The Courtyard That Zagreb Forgot And What Rebuilding It Would Actually Mean

On post-earthquake rehabilitation, historic block transformation, and the question of what exactly we are trying to restore.

The Courtyard That Zagreb Forgot And What Rebuilding It Would Actually Mean

Heagy Kweon  ·  Urban Heritage Insight Curator · Researcher & Writer

There is a building in Zagreb's Lower Town whose facade was repaired within months of the March 2020 earthquake. The lime render is fresh, the cornice line restored, the window surrounds clean. From the street, it looks fixed. Step through the main entrance, however, and you enter a courtyard that has not changed in sixty years. A rusted warehouse structure from the 1950s occupies most of the space. The original perimeter ring of nineteenth-century residential rooms wraps around it in a state of progressive deterioration. The courtyard is not publicly accessible. It is not green. It functions, to the extent that it functions at all, as informal storage and ad hoc parking.

This is the condition that the earthquake did not create, but made impossible to ignore.

Zagreb's Lower Town, aerial view. The nineteenth-century perimeter ring is largely intact; the courtyard interiors tell a different story. Google Earth, © Google and applicable data providers; annotations by author

Zagreb's Lower Town — the Donji grad — is one of Central Europe's most coherent examples of late nineteenth-century urban planning. Between the 1860s and the 1920s, the city expanded southward from its medieval hilltop core according to a rigorous orthogonal plan developed under urban planner Milan Lenuci. The blocks were generous, the streets tree-lined, the parks arranged in a celebrated U-shaped green sequence that became known as the Lenuci Horseshoe. The architecture was disciplined and the courtyard — the interior of each urban block — was intended as a semi-private breathing space within the city fabric.

From the 1930s through 1968, something different happened. Rapid industrialization and population growth put pressure on the block interiors. The courtyards, hidden from street view and therefore from public accountability, filled progressively with auxiliary structures, workshops, warehouses, and ad hoc additions. By the time Zagreb's 1968 urban development plan was implemented, the interior of the average Lower Town block had been built up to a density that the original plan never anticipated and the existing infrastructure could not comfortably support.

The earthquake of March 22, 2020, with a magnitude of 5.3, caused severe structural damage — primarily to unreinforced masonry buildings of exactly the type that forms the nineteenth-century perimeter of the Lower Town blocks. Facades cracked. Cornices collapsed. Roofs failed. The structural logic that these buildings were built with — robust perimeter walls carrying timber floor structures — proved acutely vulnerable to lateral seismic forces. The damage was real, significant, and in several cases irreversible.

Earthquake-damaged building on Đorđićeva Street, Zagreb, photographed in 2021. Photo: Milan Kušnjačić, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0

What became visible at that point, however, was not only the seismic vulnerability of the buildings. The earthquake exposed the cumulative vulnerability of the blocks as systems.

A building is a relatively legible object. It can be assessed, classified, repaired, or in extreme cases demolished and replaced. A block is something more complex: it is a spatial arrangement that has accumulated over time, in which the condition of individual buildings is only one variable. The condition of the courtyard, the pattern of use and access, the relationship between the perimeter buildings and the interior structures, the presence or absence of green space, the movement of people through and around the block — all of these constitute the block's actual urban performance, and none of them appear on a standard damage assessment form.

Three blocks in the Lower Town offer a useful illustration of how this accumulated condition varies. Block A, located in the oldest part of the area, is primarily residential. Its courtyard has limited public green space and a pattern of neglected open area that suggests gradual, uncontrolled subdivision of the interior over time. Block B, located in the heart of the district, shows the most severe courtyard densification. A significant proportion of its interior is occupied by large structures that formerly served production functions — warehouses, workshops, and light industrial facilities that have since lost their original use and now sit deteriorating in the interior of a high-value urban block. Block C, in the newer eastern section, is mainly residential but suffers from a lack of social and cultural infrastructure that would make the block a genuine neighborhood rather than simply a housing location.

Morphological transformation of Lower Town blocks, 1887–2021. The progressive infill of courtyard space mirrors a wider pattern of uncontrolled block densification. Source: Gašparović, Jukić & Mrđa, 2021

These three blocks are not exceptional. They are representative. The conditions they display — courtyard infill, loss of green space, functional obsolescence of interior structures, seismic vulnerability of perimeter buildings — apply at varying degrees across the Lower Town.

The question, then, is not simply how to repair the facades. The question is what to do with the block as a whole.

