Project Description

This interactive map is part of a larger project entitled Rijeka in Flux: Borders and Urban Change after World War II. This broader project asks: how did the relocation of the border between Yugoslavia and Italy after the Second World War impact the city of Rijeka/Fiume, which the border had previously bisected? The objective of the four-year study will be to inquire into and record the various and interconnected ways in which the city was affected by this transfer, and based on these findings, to derive a methodology that can be fruitfully applied to other case studies. Scholars in the historical research team and their students will investigate different aspects of the city’s evolution, which they will share both through traditional scholarly outlets, and through the interactive online Rijeka/Fiume map. In so doing, they will generate what David Bodenhamer has called a “deep map,” that is: “an open, visual, and experiential space, immersing users in a virtual world in which uncertainty, ambiguity, and contingency are ever present”. The digital humanities team will conduct network analyses to the database supporting the map to generate new insights about change in Rijeka. The mapping team will develop a mobile phone app that will allow users to engage with the multiple layers of the city’s history in situ.

Scholars have documented the significant exodus of the Italian population from Istria back to Italy, although their findings continue to be controversial and disputed due to their sensitive nature. Much, however, remains to be investigated. What impact did this exodus have on the city from a spatial and cultural perspective? In particular, what happened to the property that was left behind? What took the place of the traditional Italian elite? To what extent did Italian culture and language continue to play a role in Rijeka? What space did Croatian and other language groups occupy, and what role did they play, following the end of the Habsburg Empire, after the transition to Italy, then to Yugoslavia and, finally, to independent Croatia? The impact of the replacement of the Italian political and economic system by the socialist Yugoslav regime has significant implications for all these questions, and opens up new ones. What effect did the imposition of a socialist property regime have both on the built inheritance and on new urban development? How did the city’s incorporation into a new economic system change its economic profile, and with what consequences? These questions are also valid for the 19th century, with various changes in administration during the Habsburg era, and even more with the dramatic transitions of the 20th century, leading to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia and the establishment of Croatian independence. What impact did geopolitics and ideology have on the city? In seeking the answers to these questions, other questions will emerge. This iterative process will allow us to draw an inventory of types of change and continuity, which can then be applied to other contexts.

“Rijeka in Flux” will contribute to our understanding of the consequences of the Second World War and its settlement for European societies. The map will help us to research the effects of the transition, and the complex history of Rijeka through the centuries, using a tool that allows for different voices to contribute, learn and develop knowledge of the city. In addition to our own research, others who wish to share their knowledge of the city can also make contributions to the map, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of Rijeka past and present.

This project will contribute to our understanding of the consequences of the Second World War and its settlement for European societies.  The map will help us to research the effects of the transition, and the complex history of Rijeka through the centuries, using a tool that allows for different voices to contribute, learn and develop knowledge of the city. In addition to our research, which we will contribute to the map, others who wish to share their knowledge of the city can also make contributions to the map, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of Rijeka past and present.

This study will both examine the attempts to engineer homogeneous communities in the newly acquired territories while also revealing the more complicated realities that prevailed in borderlands. It also provides a unique opportunity to examine the intersection of nationalist politics with the ideological and geopolitical dimensions of the Cold War. As such, this project is of interest to the fields of international relations, geography, political sociology, and the interdisciplinary fields of nationalism studies and Cold War studies. It can also contribute to the reconciliation and the improvement of relations between certain European communities and states, which continue to be strained by deep historical wounds.

This project is generously funded by an Insight Grant (2018-2020) from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and builds on the “Cities and Regions in Transition: the case of Rijeka/Fiume” project, which was funded by an Insight Development Grant (2014-2016) and Connection
Grant (2017), also from SSHRC.

Principal Investigator: Brigitte Le Normand

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Brigitte Le Normand is Assistant Professor in the department of History at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her publications on urban planning in socialist Yugoslavia include Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.) She is currently completing a monograph on the relationship between Yugoslavia and its migrant workers in Europe during the Cold War. Her research fellowships include a Max Weber fellowship (2007) and a Humboldt fellowship (2018). She is the principle investigator of the project Rijeka in Flux: Borders and Urban Change after World War II. Aside from managing the project as a whole, and coordinating the team of historians, she is carrying out research on the impact of the border and regime change in 1945 on the flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas in and out of the city. She is particularly interested in the ways in which these flows left their mark on the body of the city. This project is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Insight Development Grant 2014, Connection Grant 2017, Insight Grant 2018.)

