The investor urbanism in Belgrade is taking place both on a small and a large scale, and in the past 15 years we have witnessed the announcement of several flagship projects. The iconic architecture and urban renewals were presented for very attractive locations in the city, promising a big slice of the Bilbao effect. The latest incarnation of this practice is the Belgrade Waterfront Project, more grandiose than any of its ancestors in numbers and scale, its costs for taxpayers, potential risks, the numerous violated regulations and laws and the frightening social consensuses. For the first time, Serbian Government becomes, not only an enabler of the project, but also its instigator.

It can be said that Belgrade always had an uneasy relationship with urban planning. The mixture between strict and rigid attitude of planners when making the plans and a relaxed attitude towards their implementation is still one of the main characteristics of urban planning in Belgrade. The novelty is that these processes are no longer part of a systematic and comprehensive thinking about cities. The idea that general urban planning lost its role and omnipresent servility of profession to (political) power welcomed megalomaniac visions of the new investor’s city. Thus the city ceased to be a space which seeks to establish, at least nominally, equality of inhabitants and becomes rather a place of increasing inequality and social and economic tensions.

These processes finally brought about the wide exclusion of the public in decision-making, leaving the public interest unprotected, on the margins of the new (absent) society. As those with the official mandate to protect the public interest abandon it to serve the interest of the capital, the protection of the public interest becomes the focal point of organizing independent initiatives in the domain of spatial transformations of the cities and production of the cities, with the name: Don’t drown Belgrade[1].

Historical context of the project

The Belgrade coastal basin of the Sava River is an attractive location for which various techno-bureaucratic elite have shown a strong interest, which reflects the political, economic and cultural climate in Yugoslavia and the newly formed states after the collapse of Yugoslavia. When looking at the map of Belgrade, it is perplexing how this area could stay dormant for so long in the first place. The Sava Amphitheatre looks like the natural centre of the city, but it was not always like that. Its position became central with the development of New Belgrade across the Sava River after the Second World War. The Amphitheatre’s future was for decades tied to the untangling of the largest infrastructural Gordian knot in Belgrade, consisting of the main train station, with both international and regional passenger and freight routes, highway, international, local and regional bus terminals, and intense public transportation. The solution to relocate it came with the General Plan from 1972. Decades later, the new station, whose construction started in the 1980s, is still not completed. Thus the Sava Amphitheatre got stuck in limbo making it a perfect canvas for the projection of grand projects whose only purpose was to gain easy political points.

The 1972 Plan was the last which was guided by the idea that space is not a commodity, but a resource that needs to be planned and utilized rationally and for the benefit of the whole community. Already in the 1980s, Yugoslavia, burdened by the Structural Adjustment Program implemented by the IMF, swapped self-managed socialism for a free market economy, and, ultimately, for capitalism. Officials and urban planners started looking at the space owned by the city not as a resource and a control mechanism to sustain equality in future development, but as a source of fast profit. It can be said that from 1985, when the planning laws were changed, allowing the city to make regulatory plans only for the locations for which investment already existed, that the role of urban planners was reduced to the facilitators of investors’ wishes. However, it was only after 2000 that the full extent of the impact of privatization and transformation of the political system became visible in the city, and the area where this text is focusing on, since in the 1990s, people living there were too preoccupied with waging war to focus on these relatively subtle changes in city politics. It was during the 1990s, however, when the potential of the Sava Amphitheatre as the site of grand political projects came to full prominence, the boldest one being called Europolis.

Official urban planning in Belgrade and Yugoslavia after WW2 was based on the Athens Charter principles of modernist planning. While the Yugoslav distinct interpretation of socialism and self-management asked for a lot of intense participation by citizens in the shaping and governing of all elements of society, it created a framework which could have yielded innovative procedures of including citizens in the urban planning process. Unfortunately, this never happened. Planners played the technocratic expert card well, so they could maintain scientific autonomy, thus always being out of sync with the real needs of society. The so called democratic turnover in 2000 and the establishment of new institutions did not bring the expected prosperity and order in the urban development of Belgrade and Serbia. Instead, the criminalized state administration and the tight connections of the political ruling elites with the new entrepreneurial class enabled the city to fall prey to having the will of the common good ignored by those in power.

