Theoretical framework

Whether through direct action, public debate, institutional reform, or long-term collaborations with citizens and movements, socially engaged architects in Croatia have participated, often prominently, in defending the right to the city (Domaradzka, Reference Domaradzka2018; Harvey, Reference Harvey2008) and in shaping ideas of just and collaborative urban futures that may still be possible at the peripheries of global capitalism. Building on scholarship that documents architects’ alignment with urban struggles and public-interest agendas—spanning advocacy and public-interest lineages (Bell & Wakeford, Reference Bell and Wakeford2008; Davidoff, Reference Davidoff1965), collaborative and insurgent approaches (Healey, Reference Healey1997; Miraftab, Reference Miraftab2009), “spatial agency” (Awan et al., Reference Awan, Schneider and Till2011), and recent syntheses of architectural activism (Boie & De Cauter, Reference Boie and De Cauter2023; Petrescu & Trogal, Reference Petrescu and Trogal2017; Sadler, Reference Sadler and Karim2018)—this article situates Croatian cases within civil-society debates in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. In taking up architecture as civic praxis, the Croatian materials show how a subset of actors from the architectural field positioned themselves as expert activists within civil society, using professional credibility to shift relations among expertise, urban mobilizations, and institutions. In practice, this has meant extending architectural work into public critique and organizing repertoires: producing handbooks and exhibitions as shared reference points, convening forums and assemblies as spaces for deliberation, developing pedagogical programs and workshops that grow spatial knowledge, and crafting institution-oriented critiques and proposals that translate civic demands into procedural and programmatic interventions. Framed as civic labor, these efforts support collective action over time and help convert moments of contention into more durable practices and, at times, policy.

There remains a need to understand how these practices unfold within specific regional and historical contexts, particularly in post-socialist societies, where established research advises a wider view of collective actors and their strategies, beyond the accounts of both NGO-ization and classical contentious politics (Jacobsson & Saxonberg, Reference Jacobsson and Saxonberg2013). In Croatia, the legacies of Yugoslav socialism, the 1990s war, and post-2008 austerity policies have shaped trajectories of civic engagement, contributing to tensions between professionalization, activism, and institutionalization (Dolenec et al., Reference Dolenec, Doolan and Tomašević2017; Heideman, Reference Heideman2018; Stubbs, Reference Stubbs2012). Across the region, post-socialist urban transformation was accompanied by privatization and deregulation that eroded democratic control over public assets (Harloe, Reference Harloe, Andrusz, Harloe and Szelenyi1996; Rakita, Reference Rakita, Stojčić and Olujić Oluja2013) and intensified the privatization of public space (Hirt, Reference Hirt2012). In this setting, critically inclined architects, urbanists, and allied practitioners developed a regional knowledge base for diagnosing investor-driven urbanism and civic organizing, drawing on a spatial history shared across the former Yugoslav republics and a common stock of socialist architectural and planning references. Within academic and planning institutions, few but important voices contributed: in Serbia, Vujošević, Petovar, and Lazarević Bajec analyzed most comprehensively how the idea of public interest—the normative foundation of Yugoslav planning—was contested and hollowed out in post-socialist urbanism (Lazarević Bajec, Reference Lazarević Bajec2009; Petovar & Vujošević, Reference Petovar and Vujošević2008; Vujošević & Petovar, Reference Vujošević and Petovar2006), while a similar critique emerged in Croatian urban sociology (Čaldarović, Reference Čaldarović, Gotovac and Zlatar2012), often in shared venues (see Svirčić Gotovac & Zlatar, Reference Svirčić Gotovac and Zlatar2012). This knowledge was also formed through para-academic reading circles, publishing, curating, and organizing under conditions of scarcity (Tucakov, Reference Tucakov2024). Throughout, it remained in dialogue with the achievements of socialist-era spatial production and its “breathtaking boldness” (Miljački, Reference Miljački2018): the generous public and green spaces, the innovative mass housing developments, the coordinated regional planning of the Adriatic coast—all treating the city as a collective project and public space as a non-negotiable good (see Gulin Zrnić, Reference Gulin Zrnić, Gotovac and Zlatar2012; Kulić et al., Reference Kulić, Mrduljaš and Thaler2012; Mrduljaš & Kulić, Reference Mrduljaš and Kulić2012; Stierli & Kulić, Reference Stierli and Kulić2018). The circumstances of socialist Yugoslavia, Čeferin (Reference Čeferin, Mrduljaš and Kulić2012) argues, were “far more in favor of the practice of architecture as a thinking practice” than what came after, and post-socialist engaged practitioners sought to reactivate this lineage.

