Zagreb City Transformation - From Infrastructural Node to City Central Area

The expansion of the city of Zagreb in the east- west direction has always followed the legacy of traffic flows which are parallel to the hills of the mountain Medvednica and to the alluvial plains of the river Sava. In the mid-19th century, the railway has passed in the same direction, becoming a linking factor in this east-west direction, but at the same time also a spatial barrier between north and south city area. This ambivalence of the railway as a factor of development, but also as a limiting element in urban tissue cohesion, it significantly determines the directions of the city expansion - today, just as it has in the past. Large urban infrastructural projects such as railway area revitalization are determining the future of the city, its long-term development and progress, simultaneously solving both global metropolitan area problems and local area problems. From the original idea to the final realization of each big scale project there is a long lasting procedure of initiatives, solutions and studies with active city strategy and continuous intellectual and financial efforts. The subject of this research is questioning the paradigm of the urban tissue transformation through the revitalization and improvement of urban railway. The city already owns the infrastructure which has to be adjusted into the organizational city system. Research was conducted in collaboration with the students of undergraduate studies at the course named “City Planning”. The aim was to set up the problem and provide urban solutions for certain neglected or unconsolidated urban spaces along the railroad, mostly infrastructure nodes, applying a model of urban valorisation, based on placing additional value to the space, as a central start up tool for the city central area Zagreb transformation.