Public squares in Southern Pannonian cities as a legacy of Habsburg regulations: The case of Holy Trinity Square in Sombor, Serbia

Settlements in Southern Pannonia are known for their well-regulated urban matrix, which was developed after the Habsburg reconquest of this peripheral region of Central Europe from the Ottomans in the 17th–18th centuries. The previous destructive wars left this land as a “tabula rasa” – barren and severely underpopulated. Hence, this was a “perfect polygon” for Habsburg military engineers to enforce the complete regulation of land and settlements, focusing on then-modern, colonial-style strict orthogonal organisation. However, some albeit rare settlements and their basic elements, such as public squares, urban blocks or streets, had preserved their organic matrix from medieval and Ottoman times. In these cases, a gradual process of strict regulation was implemented as a compromise, resulting in the present-day historical urban ambience with overlapping urban-planning legacy – their organic layer is usually “beneath” a relatively simplified and regulated form. The spotlight of this research is on public squares in the historic cores of Southern Pannonian cities in Serbia. The research first defines a historical context and general typology regarding their urban morphology. Then, a case study on Holy Trinity Square in the City of Sombor is presented. This square is appropriate for a historical-morphological analysis, as it has not physically changed for the last 150 years, so the square represents an insight into the past after the aforementioned Habsburg urban regulation. This means that this research embraces the specific remnants of colonial urbanism in the middle of Europe.