Zdravko Mlinar

Zdravko Mlinar (born 30 January 1933) is a retired Slovene sociologist, Doctor of Social and Political Sciences, Professor of Spatial Sociology, Professor Emeritus at the University of Ljubljana, and a member of the Slovenian and Croatian Academy of Sciences.

In doing so, Mlinar integrated and transcended the frameworks of urban and rural sociology, local self-government, and regional research, revealing the regularities of social change, particularly in terms of individualization and socialisation processes, globalisation, and informatisation.

He studied the dynamics of the interpenetration and exclusion of opposites, transcending the outdated notions of the zero-sum game logic between local and global, homogenisation, diversification, and de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation.

He interpreted social transformation as the freeing up of actors and their overcoming of divisions arising from spatial, temporal, sectoral, and hierarchical organisation.

Mlinar is considered to be one of the key founders and visionaries enforcing spatial sociology both nationally and internationally.

These include the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Architecture et Comportment, Espaces et Sociétés, Studia sociologiczno-politiczne, Comparative Political Studies, Sociologičeskie issledovaniâ, Revue de l'Est, La ricerca sociale, Sociologia urbana e rurale, and International Journal of Sociology of Language.

His works include: Social Participation of Citizens in Local Community (1965), People in the new town: Velenje (1965), Sociology of the Local Communities (1974), Local Government and Rural Development (1974); The Developmental Logic of Social Systems (along with lead author Henry Teune),[3] (1978); Social Ecology of Change (lead author) (1978); Humanisation of the City (1983); Contradictions of Social Development (1986), Globalization and Territorial Identities (co-author) (1992); Individualisation and Globalisation in Space (1994), co-authored Autonomy and Connectedness in the European space (1995), Living Environment in the Global Information Age: Spatio-Temporal Organization of Living (2008); Globalization: Enrichments and/or Threats (2012).