URBIS

Humanization of the urban space


The Association for Culture of Living, Improving and Humanization of the Environment – URBIS unites several renowned architects, urbanism scientists, construction engineers, sociologists, but also citizens of other professions with a common wish to make Skopje a human urban environment. The Association acts locally, and its goals are to induce the citizens’ interest for higher quality of living, high professional ethics in the area of space utilization, improvement of the legal regulation on this area, affirmation of craft of planning the environment and people whose work it is, protection and rehabilitation of the cultural inheritance of the city and its surroundings and other.

As the Chairwoman of URBIS, architect Olga Colancevska told us, they achieve these and other goals through several sections within the association: section on cultural inheritance and urban tradition (managed by architect Jasmina Hadzieva – Aleksieva), section on environment art designing (Professor Boris Petkovski), urban sociology (Ilija Acevski, PhD) and other.
- We organized two public tribunes – on the chaos in the traffic and on the chaos in the urbanism). We plan to get actively involved in the public discussion on the draft-General Urban Plan of Skopje, but we have some remarks concerning the low participation of the public through the phases of preparation of this Plan. We consider the traffic as the biggest urban problem of Skopje, and for that reason we stand for construction of streetcar lines that would connect the east and the West end of the city (Gjorce Petrov – Madjari). The chaos in the urbanism is also characteristic for Skopje at the moment – objects are constructed without plan and order, without obeying the General and the detailed urban plans. We consider as great success that we -to a certain level - stopped the construction chaos in Debar Maalo and won the citizens’ support. They understood that we work to their benefit, because most of the citizens are in fact victims of the entrepreneurs, who sell them apartments in illegal buildings – says architect Colancevska.