Co-Investigator: Jon Corbett

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Jon Corbett is an Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan, the director of ICER (the institute for Community Engaged Research) and the director of the Spatial Information for Community Engagement (SpICE) Lab. Jon is an enduring map geek. The practice side of his research explores how digital multimedia technologies can be combined with maps and used by communities to document, store and communicate their spatial knowledge. The theoretical side examines how geographic representation of this knowledge using these technologies can strengthen the community internally, as well as externally through increasing their influence over decision-making and their ability to become active agents in the process of social change. All aspects of his research incorporate a core community element. Within the context of his research program this means that the research is of tangible benefit for the communities with whom he works; that those communities feel a strong sense of ownership over the research process; and that community members are engaged and engage in the research endeavor. In the Rijeka in Flux project Jon’s role is to contribute to the design, deployment and evaluation of the technical components of proposed research, especially the programming required for the development of the augmented reality application. 

Co-Investigator: Constance Crompton

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Constance Crompton is Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. She co-directs the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project with Michelle Schwartz (Ryerson University). She serves as vice-president (English) of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques and as an associate director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. She is co-editor, with Richard Lane and Ray Siemens, of Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research (Routledge 2016). She is working closely with Benedikt Perak on the augmentation of the Flume map material through linked data and natural language processing.

Collaborators

Gruia Badescu

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Gruia Badescu is a Balzan Prize Fellow at the University of Konstanz and a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Rijeka. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge, with a dissertation on post-war urban reconstruction in the former Yugoslavia. He has been a Departmental Lecturer and a research associate at the School of Geography at the University of Oxford, a researcher at New Europe College, and a visiting fellow at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz and at the Center for Refugee and IDP Studies, University of Sarajevo. He has published articles and book chapters on post-war reconstruction in  Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Beirut and is now completing a monograph on the relationship between urban rebuilding and the sociopolitical processes of dealing with a difficult past. Moreover, as part of a the Franco-British AHRC/Labex Les Passés dans le Présent funded grant 'Criminalization of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective' he has conducted research on memorialization of sites of political violence, including on Goli Otok in Croatia.  He is part of the EU-funded project Urban Education Live, where he works with universities and NGOs from four countries to develop tools for social mapping. For the Rijeka project, he is investigating urban reconstruction and reconfigurations in Rijeka between 1945 and 1960. He is also coordinating the “Cities and Regions in Flux” symposium to be held at the Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Rijeka in 2019.

Vanni D’Alessio

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Vanni is a Research Associate at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples and is project associate for Center of Advanced Studies Southeastern Europe of the University of Rijeka. He teaches Modern History at the University of Naples and has taught European Modern, History of Nationalism, of Central Europe, of South-Eastern Europe and of the Adriatic space in the universities of Naples, Rijeka, L’Aquila, Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples. He has written a monograph on the birth of Croatian and Italian nationalisms in late Habsburg Istria (Il Cuore Conteso, Naples 2003), has edited a volume on Rijeka born Italian Intellectual Leo Valiani (Leo Weiczen Valiani, Fiuman, European, Revolutionary, Historian, Rijeka 2015), and has published several essays on social and cultural 19 th - 20 th  centuries history of Istria, Rijeka and of the Northern Adriatic, but also on the Mostar. Among his most recent interests are mental illnesses in 19 th -20 th  century Italy and Croatia, schooling and the languages issue in the 20 th  century multinational Northern Adriatic, and 20 th  century Rijeka as a multiethnic and contested city. In the project “Rijeka In Flux” he is participating in the development of the historical map with a focus on 19 th -20 th century Rijeka, in the collection of oral histories and in the supervision of a post-doctoral fellow sponsored by the project and hosted by the Center of Advanced Studies Southeastern Europe of the University of Rijeka.

