CITIES LOG: KALUDJERICA
Ana Dzokic + Marc Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited) and Nebojsa Milikic
During the two decades since the start of the 1990s, the former republics of Yugoslavia have each charted their own path, and while their societies develop along different lines it is striking to see how much they share in terms of issues concerning urban development. With the Cities Log, since 2009 a probing has started of the changes in a number of cities in post-Yugoslav context. What are the events, the occurrences and the laws that are changing the trajectories of these cities, and who are the actors that initiate or determine these changes? How is the future of these cities forged? Privatization, clientalism, creative abuse of laws and regulations seem commonplace in a context affected by ‘wild’ urbanization and fast capital investments set within the horizon of a neoliberal context. In the Cities Log series, one might speculate that the Kaludjerica (a suburb of Belgrade) takes a special position. Typical 'transition' issues (privatization of housing stock, emerging real estate development, large infrastructural investments, the struggle for collective space) might be – at this time – largely uncommon for Kaludjerica.
Kaludjerica self-managed
During the enthusiastic phases of modernization of Belgrade, Serbia and SFRJ (1960 – 1980), not everybody was sharing the benefits and advantages of the state housing policy. Many construction workers were employed in Belgrade on a precarious or seasonal basis and thus stayed out of the reach of the urban and financial planning of the state and city authorities. Nevertheless, the job opportunities, as well as the chances for education and professional upgrade - which even in distant suburbs of Belgrade were far better then in the provinces from which most of inhabitants of Kaludjerica originate (southern and southeastern regions of Serbia) - and also other conveniences of living and working in Belgrade, made many of them decide to try to settle somewhere in or near the city. As the modernization of the city grew, the mass of skilled and semi-skilled workers grew simultaneously, accompanied by a lack of means, knowledge and even a basic awareness about the criticality and complexity of possible consequences of such an unforeseen co-growth.The gap appeared in the overall relation between institutional and practical thinking, between planning and deciding, between the desired and possible, the imaginable and the real. And tens of thousands of people practically lived in such an existential gap for decades. Kaludjerica, known as the "largest wild settlement" in the Balkans has been thoroughly widening and reflecting the nature of this gap. No state institution so far found the right way to engage into a comprehensive urbanization and modernization of this settlement. The notions of illegality, wildness, non-hygienic etc. got attached already early on to the entire suburbs and outskirt areas were today hundreds of thousands of people live and work. It is in the unwritten history of the place that the diagnosis of this mismanagement and misunderstandings lay. The years of confrontations and standoff with the state and the city authorities, somehow is transferred in the cultural and political profile of the settlement. The ways of parceling land, organizing building lots and projecting houses, the ways of establishing and maintaining streets and improvised infrastructure trace the history of a negotiation between a rapidly modernizing society and its shadowed, even hidden back yard. Having a look on the Kaludjerica today, on its beautiful, simultaneously modern and traditional houses, its wonderful position in the city, knowing about the potential for further development of the policy of individual housing and confronted with its confusing status and negative public image, one can ask: is Kaludjerica the top or the bottom of the philosophy and practice of self-management?---With its early history of mass-individual development, Kaludjerica might be one of the places where the potential to find new forms of collectivity lays in a rather bottom-up nature – contrary to what one finds in most other situations. Decades after individual investment started off here, collective investment may loom at the horizon (for instance a need to construct a sewer system). The Cities Log: Kaludjerica will not only map this potential, but also look at the actors that could make this happen and place it in the perspective of other cities and urban areas.
