Innovating the Rural: Tactics for Village Renewal in the Mariovo Region

Abstract

Despite the evident domination of the urban and disregard of the countryside, it is precisely in rural areas that we can clearly see the various consequences, as well as the possibilities, of the underlying unequal world development.The situation in Europe today, especially in south-eastern Europe is paradoxical. On one hand, there is an enormous concentration of people, and physical and program congestion in certain urban zones. On the other hand, there is ongoing depopulation and/or intense transformation of entire areas in the countryside. An area wherein this tendency of labour and settlement migration was most pronounced was the Mariovo region in the southern part of the Republic of Macedonia. The effect of these tendencies was complete depopulation of a number of villages, or their reduction to several elderly residents. However, the exciting natural environment and the picturesque physical structure of the man-made environment, increasingly expresses this contradiction to abandoned landscapes and uninhabited houses. Is it possible, in opposition to current waves of distress migration from rural areas, to propose some innovative scenarios for revitalization of these villages? Contrary to the existing reality, with a series of master thesis projects and architecture studio projects, we explore alternative visions of spatial, programmatic and social revitalization of individual villages.