Between Restoration, Urban Renewal, and Revitalization: Maribor Old Town during the Late Socialist Period (1978-1990)

The question of recovering the architectural heritage of Maribor in the post-war period — not just restoration but revitalization — found fertile ground in Slovenian architectural culture. During that time, Maribor, the second largest city in Slovenia, developed primarily as a productive industrial center. Following the construction of the Srednja Drava 1 hydroelectric power plant in 1966, the level of the Drava River rose, and it was necessary to demolish some late medieval and Baroque buildings of the ancient port of Pristan (Lent). That area became the epicenter of urban revitalization in the 1970s and 1980s, animated especially by architects Branko Kocmut, Bogdan Reichenberg, and Igor Recer. These interventions entailed a search for reconciliation between the methods of the Yugoslav socialist idea of self-management and the requests for a historic center in the city that would serve both cultural and recreational-tourist purposes for many years.