Urban regeneration strategies and practice of Slovenia

The process of rapid industrialisation after WWII caused a fast growth of Slovenian cities. The peak of this process was reached in the 1960s and 1970s, when large parts of Slovenian cities and towns were built anew, following the paradigm of modernistic planning. In the 1990s Slovenia pursued a major socio- economic change from the planned economic and socialist society into the neo-liberal capitalist model. At the same time a paradigm shift in urban planning took full swing – the sustainability paradigm got introduced, firstly in the strategic urban planning documents, and later in the more concrete spatial implementation plans and realisations. It is a rather peculiar situation in which Slovenian cities find themselves nowadays – large areas of the urban territory that has been urbanised in socialist times have been aged up and need strongly a comprehensive regeneration. The strategic development goals are oriented towards the low carbon economy. This paper reviews the scholarly work that has addressed urban regeneration in the last decades in order to illustrate the development of the locally adjusted approach to urban regeneration. It analyses the strategic development documents at two different scales – the national and the local. This is illustrated in the case of the capital city of Ljubljana, where different urban regeneration projects are analysed to evaluate the implementation of the guidelines from the strategic levels of consideration into practice. The review shows the gap between strategic orientations and practical approaches, and that more time will be needed to implement the strategic urban regeneration orientations into practice to meet the low-carbon future.