(Post)socialist Meontopolitics

Abstract

This article deals with the analysis of what has been constructed as a double modernization of Belgrade, during the socialist (1945–1991), and postsocialist periods (1991–), as well as the environmental consequences these processes on the left and right side of the Sava River between the Branko’s ridge and the Gazela Bridge. The area is significant because of the spaces of socialist-, and postsocialist modernizations: the Sava River Park, and the Belgrade Waterfront, which sit directly across each other. In both cases, modernization has entailed meontopolitics – an introduction of non being into the existing relationality through territorial fragmentation, production of conflict zones and intensification of space use. Each period and its kind of modernization assumed destruction of local non-human environments as their condition of possibility leading to (post)socialist necroecologies, a historically produced environmental condition inimical to some human and non -human actors as the defining feature of the environmental condition of both socialist-, and contemporary Belgrade.