Practices such as STEALTH.unlimited’s collaborations (e.g., “Lost Highway Expedition”), Platform 9.81’s “Invisible Zagreb” and “Superprivate,” and the Peti park (Fifth Park) reading group in Belgrade built communities by translating theory into accessible formats, convening cross-disciplinary coalitions, and generating tools—maps, readers, exhibitions—that made planning legible and civic participation more possible (Blažević, Reference Blažević, Bell and Wakeford2008; Belaćević et al., Reference Belaćević, Sekulić, Stefanović, Miletić and Prodanović2011; Carl & Jovanović Weiss, Reference Carl and Jovanović Weiss2007; Platform 9.81, 2005). Subsequent collectives extended this repertoire: in Serbia, analysis by Ministarstvo prostora (Ministry of Space) demystified planning, linked struggles to the commons, and scrutinized state-enabled, private-investor-driven megaprojects such as “Belgrade Waterfront” (Čukić, Reference Čukić2013, Reference Čukić2017, Reference Čukić2018; Čukić et al., Reference Čukić, Sekulić, Slavković and Vilenica2015, Reference Čukić, Timotijević and Radovanović2019; Grubbauer & Čamprag, Reference Grubbauer and Čamprag2018; Vilenica, Reference Vilenica2014), and Nova planska praksa (New Planning Practice) examined how planning professionals relate to public interest in this context (Milovanović Rodić et al., Reference Milovanović Rodić, Slavković and Maruna2022). Housing policy critiques and mappings connected everyday dispossession to policy regimes (Krstić, Reference Krstić2016; Sekulić, Reference Sekulić2012; Vilenica, Reference Vilenica2017), while Croatian actors such as Platform 9.81, Right to the City, and Pula Group articulated explicitly political critiques and situated alternatives, from “Post-Capitalist City” to the 53rd Zagreb Salon’s “Decade Reader” (Jurcan, Reference Jurcan2010; Pula Group, 2010a; STEALTH.unlimited & Jurcan, Reference Jurcan2018). Together, these practices show knowledge production functioning as civic infrastructure: bringing practitioners into durable networks, equipping communities and movements with legible critiques of spatial production, and letting claims and repertoires travel across sites and years.

Seen from this trajectory—where knowledge-making, public critique, coalition work, and institution-facing interventions develop together—the theoretical task is to specify how architectural actors convert professional expertise into civic capacity, while remaining attentive to the Croatian post-socialist context from which these mechanisms are derived.

Emergent spaces of critique: Architecture and the independent cultural scene (late 1990s–mid-2000s)

A new generation of socially engaged architectural practices in Croatia emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, confronting the discipline’s marginalization amid post-war transition and accelerated neoliberal reforms. As the new state consolidated a nationalist political consensus and privatization restructured everyday life, the architectural profession—historically aligned with the modernist project of socialist Yugoslavia—found itself increasingly detached from meaningful public engagement and unprepared for the political–economic forces reshaping the built environment. Against this backdrop, architects, artists, and cultural workers began to reevaluate architecture’s role in public life and its potential as a tool for civic engagement and political critique.

Across Zagreb and other urban centers, a dynamic independent cultural scene formed, catalyzed by frustration with conservative cultural policy and a desire to experiment with non-institutional modes of organizing and knowledge production. Collectives such as BLOK, WHW, MaMa, Attack!, and Drugo more (The Other Sea)—encompassing curatorial platforms, media-culture centers, and autonomous social spaces—advanced a politicized, self-organized agenda focused on urban space, post-socialist transition, memory, and social justice. In conditions of underfunded public institutions and limited support for independent initiatives, public space became both a site of cultural production and a terrain of struggle to exist in—and to co-constitute—the city. As Golub (Reference Golub2004) and Bekić (Reference Bekić2020) note, these organizations built new infrastructures of critique, collaboration, and spatial experimentation. Within this milieu, some of the “new protagonists” in Croatian architecture (Mrduljaš, Reference Mrduljaš2006) sought to work beyond strict disciplinary confines and align architectural research with civic action.

