Based on the experience with workers’ self-management, local councils and housing communities in Yugoslavia, the constitutions of 1963 and 1974 introduced and affirmed local communities as a self-managed territorial form of gathering of working people and citizens within a municipality, in a block or part of a block. Together with organizations of associated labour and self-managed interest communities, they formed a self-management triangle within which the issues of income distribution and investment in the societal standard were resolved by agreement and in accordance with medium-term plans of development. Key decisions were reached respecting the principles of societal self-management, direct socialist democracy, and reciprocity and solidarity. In addition, local communities were conceived as a space for humanizing the relations in the neighbourhood and shaping the local environment according to the extended family model. Could such a model work in practice and what obstacles did it encounter? What did activists and citizens as self-managers succeed in, and what did they fail to manage? The sources used in the research point to a wide area of ​​activity of local communities in Yugoslavia and different experiences that have changed over time.

Citizen participation and everyday practices of self-management are illustrated by examples related to the establishing local communities, self-contribution, consumer protection, peace councils, civil protection, fraternization and solidarity.

Igor Duda is a historian, a full professor at the Department of History of the Faculty of Philosophy of Juraj Dobrila University in Pula and a researcher at the University’s Centre for Cultural and Historical Research of Socialism, of which he is the co-founder and initiator of different activities. Since 2011, he has been an external associate at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb, and since 2021 he has been a Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Eastern and Southeastern European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb with a degree in history and Croatian studies, and holds a master’s and doctorate in history. Duda researches the history of everyday life and the social history of socialist Yugoslavia, mainly the topics of free time, tourism, consumer culture, living standards, childhood, shaping the socialist man and the participation of citizens in societal self-management. From 2018 to 2023 he was the head of the research project Microstructures of Yugoslav Socialism: Croatia 1970-1990, the results of which are his fourth book Socialism on the Doorstep. Local community and everyday societal self-management in Yugoslavia (2023) and an edited volume Microsocialism (2023).

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