Vjeran Pavlaković

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Vjeran Pavlaković is an associate professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He received his Ph.D. in History in 2005 from the University of Washington, and has published articles on cultural memory and monuments, transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia, and the Spanish Civil War. He is also the lead researcher on the project “Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia: Political Rituals and the Cultural Memory of 20th Century Traumas” funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ). As a coordinator of the Memoryscapes portfolio of Rijeka 2020, he is working with local scholars, cultural institutions, and students in identifying key sites of memory from the 20th century. Students in his courses on collective memory will assist in researching and mapping important sites that will be uploaded to the Rijeka in Flux platform that can then be used as part of cultural heritage tourism that is being developed for the European Capital of Culture program.

Benedikt Perak

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Benedikt Perak is a senior assistant at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka. His main fields of research include digital humanities and complex semantic processes of construction of social identity. He is a researcher, with Vjeran Pavlaković, on the “Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia: Political Rituals and the Cultural Memory of 20th Century Traumas” project. Perak will collaborate with Constance Crompton in the translation of the map database into a Neo4j Graph database, and will carry out analysis of the data.

Post-Doctoral Fellows and Research Assistants

Marco Abram

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Marco Abram received his Phd in History from the University of Udine and his MA in History of Europe from the University of Bologna. He was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Advanced studies – South Eastern Europe and at the Department of History of the University of Rijeka. His work mainly focuses on cultural history, identity and memory in Socialist Yugoslavia. He has investigated case studies such as the federal capital city (Belgrade) and the Upper Adriatic borderland (Rijeka). He has published in Nationalities Papers, Southeastern Europe, and other peer reviewed journals. Since 2013, he has also worked for the think tank Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso – Transeuropa on several European projects devoted to memory and public history. He is involved in the project as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. His research is devoted to nationalities politics in post- war Rijeka and to the relationship between socialism, national identities and public spaces. He works also on the production of contents for the "Rijeka map."

Ivan Jeličić

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Ivan Jeličić obtained his PhD in History at the University of Trieste, discussing a thesis on the socialist< movement in Fiume during the late Habsburg period. Currently, he is a post-doc on the ERC project Nepostrans Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe at the Institute of Political History and collaborates with the Department of History of the University of Rijeka. His interests are personal biographies, social transformations, place of social interaction and migration, in particular of workers', from the second half of the 19th century to the period after 1945 in Rijeka and the North Adriatic. His role in the project is to find out continuities in transitions from a multinational empire to communist Yugoslavia, passing through fascist Italy, and to build relationships with local historical societies.

Renato Stanković

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Renato Stanković is an assistant at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka and a PhD student of contemporary philosophy. He teaches Cultural Policies and is involved in several extracurricular programmes for students. He worked for 4 years as a researcher on the Croatian Science Foundation's project „Framing the Nation and Collective Identity in Croatia: Political Rituals and the Cultural Memory of Twentieth Century Traumas“. He has been a part of numerous scientific research projects, including The Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia’s international project “Transnational Cultures of Remembrance in Austria and Croatia” and The Council of Europe’s project “STEPS Rijeka Evaluation Project”. He has participated in numerous conferences and symposia (Rijeka, Graz, Berlin, etc.), and has also organized several conferences (Rijeka, Dubrovnik, Graz). He is heavily involved in the Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture project, coordinating activities in the Sweet & Salt and Season of Power programmes. Rijeka in Flux having been included into the Season of Power programme programme, Stanković will help coordinate activities for this project as well.

Past Participants

Dorjan Lecki

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Dorjan Lecki (M.A. Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies – Urban Studies, 2015-2017) has participated in the Croatian National Geography Competition four times. In 2012 he commenced his undergraduate study in Applied Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Zadar, Croatia, completing his Bachelor’s degree in 2015. He was a three-­time recipient of the Federik Grisogono award for outstanding success during the studies. He was the president of the Association of Geography Students in Zadar. Dorjan Lecki successfully defended his thesis, on “Socialist urban development in the city of Rijeka, Yugoslavia, during the 1960s,” in 2017.