A Tale of Two Cities: 'Slumming' It in an Imagined Belgrade

• In Event: Land, Property, Ownership at the Imperial Crossroads II

Abstract

In the interwar period, Belgrade– the new capital of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia)– experienced the most dramatic urbanization in its history driven by the city’s new status and the pull of western European modes of modernization promising prosperity, stability, and respectability. My paper investigates the role of telescoped peripherality on urban actors, including governing elites, eugenicists, and Belgrade’s poor, to understand how the reality of “existing on the edge” drove urban elites to reproduce classed, racialized, and gendered social hierarchies that continuously inscribed peripheral city spaces and modes of claiming urban space as marginal and the source of social degradation. My paper engages the historiographies of informality and the coloniality of modernity developed by (post)colonial scholars to critically reposition Belgrade’s iconic “slum,” Jatagan-Mala, as squatted infrastructure. By juxtaposing two imagined cities– a Belgrade-to-come, imagined by elites in the 1921 and 1939 international competition for the (re)development of a general urban plan, and a livable city, articulated through the petitions, regulation plan, and associations of Jatagan-Mala’s inhabitants– my paper aims to uncover the displacement and dispossession central to the project of making a clean, rectilinear, and respectable city. It uses digital speculative and deep mapping to better understand the role of spatiality in the dynamic development of categories and strategies of urban management hostile to everyday modes of claiming city space while bolstering scholarship on squatted infrastructures in European spaces.

Author

• Madeline Stull, Indiana U Bloomington