Ongoing urban developments and contemporary social challenges increase the need for different typologies of new urban and architectural concepts, where the issue of built heritage, specifically in the case of Skopje, has become a vast problem. With the decomposition of the former Yugoslavia states in the 1990s, each of these new states inherited a significant amount of built heritage, including monuments, buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure, constructed according to the prevailing socialist urban-planning and architectural doctrines, and directed within and towards the immediate contexts of the Yugoslav community. Most of this inherited architecture vanished across the ex-Yugoslav space, while a large part of it is still left in a state of limbo.
This article aims to show the socialist built heritage's adaptation, or transformation, into new urban scenarios, using the case of Skopje to reveal more about the relationship between the heritage and the local inhabitants. It will closely examine the socialist architecture and its relation with the local memory communities, or the locals’ memories. More precisely, we will focus on one unique construct that has slowly vanished in the modern-day living: the notion of