The Rise and Fall of New Belgrade with Current Developments in Retrospect

Abstract

New Belgrade is a modern city within today’s Belgrade metropolis, built in the second half of the twentieth century in the sand-filled flood plain of Bežanija Field, located on the left bank of the River Sava and right bank of the River Danube between the historical cities of Belgrade and Zemun. The terrain where New Belgrade was developed was for centuries a no man’s land between the Ottoman and Austrian Empires. The construction of New Belgrade after WWII was a major urban project in the former Yugoslavia, which resulted in an influx of new residents from within Serbia. The initial concept of New Belgrade was as a modern, governmental, and central city in Yugoslavia, with the main function of being the seat of power of the new federal administrative structure. However, New Belgrade was completed as a city with an utterly different function; it was predominantly a city where people lived, and not a seat of power or a primary aesthetic object of the state, as initially planned. The monumental architecture of New Belgrade never fulfilled the role of representing a governmental city, as it was completed with a delay, and in different architectural and town planning circumstances than those initially planned. The intention to equalize the central zone of New Belgrade with the historical center of Belgrade did not succeed at first. The center of New Belgrade has remained until recently an ugly field of housing blocks. This part of the city is still subject to change. This chapter features the most important structures in New Belgrade. For example, Hotel Yugoslavia which was one of the first three significant facilities planned in New Belgrade, next to the Central Committee building and the Presidential Government building, today the Palace of Serbia. The others are the Museum of Contemporary Art, one of Belgrade’s architectural masterpieces and Sava Convention Center, an iconic postmodernist New Belgrade complex which was a Pritzker Prize nomination in 1979. The chapter also presents Blok 12, which has become the base for most successful Serbian start-ups, and also some of the current urban development projects such as the construction of the Belgrade Philharmonic within Block 13, the relocation of the bus and train station from the old center in Belgrade to New Belgrade Block 42 and the Block 18 development project.