Planning Capital Cities

encouraged the survival of the traditional strata of economic and social power

and the nomenclature. The domestic economic structure dictated the state of

economic culture, as the primary commodities, and, in the second half of the

20 th century, the low rated industrial products tended to dominate the export

trade. The external parameters of the urban development remained extremely

unfavourable, as the public and commodity transport, the communications,

the housing supply, the health care, and the educational and cultural services.^2

The term urbicide refers among other examples to the destruction of cities by

the Yugoslav People’s Army, by the police and by the paramilitary units during

the Yugoslav conflict 1991-1999. The cities as peaceful, pacific and inherently

tolerant communities, in terms of ethnic and religious relations, were attacked

to a greater or lesser extent by all the armed units deployed in the former

Yugoslavia. And while the NATO intervention was focused on urbicide forces

on the Serbian side, the cities have suffered again, in massive destruction,

fear and social decomposition, while the Serbian regime conducted additional

internal political, ideological and economic pressures. The former Yugoslavian

cities were also a subject of a social and ideological hatred, a massive and

uncontrolled immigration, a quiet but also self-destructive emigration of

educated classes, an ethnic cleansing, an acculturation, a political, ideological

and turbo-cultural terror, an autarchic economy or a hyper-inflation.^3 The

urban planning, the institutions and the cultural development were under these

circumstances impossible to release. Inter alia, the small and medium-sized

businesses also severely suffered as, otherwise, the driving forces of European

urban civilization during the past half-millennium. A tendency in negligence,

arbitrariness and the general weakness of institutions was evident during the

first decade of the 21st century.

“The conjunction of ‘city’ and ‘civilization’, famously

theorized by Max Weber, poses the city as a place of

civility, civics and other formations of urban culture,

and the non-urban as disordered, chaotic and

violent. Urbicide, in this context, is framed not only

as violence against the city but also violence foreign

to the city. And accordingly, accounts of urbicide

easily intersected with accounts of primordial ethnic

hatreds or religious conflicts in the Balkans, each also

deemed alien to the city”.^4

Belgrade is a European capital that suffered most

of destructions, migrations, economy fractures

and identity crises during the last two centuries.

The history of the modern Belgrade is a chronicle

of common, often anonymous, and in the eyes of

the “official”, “big” history, “small” people’s efforts

to survive. Belgrade was carried by a current of

Fig. 1
The mayor Branko Pesic on the “Gazela” Bridge, 1970.
(Archive Samardžić)