Forum Skopje is a project already established on the international stage in Europe. This would be its 3rd year of presentness in the psychical and physical worlds of our citizens. The platform operates in the public sector and tries to articulate all the socio-architectural changes conducted by the government.
In the past 2 years the basic accent was given the contemporary spirit of Western Europe. While the foreign guests from: Vienna, Milan, Berlin, Venice, Philadelphia, Zagreb, Boston, New York, Madrid, Rome, etc. discussed about the current benefactors on the World level, the citizens of Skopje created the critical body which confronted the round table accordingly at the debate sessions.

The platform is not seen as an open critique, on the contrary, it works its own way in the pool of the foreign knowledge, and in the same time accumulates and archives the information making it obtainable to everybody.

After last year’s success, the Organization of Forum Skopje decides to set up the scenario again and invite in June 2010 experts from abroad. The invitees would be summoned on a round table confronted by Macedonian contemporary architects, students, artists, citizens in different areas of this year’s subject: “City of Solidarity”. The goal would be extraction of knowledge and cognizance from the foreign guests and in a comparative manner searching for the real questions about the present occurances in the region.

The City of Solidarity
After the Quake of `63 Skopje obtains a new story that wiggles itself through the decades, together with almost all the segments of its existence. The devastating power of the Earthquake was immense, 85% of the City central housing was demolished. In the period of the Cold War, as the World leaders were trying to set aside the misconstrue through international aid to Skopje, the tragic mishap was at least well timed. The ideology that brought the world powers to our availability was nothing else then a mere solidarity, timed or not – a gesture that helped Skopje and gave a new identity to the City that was kneeling. The initiatives where literally from the whole World, established by the UN, grew into a myth written about in many books of urban design, architecture and sociology. This forgotten story deserves an international esteem, the story of a once destroyed City brought on the surface again, in the strive for the leftovers of the Solidarity; returning a 46 years old favor to the World. “The City of Solidarity”  is set to be this year’s subject for the round table sessions. The subject would be talked about and researched inside out: what has left of the World’s solidarity!

The concept
We should act: The story deteriorates in some kind of urban amnesia, through Forum Skopje we strive to instigate the essence of the once present ideologies that brought back a City on its feet, ask the invitees the right questions and aspire for right solutions in the eyes of the critique and the citizens.
The Technical University of Vienna, together with Prof. Dr. Erich Raith and arh. Ivan Mirkovski conducts a research which would manifest itself by a semestral project with students from the Technical University of Vienna in Skopje in late spring 2010. This international collaboration, Forum Skopje and the Technical University of Vienna, in the years to come would evolve into a major Institution that would teach and propagate contemporary ways of seeing throughout the whole region: A platform about City’s sociology.