Mesa-redonda que irá explorar a forma como as mudanças nos sistemas políticos e económicos têm vindo a redefinir as relações entre os cidadãos e os espaços urbanos. Com Igor Duda, IHC Visiting Scholar.

From Citizens to Tourists:

(Post)Yugoslav and Portuguese Communities between Local Needs and Global Demands

Who gets to decide on the place where we live? In socialist Yugoslavia, citizens were meant to run their workplaces and neighbourhoods through self-management. In Portugal, a different but equally ambitious movement of popular participation emerged from the revolution of 1974. After decades of modernisation, transition and European and global integration, many citizens on both sides feel that they have lost their voice, and that decisions about their housing and public space are made by markets, investors and visitors. Tourism might be the best example. Whether as a social right of Yugoslav citizens or promoted as a strategy for revenue generation and urban rehabilitation in cities such as Lisbon, tourism has profoundly reshaped everyday life. The expansion of short-term rentals and displacement of local residents demonstrate the profound consequences of the growing commodification of urban spaces.

Bringing together Professor Igor Duda (historian, University of Pula, IHC Visiting Scholar 2026), Sonja Dragović (doctoral research in architecture and urbanism, DINÂMIA’CET-Iscte), Luís Mendes (geographer, IGOT — University of Lisbon) and Guya Accornero (sociologist, CIES-Iscte), this round table compares Yugoslav, post-Yugoslav and Portuguese experiences. Moderated by Anita Buhin (historian, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), the discussion will explore how changing political and economic systems have reshaped relationships between citizens and urban spaces.

How did ideas of the citizen and the community change as societies modernised and went through transition? What happens to housing and public space when local needs meet global demand, whether in the form of tourists, investors or new policy models? And how have residents responded, from formal participation to housing movements and grassroots activism?

The event is open to the public and held in English.

About the IHC Visiting Scholar:
Igor Duda is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Pula, in Croatia, and one of the most renowned historians specialising in the social history of socialist Yugoslavia. From 22 to 29 November, he will be at NOVA FCSH as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Contemporary History. In 2012, he was one of the founders of the Centre for Cultural and Historical Research on Socialism (CKPIS), one of the leading regional platforms for the critical study of socialism, memory, everyday life and social transformations in South-Eastern Europe. Igor Duda’s research was pioneering in shifting the study of Yugoslav socialism away from high politics and party history towards the concrete experience of everyday life: leisure, tourism, consumption, childhood, housing, local communities and forms of self-management. He is the author of four seminal monographs on the social history of socialist Yugoslavia: In Search of Well-Being [U potrazi za blagostanjem] (2005), on leisure, tourism and consumer culture in the 1950s and 1960s; Well-Being Found [Pronađeno blagostanje] (2010), on standards of living and consumption in the 1970s and 1980s; Today When I Become a Pioneer [Danas kada postajem pionir] (2015), on childhood and socialist ideology; and Socialism on the Doorstep [Socijalizam na kućnom pragu] (2023), on local communities and everyday self-management. He is also co-editor of the volume Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism (Routledge, 2016).