The Cities and Regions in Transition – the Case of Rijeka/Fiume Project and Interactive Map
The project entitled Cities and Regions in Transition: the case of Rijeka/Fiume is funded by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This broader project asks: how did the long-term transfer of cities and regions from one state to another during and after the Second World War affect these places? We approach this research question by focusing on one particular case: Rijeka/Fiume, which was a part of Italy from 1924 to 1947, at which time it was transferred over to Yugoslav control. The objective of the two-year study will be to inquire into and record the various 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.
Following the completion of the first phase, the project will expand in two directions. The first, in collaboration with the department of History of the University of Rijeka, is to fully and richly document both the changes and continuities in Rijeka’s transition. The second, in collaboration with scholars familiar with post-war German, Polish and Soviet history, is to use the methodology developed in the first phase to write a comparative history of the social, cultural and spatial consequences of territorial changes after the Second World War.
The interactive GeoLive map is open to everyone who wishes to share a story related to Rijeka’s history. Although its primary geared towards academics, the enthusiasts in local history are also encouraged to participate in enriching Rijeka’s historical narrative that is visualized on the map.
The investigators working on this projects are Dr. Brigitte Le Normand and Dr. Vanni D’Alessio. Brigitte Le Normand is Assistant Professor of History and director of the Urban Studies program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She holds a PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has recently published Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.) In addition to Designing Tito’s Capital, she has published several articles on Urban Planning in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She is also working on a project investigating the relationship between Yugoslavia and its migrant workers in Europe during the Cold War. Vanni D’Alessio is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History of the University of Rijeka and Research fellow at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples. He received a PhD in History at the Department of History of University of Naples, completing part of his graduate school at the Institutum studiorum Humanitatis of Ljubljana. Vanni D’Alessio has written a monograph in Italian on the birth of nationalism in a Central Istrian small town in late Habsburg period (Il Cuore Conteso, 2004) and several essays in Italian, Croatian and English on the Upper Adriatic in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has also written on the divided city of Mostar after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on which he filmed a short documentary film.