Planning Capital Cities

Belgrade 1714-2014: Utopianism and urbicide

Belgrade has been the subject of countless urban

and architectural failures, becoming a conglomerate

of stylistic and aesthetic controversies, a cacophony

of disordered rights and interests. The city is

additionally burdened by joining the predominantly

rural settlements and conglomerates Barajevo,

Grocka, Lazarevac, Mladenovac, Sopot, Surčin and

Obrenovac.

The slums in the immediate surroundings of the city

core provide the best architectural examples of the

described situation with their temporary facilities or

construction failures. The Sava Congress Center and

the Hotel Intercontinental, beautiful and functional

symbols of the modernization in the 1970s, have

a visual connection to both the Sava River and the

spectacular panorama of Belgrade, and, somewhat

closer than that, at the wild unhygienic settlement

colloquially known as “Korea”, that arose on the

part of the former concentration camp at the site

of the pre-war fairground. The famous open market

Kalenić pijaca, a symbol of the orderly civil life in a

relative prosperity, languishes for decades as the

area of filth, of unregulated trade and of traffic

chaos. It is located just in the immediate sight of

the Belgrade’s Directorate for Construction in the

same Njegoševa Street that connects the market

from the south-western side with the municipality

of Vračar, one of the central and most expensive city

communities. In the neighboring districts, regardless

of the narrow, dirty streets, vicinity of slums and

the lack of any adequate infrastructure, during the

recent years the property prices, they have been

reaching astronomical levels. This contrasted clearly

from the local economic and social potential. The

urbicide witnesses and the actors are construction

sites themselves. They are the evidentiary polygons

of the tycoon arbitrariness, the corrupt institutions,

the neglecting of the urban hygiene and the freedom

of movement and safety at work.

The urbicide in Belgrade is fed by the mentalities

and the logic of incompleteness: unfulfilled urban

development plans, vane political promises and

abandoned projects. The international and regional

isolation, random migrations, the corruption and

Fig. 7
The location of the settlement colloquially known as “Korea”.
(Google Earth)

Fig. 8
The Kalenic market. (Archive Samardžić)