Platform 9.81, formed in 1999 by a group of architecture students at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb, was one of these actors. Early members recall a widening gap between architectural education and the social–political transformations around them—and seeking out the collective to close it. One of them, who had come to architecture from a war-displaced background, describes a curriculum that could not speak to their reality and looking for “outlets to complete my own education” (INT-7). Another remembers a formative provocation from a mentor: “Why should architecture be learned only from architects?” (INT-4), pointing to the interdisciplinary, public-facing, collective work the official curriculum offered little of: bringing artists into architectural spaces, turning installations into pedagogical tools, and debating architecture’s relationship to society. Platform 9.81’s published self-understanding was explicitly public-oriented: educational and experimental, committed to engaging wider audiences and producing “spatial infrastructure to be used by all producers of culture” (Platform 9.81, 2005). In this sense, it prefigured architecture as civic praxis as accessible, participatory, and publicly relevant, or, as one founding member later described, “dirtied by many hands”—a form of architecture where architects collaborate with citizens invested in both process and outcomes (Vizkultura, Reference Vizkultura2015).

From the outset, Platform 9.81 adopted a project-based, collaborative model that convened architects, urbanists, cultural producers, and community actors around shared spatial concerns. Public lectures, ephemeral interventions, exhibitions, mappings, and design research functioned as tools to reintroduce critical discourse into planning and architecture (for early work, see Jaklenec et al., Reference Jaklenec, Mandić and Protić2012). “Architecture Live” (2001–2002) created an informal forum for public reflection within the discipline, while “Invisible Zagreb – The Cabinet of Wonders” (2003–2006) mapped underused and abandoned spaces, reframing them as zones of civic and cultural activation (Blažević, Reference Blažević, Bell and Wakeford2008; Platform 9.81, 2005). These formats generated knowledge infrastructure: they gathered community, produced shared reference points, made urban change legible, and tested collaborative methods. They also surfaced practical challenges, requiring constant collective reflection on authorship, ownership, means, and methods, which further distinguished Platform 9.81 from conventional architectural practices (Visual Culture, 2006).

The political tension surrounding urban space sharpened these experiments. Initiatives such as “Operacija: grad” (“Operation: City”) at the Badel complex in 2005 became flashpoints over who controls public space and under what conditions. When independent initiatives gathered diverse, politicized publics, they often met conservative backlash and institutional resistance. These confrontations exposed the limits of informal occupation and underscored the need for more durable, institutionally negotiated access to space (Mrakovčić & Pejić, Reference Mrakovčić and Pejić2023)—a trajectory that several groups, including Platform 9.81, later pursued through collaborations, policy dialogues, and cultural-institution partnerships.

In this first phase, the emphasis fell less on protest than on spatial literacy, public pedagogy, and tactical engagement. The publication “Superprivate” (Platform 9.81, 2004) exemplified this approach: combining architectural research and critical urban theory, it analyzed the patterns of privatization, ad-hoc construction, and fragmentation shaping post-socialist Croatian cities. Without idealizing the socialist past, it showed how weakened planning and commodified everyday life were producing new regimes of exclusion and informality, eroding the public sphere of urban space (see Buden, Reference Buden2020). Other projects—such as “Zagreb: Cultural Capital 3000” (2003–2005) and “Tourist Transformations”—linked architecture to media, curating, and planning questions, widening the addressees of architectural work to include cultural actors, policymakers, and international collaborators. These initiatives unfolded alongside broader, albeit nascent, professional debates about unchecked coastal construction and the absence of coherent urban planning in the face of investor-driven developments (Galović, Reference Galović2004). Such concerns about coastal overbuilding and the erosion of spatial order have persisted in the decades since, voiced not only by activists but from within the professional mainstream—although on grounds of heritage and landscape protection rather than the political-economic critique foregrounded here—reaching established institutions, as in the recent “Declaration on Croatian Space” (AAUZ, 2023).

In parallel, other engaged initiatives took shape within the independent scene. ARCHIsquad—Division for Architecture with Conscience—was founded in 2006 at the Zagreb Faculty, with Platform 9.81 as both a touchstone and collaborator. ARCHIsquad’s early experiences with student exchanges and work in contexts of scarcity (including in the Global South), together with Yugoslav legacies of internationalist cooperation, exposure to critical theory, and feminist orientations, led to what members later called a “quieter, more subversive” approach to community engagement and educational work (see Dragović, Reference Dragović2024). Their repertoire—free architectural counseling in disadvantaged communities, collaborations with cultural venues, public workshops and discussions—operated as civic labor: working with(in) local contexts on concrete problems while building skills, confidence, and relational ties that could sustain collective action.

