The gates of Belgrade: Safety, privacy, and new housing patterns in the post-communist city

Problems of Post-Communism

Volumn 57, Issue 5, 2010, Pages 3-19

  Hirt, Sonia ^a   Petrović, Mina ^b  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF BELGRADE   (Serbia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77957887002     PISSN: 10758216     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2753/PPC1075-8216570501     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision Population Database, 2008, Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (June 13, 2008), available at http://esa.un.org/unup/, Accessed October 16, 2009.
2. Institute for Informatics and Statistics, Statistical Yearbook of Belgrade (Belgrade: Institute for Informatics and Statistics, 2005).
3. See also Sonia Hirt, "City Profile: Belgrade, Serbia," Cities 26, no. 5 (2009): 293-303.
4. Sasha Tsenkova, Country Profiles on the Housing Sector: Serbia and Montenegro (New York: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2005).
5. Most urban land and large means of production (with the exception of those in agriculture) were nationalized in Yugoslavia by 1948. See Zorica Nedović-Budić and Branco Carvić, "Waves of Planning: A Framework for Studying the Evolution of Planning Systems and Empirical Insights from Serbia and Montenegro," Planning Perspectives 21, no. 4 (2006): 393-425.
6. The Yugoslav authorities, however, took a more decentralized approach to housing distribution than most other communist regimes. Housing was allocated by the enterprises where workers were employed rather than by the state or the municipal government. See Mina Petrović, "Post-Socialist Housing Policy Transformation in Yugoslavia and Belgrade," European Journal of Housing Policy 1, no. 2 (2001): 211-31.
7. Miodrag Vujošević and Zorica Nedović-Budić, "Planning and the Societal Context: The Case of Belgrade, Serbia," in The Urban Mosaic of Post-Socialist Europe: Space, Institutions, Policy, ed. Sasha Tsenkova and Zorica Nedović-Budić (Heidelberg: Springer Physica-Verlag, 2006), pp. 275-94.
8. See also Sasha Tsenkova, Housing Policy Reforms in Post-Socialist Europe: Lost in Transition (Heidelberg: Springer Physica-Verlag, 2009).
9. Petrović, "Post-Socialist Housing Policy."
10. See, for example, Peter Lizon, "East-Central Europe: The Unhappy Heritage of Socialist Mass Housing," Journal of Architectural Education 50, no. 2 (1996): 104-14.
11. It should be emphasized, however, that Yugoslav mass housing was far superior in both aesthetic style and building materials to that in neighboring countries like Bulgaria and Romania.
12. Sonia Hirt, "Landscapes of Post-Modernity: Changes in the Built Fabric of Belgrade and Sofia Since the End of Socialism," Urban Geography 29, no. 8 (2008): 785-809.
13. Sreten Vujović and Mina Petrović, "Belgrade's Post-Socialist Evolution: Reflections by the Actors in the Development Process," in The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Kiril Stanilov (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 361-84.
14. See Milena Jovković, Miroslav Zdravković, and Radmila Mitrović, 2002, "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Trade Potential and Comparative Advantages," available at www.wiiw.ac.at/balkan/files/ Jovicic+Zdravkovic+Dragutinovic.pdf, accessed October 16, 2009. According to the United Nations Human Development Index 2007-2008, the latest available Gini coefficient for Serbia is 0.30, showing no improvement since 2000.
15. The number of construction firms more than quadrupled between 1990 and 2000, from 470 to 2,411 (Institute for Informatics and Statistics, Statistical Yearbook of Belgrade, 2005, p. 189).
16. The vast majority of private construction firms, especially during the 1990s, were very small (having less than 10 employees) and lacked the capacity to erect larger housing projects (Tsenkova, Country Profiles).
17. Petrović, "Post-Socialist Housing Policy";
18. Vujović and Petrović, "Belgrade's Post-Socialist Evolution";
19. Miroljub Hadjić, "Rethinking Privatization in Serbia," Eastern European Economics 40, no. 6 (2002): 6-23.
20. The "legitimacy crisis" of urban planning during the 1990s has been reported across the post-communist world. As a result, illegal construction became widespread in many countries. Serbia is one of the extreme examples. See Zorica Nedović-Budić, "Adjustment of Planning Practice to the New Eastern and Central European Context," Journal of the American Planning Association 67, no. 1 (2001): 38-52;
21. Sonia Hirt, "Planning the Post-Communist City: Experiences from Sofia," International Planning Studies 10, no. 3/4 (2005): 219-40).
22. Vujović and Petrović, "Belgrade's Post-Socialist Evolution."
23. The survey, which was statistically representative, showed that 21 percent of Belgrade's residents felt very safe when walking in their neighborhood at night, 31 percent felt rather safe, 33 percent felt somewhat unsafe, and 14 percent felt very unsafe. The results showed a sharp increase in feelings of urban insecurity as compared to a survey conducted in 1988. See Vesna Nikolić-Rastanić, "Victimization in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" (1998).
24. See Eric Gordy, "Serbia after Djindjić: War Crimes, Organized Crime, and Trust in Public Institutions," Problems of Post-Communism 51, no. 3 (May/June 2004): 10-17.
25. For a concise history of residential stratification and gating, see Peter Marcuse, "The Partitioned City in History," in Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space, ed. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 11-34.
26. Regarding gated housing in nineteenth-century London, for example, see P.J. Atkins, "How the West End Was Won: The Struggle to Remove Street Barriers in Victorian London," Journal of Historical Geography 19, no. 3 (1993): 265-77.
27. Belgrade was formally under Ottoman rule between 1521 and 1867, but Islamic artifacts in the city are very few. Still, the gated courtyard was common in Belgrade both during the Ottoman period and in its immediate aftermath.
