publications

Split is not one city but three different cities in one. Each of them exists in its own reality, with different boundaries, problems and identities. Their mutual misalignment is the key obstacle to the future development of the entire metropolitan area.

The first Split is the mental one. In the narrowest sense, it is the city between Poljud and the Palace. The second Split is the administrative one — formally bounded by lines that make little urban, geographic or functional sense. The third Split is the lived one. It is the metropolitan area that stretches from Trogir to Podstrana, connected by daily commuting yet torn apart by administrative barriers.

This publication is motivated by the need for a professional and political debate that, through the cooperation of these four cities and three municipalities together with institutions and citizens, would finally produce THE MISSING PLAN — a spatial development plan for the metropolitan area of Solin – Kaštela – Trogir – Split.

The publication “Metro Split – Trogir” addresses the backbone of the future transport system of metropolitan Split. The authors develop the idea of a light city rail (metro) connecting the “Sv. Jeronim” airport with the new central station, the ferry port and the urban centres from Trogir to Stobreč. Together with a technical feasibility study, the project envisages a metro on the columns of the “magistrala” with all stations dimensioned and a terminal located at the airport. The proposal is motivated by current road congestion and offers a vision of integrated and sustainable mobility appropriate to a 21st-century Mediterranean city.

The publication is the result of a design-and-planning exercise prompted by the lack of structured debate on the spatial development of the Split metropolitan area in the near future — more precisely the absence of planning and urbanistic theses on the general and specific possibilities of spatial development grounded in a holistic, analytical approach. Despite a large number of piecemeal proposals announcing the development of Split in recent years, in the general cacophony and dissonance between different actors the direction remains entirely unclear: the collective, generational intent that answers the question — where will this city and its metropolitan area find themselves in 2040?

The Split architect Ante Kuzmanić — the author of significant projects and the recipient of numerous awards for his realisations — uses the book “The City of Split and Architect Ante Kuzmanić” to record more than thirty years of architectural practice, to re-examine the experiences and values gained from it, and to identify the actions and strategies that need to be carried out in the future. This book is therefore not a standard monograph (most of the texts were written by Kuzmanić himself), but is at the same time a monograph and a theoretical text on selected urbanistic and architectural phenomena, while also bearing the marks of memoir prose. The book is organised into thematically distinct chapters in which, alongside a profiled common topic, Kuzmanić’s views on architectural practice are presented together with his selected realisations and projects. The introductory texts to each chapter are written by Vedran Mimica, and the detailed accounts of individual realisations and projects are written by the book’s editor Sanja Matijević Barčot. It is a book about the city of Split that, through Kuzmanić’s view of decades of urban planning and design, offers answers to numerous questions as well as visions for resolving them.