Seen through a wider post-socialist lens, these Croatian experiments were part of a broader regional reactivation of critical spatial knowledge. With limited access to feminist spatial thought, critical urban theory, and post-Marxist critique in mainstream curricula, para-academic reading groups, cross-border collaborations, and project-based learning helped fill gaps and ground theory in local material conditions (see Carl & Jovanović Weiss, Reference Carl and Jovanović Weiss2007; Tucakov, Reference Tucakov2024.). These processes unfolded across the post-Yugoslav space; in Croatia, they were rooted in the independent cultural field, where architecture’s tools started being utilized for co-producing knowledge and building civic networks.

Materially, the work remained modest—temporary, underfunded, and precarious—but it yielded durable capacities. The infrastructures built in this period (forums, publications, archives, pedagogies, and networks) supplied scaffolding for later, more confrontational mobilizations and, eventually, for purposeful engagement with institutions. Analytically, this phase consolidates the three dimensions of architecture as civic praxis: it experiments with hybrid roles (architects as educators, researchers, and organizers), develops knowledge infrastructures that make spatial conflict legible and shareable, and begins to encounter—through conflicts over access—the problem that later motivates institutional repertoires. These shifts were neither linear nor free of contradictions, but they opened a critical space in which architecture could be understood as a field of public concern, social imagination, and political possibility, preparing the ground for the commons-oriented mobilizations that would define the late-2000s to mid-2010s.

Defending the commons: Spatial activism and civic mobilizations (late-2000s–mid-2010s)

If the late 1990s and early 2000s were marked by experimental departures in the independent cultural scene, the following years brought a decisive turn toward organized and confrontational spatial activism. Resistance to commercialization and enclosure in Zagreb widened and diffused the repertoire—geographically and thematically—through new alliances among organizations, collectives, and professional actors. These developments resonated with a regional surge in commons struggles against dispossession and environmental harm (The Commons Working Group, Reference Bibić, Milat, Horvat and Štiks2014) and with the consolidation of a “new Balkan left” (Štiks & Stojaković, Reference Štiks and Stojaković2021). As Dolenec et al. (Reference Dolenec, Doolan and Tomašević2017) argue, the urban became not only a site of neoliberal restructuring but also a laboratory for imagining and enacting alternatives; Bilić and Stubbs (Reference Bilić, Stubbs and Jacobsson2015) similarly show how post-Yugoslav mobilizations grew around public space as a key arena of contention.

In this context, organization Right to the City—emerging from the 2005 “Operacija: grad” efforts (Mrakovčić & Pejić, Reference Mrakovčić and Pejić2023)—became pivotal. What began as a coalition around youth and cultural policy radicalized in response to the Zagreb city government’s prioritization of private over public interests, culminating in the 2006 struggle against privatizing development in Flower Square/Varšavska Street, a conflict emblematic of investor-driven urbanism (Bilić & Stubbs, Reference Bilić, Stubbs and Jacobsson2015; Dolenec et al., Reference Dolenec, Doolan and Tomašević2017). As the campaign intensified, the initiative expanded its network and conceptual reach. The National Forum for Space in 2007 connected activists, professionals, and NGOs concerned with spatial justice across Croatia, amplifying local conflicts and elaborating a shared vocabulary of protest. In 2008, the coalition organized the conference “The Neoliberal Frontline: Urban Struggles in Post-Socialist Societies,” published its newsletter in English (Kovačević et al., Reference Kovačević, Medak, Milat and Sančanin2008a), and issued “Operation: City – A Handbook for Life in Neoliberal Reality” in Croatian (Kovačević et al., Reference Kovačević, Medak, Milat, Sančanin, Valentić and Vuković2008b). These publications localized critical urban theory, featured debates on spatial planning and privatization, and articulated architects’ potential roles in urban struggle. For a younger cohort of socially engaged architects, they also provided a first systematic encounter with Harvey, right-to-the-city arguments, and the proposition that urbanism is political. Reflecting on coming across the “Operation: City” book by happenstance in their teenage years, one of them recalls that it was “perhaps the first time I realized that there was a field called the politics of space, or spatial politics—that urbanism was not something that simply happens, but something people struggle over” (INT-5). Similar repertoires circulated regionally in dialogue with the Croatian scene. In Belgrade, the Fifth Park initiative (2005–2010) told the story of their attempt to preserve a neighborhood space against private development through the exhibition “Peti Park – A Struggle for the Everyday”; part of their process was a “Right to the City” reading group that discussed Harvey, Lefebvre, Don Mitchell, Neil Smith, and others, which illustrates the connection between theory, community organizing, and neighborhood defense tactics (Belaćević et al., Reference Belaćević, Sekulić, Stefanović, Miletić and Prodanović2011). The parallel is instructive: reading circles, exhibitions, and situated research operated as civic tools for legitimizing claims to shared space, while official planning mechanisms continued to enable investor capture.