28. On the Islamic urban tradition, see Janet Abu-Lughod, "The Islamic City: Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance," International Journal of Middle East Studies 19, no. 2 (1987): 155-76.
29. Nan Ellin, ed., Architecture of Fear (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997).
30. Georg Glasze, Chris Webster, and Klaus Frantz, Private Cities: Global and Local Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2006).
31. Robert Reich, "Secession of the Successful," New York Times Magazine (January 20, 1991): 16ff.
32. Setha Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (New York: Routledge, 2004).
33. See, for example, Martin Coy, "Gated Communities and Urban Fragmentation in Latin America: The Brazilian Experience," Geo Journal 66, nos. 1-2 (2006): 121-32;
34. R. Salcedo and A. Torres, "Gated Communities in Santiago: Wall or Frontier," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 1 (2004): 27-44.
35. See also Pu Miao, "Deserted Streets in a Jammed Town: The Gated Community in Chinese Cities and Its Solution," Journal of Urban Design 8, no. 1 (2003): 45-66;
36. Mikhail Blinnikov, Andrei Shannin, Nikolay Sobolev, and Lyudmila Volkova, "Gated Communities in the Moscow Greenbelt: Newly Segregated Landscapes and the Suburban Russian Environment," Geo Journal 66, nos. 1-2 (2006): 65-81.
37. Edward Blakeley and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997).
38. See also Low, Behind the Gates.
39. American retirees' golf communities, many of which are gated, are the paradigmatic example here.
40. See Setha Low, "The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear," American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 45-58.
41. On gated communities in Hungary, for example, see Z. Cséfalvay, "The Demystification of Gating," European Journal of Spatial Development (October 16, 2009), available at www.nordregio.se/EJSD/debate200902/ , Accessed October 16, 2009.
42. Charlotte Johnson, "The Status of Gates in Belgrade: Notes on Styles and Markets," Forum IFL (2009): 21-29.
43. Oleg Kharkhordin, "The Soviet Individual: Genealogy of a Dissumulating Animal," in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott M. Lash, and Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), pp. 209-26;
44. idem, "Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Russia," in Public and Private in Theory and Practice, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 333-64.
45. Ekaterina Makarova, "The New Urbanism in Moscow: The Redefinition of Public and Private Space" (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal, August 10, 2006).
46. See Sorin Matei, "The Emergent Romanian Post-Socialist Ethos: From Nationalism to Privatism," Problems of Post-Communism 51, no. 2 (March/April 2004): 40-47;
47. Venelin Ganev, Preying on the State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
48. Petrović, "Post-Socialist Housing Policy."
49. As the map of Belgrade shows, the neighborhoods are part of the seventeen municipal regions that comprise the formal administrative division of the Belgrade metropolis. Most of the census data collected by Belgrade's Institute for Informatics and Statistics pertain to the seventeen municipal regions. Such data, however, can be misleading, because many of the regions are very large and include a wide variety of neighborhoods with sharply different socio-spatial features. Fortunately, a limited amount of data on education and employment is available at the neighborhood level for the years 1991 and 2002 (the years of the last two censuses) and allows a rare glimpse into the recent socio-spatial evolution of Belgrade. These data show that older areas of the city, such as Dedinje and Seniak, have a highly educated population: In 1991, residents with college or higher education comprised 35 percent of all Dedinje's residents and 30 percent of those in Senjak; by 2002, the percentages increased to 39 and 34 respectively. In comparison, the city averages were 18 percent in 1991 and 21 percent in 2002. Furthermore, 60 percent of the population of Dedinje and 61 percent in Senjak were employed in the tertiary sector in 1991; the number increased to 83 and 81 percent respectively by 2002. The city wide averages were 46 percent in 1991 and 66 percent in 2002. In contrast, the percentage of persons with college or higher education in Višnjička Banja was well below city averages: 16 percent in both 1991 and 2002, even though the percentage of people in the tertiary sector increased from 45 to 71 percent. Such data suggest not only that Belgrade exhibited socio-spatial inequality at the end of communist period, but also that the differences grew starker afterwards. The survey reflected these differences, proving again that socio-spatial inequality in Belgrade is deeply ingrained.
50. According to the research firm Park Associates, about a quarter of U.S. homes have some sort of a security system; see www.parkassociates.com/reserach/ reports/tocs/2009/home-security08.htm, Accessed July 17, 2010.
51. We lack reliable data on whether low levels of trust are a post-socialist phenomenon. The old proverb that the dying wish of a Serbian peasant is for his neighbor's cow to die too provides some evidence, as anecdotal as it may be, that low interpersonal trust is a long-standing cultural phenomenon that the trauma of post-socialism may have either revived or augmented.
52. The questions asked respondents whether certain factors could be qualified as "most important," "important," "somewhat unimportant," or "completely unimportant" in their decision to live in a gated residence.
53. This is about 7,000 new housing units per year. Colliers International Serbia, "Belgrade Residential Market - 2nd Half of 2007," available at www.colliers.com/Markets/Serbia/MarketReports/, Accessed October 29, 2009.
54. Colliers International, cited in Johnson, "Status of Gates in Belgrade."
55. Interview with a member of Belville's project team cited in Johnson, "Status of Gates in Belgrade."
56. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1938), p. 403.