Urban Megaprojects and the Architecture of Competitive Authoritarianism: Remaking Skopje (Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics)

This book presents how urban megaprojects uniquely expose the complexities of competitive authoritarianism.Through an analysis of Skopje 2014, it argues that accelerated, symbolically charged urban transformation reveals how such regimes govern space, manage constraint, and assemble power through the intertwined dynamics of implementation, ideology, and resistance. The book offers conceptual and empirical tools to analyze urban megaprojects as windows into the inner workings of competitive authoritarian regimes.It employs a qualitative, process-tracing approach grounded in historical analysis and extensive empirical material.It reconstructs the emergence and implementation of Skopje 2014 through interviews, archival and secondary sources, media materials, and close observation of spatial transformation, triangulating evidence across different types of data to capture how authoritarian power operates over time and across arenas.By following Skopje 2014 across political decisions, spatia