Institutionally, the architectural field was initially cautious. The Croatian Architects’ Association (CAA) was reluctant to confront structural critiques of privatization and power, yet the intensity of Varšavska protests left traces in professional understandings of public responsibility. Tactically, the campaign moved through creative disruption, media work, legal challenges, and mass protest; in 2009, Right to the City registered as an NGO to strengthen legal standing. While it did not stop construction, the campaign delayed the project for four years, halved its scale, and pushed the City Assembly to reverse General Urban Plan changes that had enabled the intervention, thereby preventing similar projects in other central blocks (Dolenec et al., Reference Dolenec, Doolan and Tomašević2017).

While Zagreb’s mobilization gathered force, a parallel one took shape in Pula. Beginning with a 2006 workshop at the former military zone Katarina–Monumenti (Jaklenec et al., Reference Jaklenec, Mandić and Protić2012), the architects who would form Pula Group articulated a counter-vision to privatized tourist mega-projects. Through exhibitions, lectures, and policy critique, they challenged speculative urbanism but were either rejected or ignored by the local authorities (Dragović, Reference Dragović2024; Franceschi, Reference Franceschi2013). “The Red Plan of Pula” (Pula Group, 2008) documented protests and proposed planning grounded in transparency, self-organization, and spatial commons; the 2009 “Postcapitalist City” congress—organized with international experimental practices—culminated in “The Pula Declaration,” which called for the communal as “a shared territory, an autonomous zone, a place of new utopias” beyond the public/private binary (Pula Group, 2010a, p. 224). In 2011, Pula Group founded Practice Cooperative, an engineering cooperative that responded to post-2008 austerity and precarity through collective organization, pairing theoretical–activist work with commissioned design and execution.

Reflecting on this period, Pula architects emphasize youthful enthusiasm and volunteerism but also a strategic learning curve. As one Pula Group member put it, the early assumption that “once politicians see the beautiful maquettes of an alternative future, they’ll realise it’s better” proved “an illusion that lasted three months”; in time, they saw that “if we wanted to keep examining, translating, and thinking these things through, it would have to be done outside institutions, largely in conflict and confrontation with the political administration” (INT-2). The civic initiative “I Love Pula – for Muzil,” formed in 2009, opposed the Brijuni Riviera luxury tourism scheme and advanced participatory alternatives (Marčetić, Reference Marčetić2012; Pula Group, 2010b). Producing those alternatives was itself unpaid civic labor: lacking any official drawings of the militarized Muzil peninsula, Pula Group organized “a small army” (INT-7) of architecture students to map the area by hand over two summer weeks, and described the activities as funded through “samodoprinos”—the citizens’ contribution to financing community infrastructure in Yugoslav self-management. The hope was, as one of the organizers reflected, that this work would “build knowledge and a collectivity that may later spill into another kind of energy and bring change” (INT-7). These collaborations extended to the National Forum for Space, which linked Pula with Varšavska in Zagreb and the “Srđ is Ours!” campaign in Dubrovnik (Pula Group, 2012a), consolidating a movement landscape to which architects were integral as organizers, researchers, and translators of spatial claims.

Concurrently, the profession’s internal debates sharpened and began to produce more explicitly political forms of professional responsibility. In Istria, members of Pula Group assumed leadership of the CAA’s local chapter in 2011, turning it into a forum for debating architects’ roles in Adriatic coastal struggles (Dragović, Reference Dragović2024; Otvoreni Muzil, Reference Otvoreni and Franceschi2011). In Split, members of the local chapter’s presidency resigned collectively in 2011, criticizing clientelist relations with city government (Društvo arhitekata Splita, 2011). In Dubrovnik, the local CAA chapter supported “Srđ is Ours!” through expert analyses and exposed planning irregularities that were intended to hide the project’s luxury real-estate ambitions (Bušnja, Reference Bušnja2011). As then-CAA president Hrvoje Hrabak later acknowledged, the Association’s limited systemic involvement during Varšavska Street protests was shortsighted, but the momentum it created ultimately generated “a completely new kind of professional elaboration to support civic initiatives” (Sančanin, Reference Sančanin2013). The 2010s thus opened a more politicized understanding of professional responsibility vis- à- vis the erosion of public space and spatial commons, with the CAA increasingly present in spatial debates. The standing of professional associations as actors in spatial decision-making—and their tendency, in the context of post-socialist transition, to abdicate the defense of public interest—has been analyzed directly by Petovar (Reference Petovar, Gotovac and Zlatar2012); read against her writing about the Serbian context, the CAA’s gradual shift from silence to advocacy shows a contrasting case of a professional body recovering its public-interest-oriented role.