»Celebrating Belgrade« and its side effects

The main goal of a large number of privatization processes occurring in the last two decades was to take hold of property and city land. In privatization, most of the industrial production was wiped out, and the only thing left was real-estate speculation. In the name of prosperity and city renewal, the urban legislators were being subordinated to »those who want to build«, blinding the fact that they were enclosing the societal property for personal gain, which was destructive for the community. The term investor urbanism describes these practices, where the interests of the investor become the main criteria in defining the urban growth policies, disregarding any consequences on the quality of life and the public interest.

After many attempts of the City governments together with various developers to push urban renewal through different mega projects combining shiny pictures, big names, high promises of overall general benefit, striking media attention, change of legislation regulating urban planning and construction, each project being more ambitious, but implementation never coming to fruition, the newest manifestation of this formula is the Belgrade Waterfront project. While other projects by private investors, although actively supported by the city government, kept at least the illusion of following the rules of the market, this is not the case in the Belgrade Waterfront case. The Serbian Government appears as the main instigator of the project. They lured the potential investors by the promise to compensate them for any losses, if the performance of the project on the market failed. The project hit the fast lane with the appearance of investors such as the Eagle Hills Company, Abu Dhabi, the UAE who is financing the master plan and the complete Waterfront renewal. The legitimacy of this company was never questioned, even though leaders of the company were involved in projects that have led to state debt (Abuja, Nigeria), constant postponement of construction (Erbil Downtown, Kurdistan), the realization of only a small part of the project (Crescent Bay, Karachi, Pakistan), and selling (with awareness of the local government) the land that the company does not own (Mohali, India).

It is important to mention that in the last couple of years, from 2011, the Sava riverbank known as Savamala became a true testing field for a series of experimental revival, urban regeneration and cultural transformation projects. Local authorities and various stakeholders have recognized this area as a new opportunity to partake in the process of urban regeneration. The process started by taking over, reusing and repurposing, often in dubious privatizations, devastated buildings and spaces, in order to create a new cultural and touristic district in Belgrade. The most noticeable change is the high concentration of bars and clubs which found a refuge in Savamala, an area scarcely used for housing, as the implementation of legislation on noise levels and working hours became stricter in other parts of the city.

The idea was to develop Savamala as the Creative City. While there was some independent criticism coming from the groups of local cultural actors, the principles of the Creative City were embraced both by the City and the establishment. Although most of the experiments with creative cities in the last 20 years prove otherwise, both independent and official actors driving the transformation of Savamala shared the naive belief that this strategy has the potential to build a prosperous city. Despite a myriad of examples bringing a creative industry driven urban regeneration into close connection with gentrification of those sites, the main line of argumentation for the acculturalization of Savamala were the many benefits for the already existing community living there.

The first public presentation of the Belgrade Waterfront project came with the campaign for the municipal elections in Belgrade in 2012. The project reappeared during the 2014 parliamentary election campaign as the trump card of the current prime minister and ruling party promoting a »better future«. Images were there to convince the electorate that a 3 billion euro investment (which in time grew to 5 billion) is already in the bag. Planning a better future with the construction of luxurious flats when hundreds of thousands of people are without a permanent housing solution; construction of the largest shopping mall in the Balkans when each day the amount of people below the poverty line is increasing; construction of new retail and office spaces while »for rent« signs are fading for years on the same buildings; all of this seems at least questionable. With adding luxurious hotels that would transform Belgrade overnight into the tourist destination of the Dubai type, and the relocation of the main train and bus stations from the centre of the city, and the creation of a marina for private yachts, the plan starts to resemble a bad joke. At the same time, the project was presented as the solution to unemployment and a jump starter of the economy, offering precarious temporary jobs in construction and low paid jobs in the service sector. Since the project was given the status of »national priority and importance«, the state is investing large amounts of public money while regulations are being changed to speed up the beginning of the project. The project was hailed as a »salvation«, while all the important information was kept in the dark. It is still not clear if the Gulf money is investment or credit; what is the legal relationship between Eagle Hills and the Government of Serbia? Which studies and documents are the basis for the model (master plan)? Who who are the authors? Why there was no competition, nor tender? What is the role of the municipalitiy? Andnd the list goes on.

