contemporary city of Skopje is dialectical, it is both thesis and antithesis. Its urban-scape is a result of contradictions of its society and systems a diffuse result of unfinished layers.
Throughout history, different concepts have left their marks on the city web, making Skopje a small and intense conglomerate of diverse ideologies, none of which was influential or long-lasting enough to establish a homogenous city structure. Their physical traces tell stories about the city as a dynamic 'living organism', stories about the 'active processes' of development, shrinking and transformation.
The thesis, departs with the presumption that the current state of the city is an outcome of non-context based utopian standardization and control over the city through the past exercises of urban concentrations.
When exploring the potential of the fragmented reality of Skopje for establishing new urban quality of the city, the research itself relies on the principles of the newly emerged landscape urbanism approach in the planning discourse.
While the architecture traditionally operates through an ethics of stasis, wholeness and timelessness, and the urban planning operates via control, determinism and hierarchy, the landscape urbanism offers ethics of temporal, complexity and soft control with a commensurable spatial and organizational repertoire.
In reference to that, this thesis implies the contemporary landscape, with its capacity for inclusive multiplicity and pluralism, as a medium for spatial formation that invokes the functioning matrix of tissues that organize not only objects and spaces that constitute the city, but even more importantly engages dynamic processes and events that move through them.
Accordingly, a field condition is established within the city of Skopje, based on the relational forces and flows between the physical urban fragments and residual urban voids, referred to as post-urban fragments, which constitute the contemporary urban state.
They are all structured in an open flexible system of continuous urban landscapes, which slide conceptually and physically through different physical and open parts of the city, bringing all of them together, while still respecting their autonomy and identity.
The continuous urban landscapes though, are not implied only as a model of urbanism, but more importantly as a model for processes that happen in the city. Their performative characteristics, which are an outcome of the site's capacity, become new way of activating space and producing urban effects, which is beyond the traditional space making with definite physical forms.
As a system that has gone through dissolutions and reconstructions, Skopje had become a system of constant disturbances that lead to its discontinuous development. Therefore, the goal of programming the urban surface of Skopje, through the matter of performative landscapes, is to increase its capacity for accommodating changing demands and unforeseen circumstances. The disintegrated and unfinished urban system of Skopje has to become adaptive, fluid and responsive system able to take disturbances, without qualitatively changing to another regime. In this way, we can establish a city capable of extending its own continuity a resilient city!