Analytically, this phase consolidates architecture as civic praxis under—and sometimes against—NGO-ization pressures by intensifying all three dimensions of the framework: hybrid roles, knowledge infrastructures, and institutional repertoires. Right to the City’s 2009 formal registration is not a shift into donor-driven service delivery, but a tactical move within a repertoire that remained protest-led, public-facing, and coalition-oriented—precisely the hybrid forms that scholarship urges us to recognize beyond narrow NGO categories (Jacobsson & Korolczuk, Reference Jacobsson and Korolczuk2019; Jacobsson & Saxonberg, Reference Jacobsson and Saxonberg2013). Architectural tools (mapping, spatial analysis, professional planning critiques, exhibitions, public counseling) functioned as civic labor that built networks, enhanced spatial literacy, and helped sustain coalitions across cities. The activist infrastructures built around Varšavska, Muzil, and Srđ generated formats, alliances, and languages that would later be translated into more purposeful engagement with institutions—professional bodies, participatory procedures, and, eventually, municipal platforms. In short, commons-oriented mobilizations politicized planning while preparing organizational and epistemic groundwork for selective institutional advances.

Between protest and governance: Shifting strategies in contemporary architectural activism (mid-2010s–2020s)

By the mid-2010s, the wave of spatial activism that had emerged in response to privatization, investor urbanism, and top-down planning began to transform. Repertoires forged in the previous decade contributed to more overtly political organizing, first through localized engagements with institutions, and then through municipal platforms. In Dubrovnik, the 2013 referendum led by “Srđ is Ours!”—though unable to immediately halt the golf resort—mobilized broad public backing and brought three initiative members into the city council, signaling a passage from protest to parliamentary representation (Srđ is Ours, 2014). In Pula, by contrast, the 2014 planning decision that favored luxury tourism despite mass support for “I Love Pula – for Muzil” underscored the limits of movement victories under investor-driven regimes (Matić, Reference Matić2014). Across cases, activists, including architects, responded by redirecting energy toward building longer-term capacities.

One important victory was the 2014 National Forum for Space campaign that gathered over 500,000 signatures against the highway concession, contributing to the government’s withdrawal of the proposal and demonstrating the power of coordinated, cross-sector mobilization with trade unions (Dolenec et al., Reference Dolenec, Doolan and Tomašević2017; Štiks & Stojaković, Reference Štiks and Stojaković2021). In Zagreb, actors clustered around Right to the City converged in the municipal platform “Zagreb is Ours!” (2017), which later evolved into the green-left party Možemo! (We can!) and won city-wide elections in 2021. These developments reflected a broader strategic shift: efforts to convert movement repertoires into organizational and political forms capable of acting across arenas.

While some socially engaged architects entered representative politics and municipal structures, others sought to reshape institutional terrain through professional organizations. By 2017, local chapters of the CAA intervened more explicitly in planning debates, often aligning with civil society against predatory developments. The election of Emil Jurcan (Pula Group) and Ana Dana Beroš (ARCHIsquad) to CAA leadership crystallized a program to reform and politicize the profession by building alliances with civic actors and reframing architecture’s role within broader spatial politics. This orientation shaped the 53rd Zagreb Salon (STEALTH.unlimited & Jurcan, Reference Jurcan2018), which read the 2008–2018 decade through political economy and ecology rather than through isolated architectural projects, emphasizing community-anchored futures and collaborative roles for architects.

