Layers of Time in the Urban Landscape

Mitrovica is a divided city. The bridge separating the Serb north and the Albanian south is a symbolic site in the ongoing ethno-political dispute over Kosovo. Beneath the ethnic division and post-conflict reconstruction, however, lies the fascinating heritage of the city’s rapid industrial and urban development under the ideological premises of socialist Yugoslavia.

This book is a unique cooperative endeavor at the intersection of photography and history, aiming to document the overlaps in the socialist and post-conflict transformations of the city of Mitrovica. It powerfully demonstrates that the material remnants of the socialist metamorphosis of the city are more than passive leftovers of a lost age. Rather, they continue to give meaning to post-socialist, post-industrial, and post-conflict socio-spatial configurations in Mitrovica.