Continuous Performative Landscape for Resilient City of Skopje

Abstract

The present time city of Skopje is dialectical result of contradictions of its society and planning systems, a diffuse result of unfinished layers of diachronically superimposed different planning concepts, none of which has lasted long enough to establish a homogenous city structure. The combination of its structural parts is no longer defined as homogenous, but rather as a multiple layering and heterogeneity, a fragmented solids and voids with borders, barriers and edges that are subject to a constant process of modification and reconfiguration of the dynamic image. In this regard, it is interesting to look at constitution of space that occurs outside of the urban network, as well, in order to clarify vague spatial morphology and landscape between urban and rural/ suburban areas. The boundary between the end of the city and the beginning of the nature or urban/rural fringe defines discontinuous route which gradually perforated casing urban structure of the city. This disintegrated and unfinished urban structure needs to become adaptive, fluid and responsive system able to accept disturbances, without changing to another system. Only this way, we can establish a city capable of extending its own continuity: a resilient city. When exploring the fragmented reality of Skopje and the potentials for establishment of a new urban reality the paper relies on the principle of the newly emerged landscape urbanism approach in the planning discourse. It is based on the idea of continuous landscape, where physical urban fragments and residual urban voids need to be connected, integrated and structured in an open flexible system, and on the necessitate potential of the voids as ecological intensity. The idea is to bring all urban fragments together in one open system and to create an integrated overall system of green areas and corridors that connect the inner city with the exurban green lands, agricultural land, as well as exurban greenery of the mountains. The “power” of the landscape medium is in the possibility to organise the urban fabric of fragmented voids into the continuous landscape within the city of Skopje. It is not conceived only a simple medium for defragmented city development, but more importantly it is a medium that activates urban space through invoking processes and events that move within the city, which means a performative landscape. Through performability introduced the ecological performance of the continuous urban landscape is becoming productive environmentally, economically and socially (producing food, pollution absorption, air, water and soil purification, etc).