Anamaria Klasić

This paper examines housing affordability in Croatia’s large housing estates in the context of energy renovation. Drawing on survey data, focus groups, and expert interviews, the study highlights challenges in both socialist and post-socialist buildings. Residents report lower satisfaction with buildings’ energy efficiency, interior and exterior appearance, especially in socialist estates. Over 40% of households spend more than 30% of income on housing costs, with affordability risks higher for tenants, low-income households, the mortgage-indebted, single-person households, and the elderly. Experts agree that current renovation efforts of private stock lack a systematic approach. The findings underscore the need for targeted national policy and financial support.

This paper explores public participation in socialist and post-socialist housing estates in Croatian cities. The quantitative (survey, N = 1,536) and qualitative research methods (focus groups with residents, semi-structured interviews with experts) were conducted. The focus was on the level of participation and obstacles for participation in Croatian housing estates. The results confirm the hypothesis that those citizens who do not believe that their participation impacts the decision-making process are less likely to participate. At the level of all estates, citizens are poorly acquainted with the actions of the city and local authorities, and poorly involved in decision-making processes. Citizens are mainly engaged when urgent situations occur that endanger the quality of life in the estate, which is most often related to environmental or infrastructural issues. That is also the most important ad hoc channel by which residents communicate their requirements with the formal government in cities, which is also called reactionist activism.

The inadequate legislation on multi-family housing management in Central and Eastern European post-socialist countries calls for the exploration of additional determinants of building renovation on the level of the community of residents in a building. To this end, we present here an analytical framework called the mediated-Renovation Decision (m-RD) model for simultaneously testing the direct and indirect effects that neighbourly relations, cooperation of the co-owners' representative with the co-owners, and acceptance of the building co-ownership concept have on co-owners' willingness to invest in building renovation. The model is based on assessments made by 325 co-owners' representatives from multi-family buildings in Croatia. The results show that the quality of neighbourly relations affects the co-owner's willingness to renovate not directly, but indirectly through the level of their acceptance of the building co-ownership concept. The other indirect effect of neighbourly relationsthrough the level of the representative's cooperation with co-ownerswas not significant. The demonstrated analytical value of the m-RD model advocates for more complex studies of the role of neighbourly relations in collective decision-making and actions in the housing domain.

U Zagrebu pored brojnih javnih kulturnih ustanova i niza drugih kulturnih organizacija u neprofitnom i profitnom sektoru djeluje i 15 javnih centara za kulturu. Njihov je nastanak i kasniji rad određen specifičnim kulturnim politikama koje su se ra...