Public-facing venues also served as sites where movement knowledge was translated into professional and civic discourse. Several Croatian contributions to the Venice Biennale of Architecture made community-centered work the centerpiece, framing architecture as connective infrastructure that does not shy away from ethical responsibility (Pula Group, 2012b) and supports collective capacities within civil-public partnerships, a new model of collaboration between public authorities and cultural initiatives (Peračić et al., Reference Peračić, Veljačić, Tolj, Višnić, Višnić and Veljačić2016). The institutionalization of civil-public partnerships signaled attempts to translate movement repertoires into governance forms; however, the uptake of this model remained uneven (Vidović, Reference Vidović2018). Beyond Zagreb, sustained implementation was difficult: resource scarcity, political shifts, precarity and out-migration weakened local alliances, particularly along the coast where deindustrialization and touristification eroded organizing capacity (Dragović, Reference Dragović2024; Travar, Reference Travar2023). In Rijeka, ambitions to anchor the European Capital of Culture (a title the city held in 2020) in community organizing were curtailed by COVID-19, and subsequent strategies appear oriented toward large infrastructural and logistics agendas with limited citizen involvement (Dokonal, Reference Dokonal2022).

Throughout, CAA chapters increasingly acted as intermediaries between citizens and institutions, pressing for more participatory and publicly accountable planning (Dragović, Reference Dragović2024). Confrontation, however, remained part of the repertoire. When “Zagreb Manhattan”—a conglomerate-backed redevelopment promoted by Zagreb’s longtime mayor Bandić—surfaced in 2019, Zagreb Society of Architects (DAZ) publicly opposed the move, convened debates, and criticized non-transparent changes to planning documentation, joining Right to the City and others (Društvo arhitekata Zagreba, 2019a, 2019b; see also International Network for Urban Research and Action [INURA], 2019). The contrast with Varšavska a decade earlier—when professional silence predominated—marks a cultural turn: architectural institutions were now expected to articulate civic responsibility and contest speculative urbanism publicly.

Interviews focusing on this period illuminate how “getting inside” institutions brought a mixture of hope and ambivalence, requiring an alteration of activist tactics. Former street-level organizers who moved into advisory, departmental, or professional roles describe a double task: translating activist languages—right to the city, commons, spatial justice—into administrative routines (participatory procedures, design briefs), while defending minimum standards under budgetary and legal constraints. Several interviewees frame this work as “trying to prevent more damage” amid legacy contracts, fragmented competencies, and rigid bureaucracy, but they also point to incremental gains: piloting open calls that prioritize public interest, codifying design-quality criteria in tenders, and expanding consultation practices beyond the formal minimum. This insider view supports the article’s broader claim about expert activism as civic activism: architecture-trained experts operationalize repertoires learned in movements—spatial analysis, participatory mapping, coalition-building—into governance instruments, while remaining accountable to communities they previously organized with before entering the city hall. In doing so, they expose the limitations of Schumacher’s (Reference Schumacher2012) hegemony-first account, in which architectural agency is restricted to translating client-set agendas and political meaning only “counts” once linked to empowered actors within formal politics. Here, political relevance is made, not awaited: architecture as civic praxis, through creating knowledge, supporting coalitions, and engaging with procedures, patiently builds up the very civic forces capable of shifting the agenda.

Meanwhile, the activist landscape continues to evolve in this new setting. As some long-standing networks aged and entered institutions, new generations of architects are still being politicized, and new socially engaged initiatives continue to emerge—examples include Odaziv (Response), Prednji plan (Foreground), Društvo i prostor (Society and Space)—sustaining public dialogue and non-formal knowledge production, alongside architectural theorists who translate critiques of capitalist spatial production for wider audiences (e.g., Cingel, Reference Cingel2023). International pedagogical circuits also mattered: the 2018 European Architecture Students Assembly (EASA) in Rijeka modeled self-organization among students and reinforced activist and interdisciplinary orientations in architectural practice. Interviewees from this cohort treat the socially engaged practices of the 2000s as a reference point, while seeking ways to sustain critical work without perpetual volunteerism or burnout. In this landscape, the existing CAA’s infrastructure remains important as an organizing platform and a starting point for new iterations of engaged practice.

Taken together, the mid-2010s to 2020s reveal a strategic broadening rather than a linear departure from protest. Across cases, architecture as civic praxis persists through a shifting balance of its three dimensions: hybrid roles, knowledge infrastructures, and institutional repertoires. The success is far from guaranteed (e.g., the failure to alter the spatial plans for Muzil and Srđ), and once activists enter institutions, their perseverance is constantly tested by bureaucratic rigidities and the tribulations of political organizing within a party (e.g., Možemo! in Zagreb). Still, it persists—moving between streets and institutions, supporting community organizing with concrete tools, and converting episodes of contention into civic capacities that do not wait for political validation but constitute it, in precisely the grassroots, capacity-building sense Jacobsson and Korolczuk (Reference Jacobsson and Korolczuk2019) identify.