In order to create the conditions for the realization of the megalomaniac project on short notice, planning documents are being deregulated at breakneck speed and gargantuan costs are being added to the public budget, while being passed against the law following the undemocratic procedure which simulates citizens’ participation. The processes leading to the Project Belgrade Waterfront are non-transparent; designated roles and potential risks for public actors involved are unclear; legislative mechanisms are bended and bypassed, setting the (bended) direction for the planning and development of the city in the future.

The project plans the construction of 6,178 housing units of average size of 135 m². Anticipated revenue from the sales of these apartments is approximately 2.5 billion euros, making the price of an apartment just over 400,000 €. In a country where the real average monthly wage is around 300  euros, the analysis shows that it would take little more than 84 average annual salaries to pay for an apartment.

Meanwhile in situ, the optimistic vision of the promised better future started materializing in the promotional campaign and the preparatory works of the removal of unwanted buildings and people from the site. Branding started in March 2014 with the reconstruction of the dilapidated building of the former Geological Institute, which became the Belgrade Waterfront promotional hub, with the permanent exhibition of the model of the project, a typical apartment and an elite restaurant on display. The choice of the building was not a random one, since the heritage building, constructed in 1907 as the seat of the Belgrade Cooperative, with the intention to become the first stock exchange, represents a symbolic continuity with the pre-socialist development of Serbia and the prosperity of the neighbourhood, while the socialist period is seen as the period of decline. Investment into reconstruction of the building gave the investor 6,000 m² of commercial space rent-free for the next three years.

The next step was the unveiling of the huge promotional billboard adorned with the same 3D rendering of the project and the »Celebrate Belgrade« caption on the façade of the main train station to symbolically mark the relocation of the train station as the largest infrastructural operation of the project. The billboard is under constant police protection. In the opening eve of the promotional centre, along Karađorđeva Street and the Sava River promenade, a few hundred masts with flags of Eagle Hills and the Belgrade Waterfront were placed mostly on bicycle lanes and parking places. For most of the interventions listed above, the permissions and paperwork were done a posteriori, showing how the priority of officials is catering to the investors’ wishes and not the wellbeing of the city. The peak of the promotional campaign is the construction of the first (temporary) object officially registered as the promotional stand[2], which in reality is a private restaurant built on the green area of the Sava River quay, in the no-construction zone.

Additional public funds from the already tight budget of the city are being wasted on the production of a promotional show that airs on the television owned by the city, in which the monumentality and extraordinary importance of the project are stressed. Still, all the effort to focus the show on the optimistic promotion of the project cannot hide the ruins produced by the two decades long transition of toxic deindustrialization through privatization and poverty. The mayor of Belgrade, with forced concern, tries to conceal the precarity of the housing situation of inhabitants of this neighbourhood. They are fast becoming the first victims of this project as the first phase of social cleansing is taking place to prepare this part of the city for its new construction. Based on the inherited inequality of decades long inhabitants of the area, above all railway workers living in workers’ barracks and houses, they are divided between »legal«  – whose permanent relocation to the apartments on the periphery of the city will be paid for by the city, and »illegal« – who will get just temporary help. In the cleansing process, the pitch of the football club Železničar [The Railway Worker] was demolished without prior notice, leaving a 90 year old club that gathers large number of children to play football, without a field to play on. Even the property owners in Savamala are not protected from the intimidation of the city government, as often, without any prior warning. A crew just shows up on their doorsteps to measure and inventory their apartments. Arrogant behaviour of the city bureaucracy provoked an organized reaction of inhabitants and property owners who released a public statement asking for non-transparent actions and speculations surrounding the Belgrade Waterfront to stop. A questionable role is played by so-called creatives from Savamala who are representatives of numerous restaurants, bars and clubs, as well as from cultural industries. They used the public debate on the topic to push forth their own profit-driven interests and to stress the role they played in the gentrification of this neighbourhood during the last few years. This, they think, qualifies them to get a share of the budget devoted to culture (1% of the entire budget) within the Belgrade Waterfront project.

