ABSTRACT
Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) is a new city, planned and constructed in the post-Second World War period during socialist rule in the former Yugoslavia. Planned on the principles of modern urbanism and the paradigm of the ‘functional city’, it developed in an area with no previous settlement on the site of a marshy alluvial plain bordered by the rivers Sava and Danube, between the historical cities of Zemun and Beograd (Belgrade). Over time, the modern urban structure integrated the two previously independent and territorially autonomous centres into the Greater Belgrade metropolis (Blagojević 2004, 2005, 2007, 2012b). The Municipality of Novi Beograd today covers an area of around 4,000 hectares and is inhabited by some 250,000 people. By virtue of its location, modern infrastructure and development potential, Novi Beograd nds itself at the centre of contemporary post-socialist/communist socio-political and economic transition of the metropolis and its region, thus undergoing profound socio-spatial transformations. In this respect, the relationships between the emerging post-socialist urban reality and the extant modern urban landscape of the socialist era continue to be spatially, environmentally and socially contested, while questions about the opportunities of collective and cooperative appropriation of space remain largely unresolved. Pertinent questions concern the relation of new development to the urban structure, architecture and social space of dilapidating and ideologically stigmatized socialist housing. What qualities of socialist architecture but also of its social space need to be recognized and preserved, and where can the new development improve on the inherited urban structure? Some recent studies present the current processes of urban change in the bright and positive light of an eagerly awaited progress towards a market economy, while others see the paramount importance of modernist architectural heritage and the need for its protection and preservation (cf. Waley 2011). Could we argue that the balance between the two is to be found in the complex appreciation of the urban landscape quality of the modern city and in the perspective of ecological urbanism?1
