Our second group trip took us through Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, where we learned about the region’s complex history during and after Yugoslavia up to the present. The political histories we learned about were ringing in my head while exploring Belgrade, Mostar, and Sarajevo. I love getting to know new cities and understanding the values behind how they are organized. After taking an urban history class in high school, I became particularly interested in how seemingly superficial city planning can prioritize specific groups, activities, or economic and political interests. I believe Belgrade’s use of their waterfront demonstrates an interest in organizing public perception of their city around looking to the future, rather than a more historical focus, like in many European cities.
Belgrade is situated along the Sava and Danube rivers, and I immediately noticed that the city loves their waterfront. In fact, there’s a new “Belgrade Waterfront” area full of fancy, modern-looking apartment buildings and hotels. The “Belgrade Waterfront” logo is posted everywhere: on buildings, benches, and signs. While observing the area from the water on a boat tour, our guide Christina told us that locals generally don’t like it – it’s expensive and not geared towards the average resident. While it does a good job of making the city look desirable and modern, and the waterfront itself is lovely to walk along, it seemed to be much more about building an image than functionality.
The next night, a group of us decided to walk around the area. It was kind of eerie! There were apartment buildings, some of which had nice outdoor facilities, but little else. No restaurants, stores, gyms, cinemas, or anything else that would bring people together there for any reason besides expensive river views. The way the area was designed made me think about Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She argues one thing that makes a neighborhood ideal is having variety so that the neighborhood will attract different people at different times of day, without having eerie dead times, like Belgrade Waterfront that night. The lack of activity made me more confident that the area was built up primarily to create a certain image for people observing Belgrade – which is the biggest and most famous city in Serbia – rather than to create a neighborhood or community to benefit actual Serbians.
The newness and uniformity of the area felt very different from the Belgrade I’d gotten to know earlier that day, when Zoe and I went on a long walk along the Danube in a less central part of the city. We’d spent much of the walk in a park that was very nice but not fancy at all — just lots of fields and one walking path. The atmosphere was pretty rugged, similar to the more historic adventure I’d been on with some others where we explored the dark, somewhat trash-filled, tunnels of the Belgrade Fortress, shaped by the presence of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Walking around these tunnels definitely felt different than walking around Belgrade Waterfront, since they were centered around the city’s history in a way that is familiar to me from other European cities I’ve visited – such as everything we saw throughout Transylvania a few weeks prior. However, I did get a taste of this more stereotypical historic-looking European-ness when Zoe and I ended our walk at a tower overlooking Belgrade. The area around the tower and the view we got were very different from the tunnels, but they were both clearly rooted in the past, unlike Belgrade Waterfront, which is rooted in a vision of the future, or at least the present.
These historic areas are of course tourist destinations, and aren’t actively ignored by the city. However, Belgrade Waterfront shows the way that the city has chosen to deal with its complex past and present, which we learned about from our tour guides and lecturers: the legacy of Milosevic and Serbia’s role in the Bosnian genocide; the Kosovo War and the NATO bombings of Belgrade; and the fact that Serbia still does not recognize Kosovo. These are all events that have impacted how Serbia and Serbs are perceived internationally, and likely play a role in why Serbia hasn’t been accepted into the EU. These events, especially the NATO bombings, also were traumatic for Serbians who lived through them not so long ago. Belgrade Waterfront, with its shiny new appearance dominating the Belgrade skyline, neatly subverts these perceptions, and makes Belgrade look much more like a modern, typically E.U., city. While it evidently does not create much of a community for Belgraders, and is not loved by locals, I am curious how successful it has been, or will be, in shifting broader perception of the city and nation.