Operation Lifebelt

As a reaction to these processes, the initiative Don’t drown Belgrade was formed with a goal to stop further degradation and plunder of Belgrade in the name of colossal urban and architectural projects.

The first public actions that the group organised were based on an attempt to use existing democratic participatory tools, which proved to be only a simulation without any real effective power.

The changes of the General Plan brought about the new legal framework enabling the occupation and privatization of public spaces owned by the city. It also erases the obligatory architectural competition as a format of expert and public involvement, thus causing fragmentary planning of the city, as well as the possibility to ignore social aspects of life in the city. Around 100 citizens, activists and experts wrote together complaints, and over 2,000 filed them in a collective action. During public review, the Planning Commission rejected most of those complaints, accepting just a few symbolic ones, in a vain attempt to keep up with the appearance of a democratic procedure.

The next step in the creation of the new legal framework, the Spatial Plan of the economically most valuable part of Belgrade transferred the investor’s model into the planning documentation – in contrary to the regulations of the Republic of Serbia. The initiative again worked with collective complaints, but this time having only one goal in mind – the complete rejection of the dubious Plan and the creation of a new one. Complaints focused on the expected outcomes of this kind of plan being spatial and social segregation, traffic gridlock within this mega-development that would affect the whole city and the disappearance of small businesses in the area. During the public session, the initiative organized the performance called Operation Lifebelt (Operacija šlauf), by passing out beach toys such as beach balls and swim rings, and singing songs celebrating Belgrade while trying to produce as much noise as possible. Commission members’ behavior proved once more that public sessions of this kind are just a simulation of citizen participation and that such a process serves only to give the false illusion that the city commissioners actually care about what the general public thinks.

The initiative continued to strongly oppose the project in public by making public and pointing to the irregularities in the execution of the project utilizing as much as possible such tools as the Law on Freedom of Information of Public Importance in order to gain access and collect documentation.
Unintentionally, the activities of the initiative disclosed the subservience to the government and the urban planning profession, resulting in a collective resignation of the board of the Society of Urbanists under the pressure of the initiative, making public such activities which can only be seen as capitulation by the profession. By now it managed to shift the public discourse on the project from laudatory to critical.

In the year when the government deficit is reaching an historical maximum and radical cuts in public financing are being conducted, the state takes on a dramatic amount of debt in order to fulfil obligations from the contract. This is pure economic suicide. The Belgrade Waterfront continues to smoothly sail along despite being in conflict with the law and the public interest. The flood is to follow. We have to prepare for it.

Post Script

After the editorial deadline, there was a surge of events related to the Belgrade Waterfront Project. On March 6th, the Parliament of Serbia received from the Government the Bill on Determination of the Public Interest and special procedures for expropriation and construction permits for the realization of the Belgrade Waterfront project, popularly named Lex Specialis. The purpose of the Bill is to enable faster expropriation of privately owned land and apartments, overriding all procedures existing in the jurisdiction, giving full control of the whole development to the investor, and the use of the land without paying any fees to the city and state. On March 13th, reporting on the successful presentation of the project at the Cannes Real Estate Fair, Belgrade Mayor Siniša Mali announced that the first apartments in the luxury housing towers designed by SOM will go on sale on March 16th, although no official contract between the Government and Eagle Hills as the investor was signed. With spring approaching, it becomes obvious that the following period will bring an acceleration of the struggle.


Anmerkung:
[01] The name is an untranslatable game of words in Serbian. The closest translation would be a description of how brackets offer reading of two sentences, one meaning »We do not give Belgrade« and the other »Do not sink Belgrade«.

[02] The first new object built within the project »Belgrade Waterfront« was a restaurant on the public greenery part of the promenade next to the Sava River, officially filed in the legal permits as a temporary promotional stand. When asked why the construction of a promotional stand is necessary where already there is a whole building dedicated to the promotion of the project Siniša Mali, the Belgrade mayor replied that one promotional space is not enough for such a grand project. Activists raised the banner »Ne da(vi)mo Beograd« (the slogan, which is also the name of the initiative is a word game with two possible meanings Do not drown/We do not give/Belgrade) next to the restaurant.