The paper focuses on urban changes in Zagreb at the turn of the Twenty First Century. The changes are analyzed as tensions between continuity and change e in social structure and discourse, throughout the long period of modernization. A city square and its recent changes provide a platform (Low and Laurence-Zúñiga, 2003) to study the divergence and convergence of current social, economic, cultural and identity issues in the Zagreb post-socialist experience. This example of a contested space illustrates broader national political and economic processes (post-socialism, transition) and local incorporation of global trends (neoliberalism, consumerism, development of civil society), which are discussed in the paper.