The concept that offers the clearest framework for this is the Historic Urban Landscape approach, developed through UNESCO's 2011 recommendation. The HUL approach does not treat historic preservation as the freezing of a moment in time. It treats the historic city as a living system in which change is inevitable and the task of conservation is to manage that change in a way that preserves the essential values, relationships, and spatial identities that make a place meaningful. In the Lower Town context, this means recognizing that the nineteenth-century perimeter ring of buildings is genuinely worth preserving — not merely as architecture, but as the spatial container of a block structure that once worked well and could work well again. The problem is not the historic envelope. The problem is what has been allowed to accumulate inside it.

Two strategic approaches to the courtyard suggest themselves, each suited to different block conditions.

The first — which might be called the "Green Heart" model — proposes the complete clearance of non-historic, post-war additions from the block interior, retaining only the nineteenth-century perimeter ring. The cleared center becomes a unified public green space: dense tree canopy, unsealed soil, space for movement and gathering. Ground floors of the perimeter buildings are opened to face this new interior, with cafes, community functions, and small retail. The block, in effect, gains a room it never had: a quiet, green, publicly accessible interior that reconnects the perimeter buildings to each other and to the city.

A maximal-clearance strategy that removes non-historic post-war infill, preserves the nineteenth-century perimeter, and creates a unified public green courtyard.

The second — the "Permeable Hub" model — is more selective. Rather than full clearance, it proposes the retention of a small number of structurally sound interior buildings — a brick warehouse of architectural character, for example — and their conversion to glass-fronted pavilions housing cultural or community functions. The courtyard does not become a single large space but a network of smaller passages, pocket gardens, and activated nodes. Access is permeable: the block can be entered from multiple points on the surrounding streets, creating shortcuts and unexpected routes through the city that did not previously exist.

A selective-retention strategy that preserves characterful interior structures and transforms the courtyard into a permeable network of passages, pocket gardens, and active community uses

Both approaches share a common premise. The courtyard is not a residual space. It is the city's missing public room — not missing by accident, but by a process of gradual, poorly regulated densification that was invisible precisely because it was hidden from the street.

Rehabilitating the interior of the block, however, is only half the problem. The street network surrounding it is the other half. Zagreb's Lower Town streets, particularly the secondary connections between the main avenues, have been progressively surrendered to vehicles over the past half-century. Traffic volumes have increased, sidewalks have narrowed, and the on-street parking that has colonized every available metre has made the street itself inhospitable to the pedestrian movement that a dense mixed-use neighborhood requires.

The Superblock model — developed in Barcelona as the Superilles program by the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona — offers a tested response to this condition. By grouping several urban blocks into a single mobility unit and restricting motor vehicle access to the perimeter, the model returns the interior streets to pedestrians and cyclists. The results in Barcelona have been measurable: significant reductions in vehicular traffic and air pollution, a substantial expansion of public green space within the blocks, and increases in ground-floor commercial activity that initially feared pedestrianization but subsequently benefited from it. The spatial logic of the Lower Town — an orthogonal grid with clearly defined block perimeters and interior streets — is well suited to this approach.

Left: existing conditions on Hebrangova Street, Lower Town — vehicle-dominated, minimal pedestrian provision. Right: proposed street section after pedestrianization intervention, reallocating space to pedestrians, cyclists, and green infrastructure.

The combination of these two strategies — adaptive reuse of block interiors and Superblock-based street reorganization — constitutes a genuinely integrated response to the condition that the 2020 earthquake revealed. It does not simply repair the envelope. It rehabilitates the system.

This matters for reasons that go beyond Zagreb.

Across European cities with comparable historic fabrics — dense nineteenth-century urban extensions built to orthogonal plans with large block interiors — the same pattern of courtyard infill, street congestion, and seismic or structural vulnerability is visible at different scales and in different stages of severity. The question of how to manage the transition from a damaged, under-performing historic block to a resilient, livable, and economically active one is not specific to Croatia. It is one of the central challenges of urban heritage management in the twenty-first century.

What Zagreb offers, if approached seriously, is not a case study in recovery. It is a case study in transformation — one in which the earthquake served less as a cause than as a moment of clarity. The damage to the facades was visible. The damage to the block system had been accumulating for decades. Addressing only the visible is not rehabilitation. It is, at best, a delay.

The courtyard is still there, behind the freshly repaired facade of that Lower Town building. What happens to it will say more about the seriousness of Zagreb's commitment to its historic core than the plasterwork on the outside walls ever could.

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