A planned socialist city for 120,000 people, across the river, and much better than its reputation.
Half of Zagreb’s built area is on the far side of the Sava, almost no visitors cross, and the half nobody sees is one of the more interesting pieces of twentieth-century urbanism in Europe.
Why it exists
Zagreb after 1945 had a housing shortage and a flood problem. The Sava’s flood plain to the south was empty because it flooded.
Construction of Novi Zagreb began in the late 1950s, and the catastrophic flood of October 1964 — which killed at least seventeen people, displaced around 40,000 and inundated much of the south of the city — settled the argument. Flood defences went in and building accelerated.
The result is a planned city of around 120,000 people, laid out as a series of naselja — neighbourhood units — each with its own school, clinic, shops and green space, connected by tram.
What to look at
The blocks themselves. Yugoslav modernism at its most confident: long slabs, deep balconies, raw concrete and brick, with an unusual amount of variation between architects because the units were designed separately.
Mamutica in Travno — “the mammoth”. Built in the 1970s, it is around 240 metres long, seventeen storeys, and holds roughly 5,000 people in a single building. It is the largest residential building in Croatia and one of the largest in this part of Europe.
The space between. This is what the plan was actually about. The blocks stand in genuine parkland, with mature trees, playgrounds and paths, at a density far lower than the buildings suggest. It is green, quiet and full of children, and it is nothing like the estates the word “socialist housing” conjures for most western visitors.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, the largest museum building in Croatia, deliberately sited here.
Bundek, a lake and park by the river, restored in 2006 and now one of the best public spaces in the city.
The Zagreb Fair — the trade fair complex, with a series of remarkable 1950s and 60s pavilions by different national and Croatian architects, several of them protected and several of them decaying.
The honest view
It is not pretty in a way that photographs well, and there is no single sight to aim at. Some of the building stock is in poor condition and the ground floors of the shopping units have not aged well.
It is also genuinely well planned, well used and pleasant to be in, and the difference between how it reads on arrival and how it reads after an hour is the whole point of going.
If you have any interest in how cities were made in the second half of the twentieth century, this is a better afternoon than another baroque street.
Practical
Tram 6 or 14 from the centre, fifteen minutes. Tram 7 runs east–west across it.
Free, obviously — people live here. Behave accordingly.
Combine with the Museum of Contemporary Art and Bundek for a half-day.