Architecture as civic praxis: What the Croatian case contributes

This article has argued that over the last three decades in Croatia, socially engaged architects shifted the relationship between expertise, publics, and institutions by turning architectural knowledge outward as civic labor—organizing communities, building capacities, and translating movement repertoires into institutional procedures. The analytical value of the Croatian case is an empirically grounded contribution that widens what counts as civil society in CEE by specifying how expert activism operates as civic activism, and by identifying mechanisms through which civic capacities endure beyond episodes of protest. Across the three phases traced here, architecture as civic praxis persists through a shifting balance of hybrid roles, knowledge infrastructures, and institutional repertoires.

First, the case advances a more precise account of expert activism in CEE. Rather than treating architects as technocrats or as a classic “epistemic community” quietly advising elites, it shows networks of experts acting with communities and through institutions, intervening in how spatial problems are known, named, and governed. This outward orientation destabilizes the binary that opposes NGO-ized service delivery to contentious politics: architects move between repertoires (research, mapping, planning workshops, exhibitions) and arenas (streets, cultural venues, professional bodies, municipal platforms), producing effects visible in procedures (expanded consultation practices and rules), professional norms (a politicized CAA), and political outcomes (civic coalitions and municipal platforms). In this sense, the Croatian case deepens CEE civil-society debates by demonstrating that “citizen-experts” in clientelist systems can strengthen civic struggles not primarily through privileged access to policymaking, but by communicating with the wider public, organizing communities, and building shared vocabularies that make spatial knowledge more accessible and usable in contestation.

Second, the article specifies the importance of architectural knowledge production as civic infrastructure. Maps, planning analyses, readers, exhibitions, and theory written for broader audiences function as civic tools: they scrutinize how space is produced, make decision-making processes legible, and build a shared language through which communities and movements can articulate claims and contest official narratives. Their value lies in their continued circulation and reuse, which allows critiques, methods, and reference points to travel across sites and years. This perspective also raises practical questions about what educational frameworks and movement-based support are needed to maintain, update, and build on such tools across cycles of contention.

Third, the findings contest the view (e.g., Schumacher) that architectural political work becomes meaningful only when empowered political actors take it up. The Croatian case shows the reverse: political relevance is made through organizing, knowledge work, and the gradual construction of procedural tools and coalitions that enable the translation of contested claims into actionable programs. When municipal power in Zagreb shifted in 2021, activists-turned-public servants could act and introduce new policy (in spatial planning, land use, and public services) because civic infrastructures—and the repertoire of purposeful institutional engagement—had already been built within movements, before any stable “hegemony” was secured.

These claims have limits. Institutional entry revealed hard constraints—legacy contracts, legal obstacles, budget lines—that activists hoping to change the system from within ran up against. At the same time, civic networks lost some of their prominent organizers to elected office and public institutions, leaving the independent scene with less capacity to articulate new progressive demands and to keep producing knowledge and politics from below. The uneven geography of capacity in Croatia underscores that infrastructures require ecologies: organizations dense enough to reproduce themselves by renewing labor, shared vocabularies, and supportive regional and national frameworks. The article therefore proposes reframing “failure” (lost civic campaigns; partial municipal reforms) as diagnostic—an indicator of where civic infrastructures are thin and what is needed to strengthen them.

For theory and CEE debates, this implies, first, a conceptual widening of civil society: treating expert activism as a core form of civic action, rather than an outlier. This brings socially engaged architects and other professionals with spatial knowledge fully into civil-society analysis and recognizes them for the civic labor they perform, rather than reducing them to expert “stakeholders.” Second, analysis should focus on mechanisms. The three mechanisms outlined here—expert activism as civic activism, knowledge production as civic infrastructure, and purposeful institutional engagement—offer analytic tools for other CEE settings, extending standard typologies (advocacy, service delivery, grassroots contention) with processual accounts of how civic capacity is built and sustained. They also refine urban-movement scholarship by showing how the “right to the city” becomes actionable through concrete repertoires, tools, and procedures.

For architecture, the case legitimizes architecture as civic praxis: strategic, situated, collective labor that does not await political validation but helps constitute it. Its legacies are not just buildings or plans, but vocabularies, procedures, and alliances that reconfigure how urban futures are imagined and decided. In an era of polycrisis, this is a disciplined ambition: to treat architectural knowledge as a civic resource, calibrated to organize communities, prioritize public interest, and make room, materially and politically, for more just urban life.