The spatial plan expired in 2020 and the new one is still a draft: Pelagonia is promised a third national park and a Bitola-Ohrid expressway

Macedonia is being planned according to a document that expired in 2020. That's not the opposition talking - it's the Ministry of Environment and Spatial Planning. At a public hearing in Bitola, Nebi Redzhepi, head of the ministry's spatial planning department, said the current Spatial Plan had a time horizon up to 2020, and that until a new one is adopted, the state will keep working according to the old one.

The procedure for the new plan, with a horizon to 2040, began in 2021 with the signing of the contract to draw it up. Five years later, in the Bitola municipal council chamber, what was presented was - a draft. The client is the ministry, the author the Agency for Spatial Planning, and the hearing was devoted to the Pelagonia planning region in the south-west of the country.

The list of possibilities is long. A motorway to the Medzhitlija border crossing with Greece. An expressway from Bitola to Ohrid. 16 reservoirs on the region's rivers, a biomass power plant, transformer stations. And a third national park: alongside "Pelister" and "Galichica", the new plan is expected to include "Nidzhe" as well.

Mayor Toni Konjanovski said the Municipality of Bitola is already drafting a new General Urban Plan, since the existing one is several decades old. "As a serious local government, we had the courage to start this process, which for years had only ever been announced," he said.

Courage is a big word for something that is a legal obligation. At the hearing, the ministry itself called spatial planning "a constitutional obligation". If that's so, how did the country go for years without a valid spatial plan, while one of its largest cities runs on an urban plan that is decades old?

The hearing also dealt with the demographic gap between the Skopje region and the rest of the country, and the need for new economic policies to keep the workforce at home. That is the real test of the plan. Motorways are easy to draw on paper. It's harder to make sure someone is still left in Pelagonia to drive on them by 2040.