Recognizing Principles of Integrated Urban Planning in Historical Development of the City: A Case Study of Banja Luka

Abstract

Integrated urban planning is based on the necessity of constantly adapting to complex social processes and applying methodology that supports multidisciplinarity, flexibility, and adaptability. In trying to achieve future visions and to meet trends of urbanization, inherited contextual values are often forgotten. Although the impression that everything was better before is based on nostalgia, the urban development history should still be analyzed. This article analyzes principles of integrated urban planning by reviewing twentieth-century development of Banja Luka. The objective is to recognize, to evaluate, and to adapt those principles to the contemporary context and to reconsider them in the future. The analysis shows the positive and negative values of the development, which reveals that the principles of integrated urban planning were present in each period. As their singularity and fragmentation without the systematic integration was not efficient enough, recommendations for improving integrated urban planning in the specific context are given.

Applying Historical Measurement Methods to Study the Interaction between Cultural Identity and Historical Development

“…Cultural identity is not only a matter of self-consciousness and self-speech but also a matter of getting along with different lifeworlds and value systems [11]. It is always in the process of mutual conflict and absorption of one and many, same and different [12][13]. Cultural identity is the foundation of historical development, and only by generating a sense of identification with the history and culture of the motherland.…”

Linear Landscape. The Idea of Activation of the Old Banja Luka - Čelinac Road as a Narrative Itinerary

“…In this sense, the urban territory of Banja Luka is not unfamiliar to contemporary urban processes found in the European city and in other contexts. Those are metropolisation; urban sprawl -also erratic localization of functions- [1,2]; increased traffic, with consequent over-representation of infrastructure or demand for sustainable mobility [3,4,5,6]; loss of identity [7 , 8, 9] in a context that is sometimes predatory towards "land resources'', as well as the threat to biodiversity and serious deterioration of urban environment [10,11]. As we will see in the case study of a suburban space, urbanization patterns correspond to the concept of "horizontal metropolis" developed by Viganò, Cavalieri and Barcelloni where borders, boundaries and flows blur [12].…”