Cities are expanding at an overwhelming rate, not just in Serbia, but all over the globe. As construction sites and lavish expansion projects mushroom across the urban landscape, they are presented as a sign of growth and development, but this growth often comes at a cost – a cost measured in the number of people who are losing homes, neighborhoods, walkable paths, and green areas. Activist and spatial justice researcher Jovana Timotijević explains what happens to our cities when we build revenue instead of communities.
On the way to the Belgrade city center, one cannot miss the vast landscape of Belgrade Waterfront, sitting between the river Sava and the “rest of the city”. Each time I look at it, a vivid image appears in my head – a bully named Vladimir from my elementary school, preventing the rest of the kids from accessing a table with birthday cake. In contrast to that disturbing association, the billboards and brochures advertising Belgrade Waterfront apartments priced at up to 12 times the median net salary per square meter promise a “peaceful haven”, “thousands of possibilities”, “blissful riverside living”, “authentic life with style” … “new vision of city life”. It certainly is a new vision, but I am afraid that for most of the people living in Belgrade, it hardly meets any of their needs or contributes to a decent everyday life.
Although not this large, there seem to be more and more city neighbourhoods joining this new vision of city life – New Dorćol, K-District, Park residencies, Central Garden, etc., demonstrating the normative framework of how cities are planned and shaped today. This framework has many names. In Serbia, one can frequently hear the term investor urbanism — capturing something real, no doubt, but risks suggesting that the problem is merely about the excessive power of a small investor class, as if better regulation or more honest politicians could restore some previous equilibrium. It is worth being more precise — what we are describing is simply the spatial imprint of the neoliberal capitalist logic. Not a local pathology, not a temporary disorder, nor the product of one particularly greedy government — but the dominant global logic of how cities are organised under capitalism, applied here with particular intensity and with particularly blatant disregard for its social costs.
Cities for profit, not for people
The critical urbanist tradition has long insisted on a fundamental distinction: between the use value of urban space, its value for the people who exist in it, move through it, breathe in it, and whose lives unfold within it, and its exchange value – its value as a commodity to be bought, sold, leveraged and speculated upon. Under capitalist urbanism, exchange value systematically overrides use value. The state, rather than acting as a counterweight, becomes the primary facilitator of this process by providing land, infrastructure, planning privileges and legal cover for the conversion of public goods into private wealth. From London to Istanbul, from Vancouver to Kuala Lumpur to Belgrade, the pattern is the same — the city is remade in the image of capital, and what remains of the commons deteriorates by planning and design. Hence the title of this section, an ironic inversion of the book Cities for People, Not for Profit (2012), signalling that what follows describes the existing city rather than an ideal one.
What distinguishes capitalist urbanism as a structural logic are four interrelated processes. The first is the privatisation of spatial resources: land, housing, riverbanks, green space, public buildings — transferring them from collective or public to private ownership, removing them from democratic governance and subjecting them to market logic. The second is deregulation — the systematic dismantling of planning standards, environmental protections and public consultation requirements that previously constrained what could be built, where, and for whom. The third is commodification — the discursive and de facto transformation of space from something organised primarily around social needs into a commodity to be bought, sold and speculated upon. Finally, the fourth, and increasingly dominant, is financialization — the conversion of urban real estate into a vehicle for capital accumulation and financial investment, decoupled from any relationship to actual human need for shelter or public space. These four processes are mutually reinforcing, and together constitute what we recognise, in city after city, as the built environment of contemporary capitalism.
Now you see me, now you don’t – the magic of the planning system dismantling itself
Now, what is unfolding in many cities, including the ones in Serbia, is not simply deregulation in the conventional sense — the removal of rules. It is something more paradoxical. There is an ingenious term, regulated deregulation (coined by the very insightful political economy theorist M. Aalbers) to explain this illogical situation of producing new legal and planning instruments whose function is precisely to avoid the standards that existing instruments were designed to uphold. Practically, new laws are passed to override old ones — and, remarkably, sometimes even to override themselves! Special-purpose plans are adopted to replace general plans, because they require less public control. Procedures are reformed — digitised, shortened, restructured — in ways that systematically reduce rather than enhance meaningful public oversight. Regulation plans contain paragraphs that literally make them de facto non-obligatory. The result is a planning environment in which more regulation on paper produces less protection in practice: denser construction, more square metres, taller buildings, and fewer public amenities — green space, schools, health facilities, accessible waterfronts — that existing standards were meant to guarantee, at least to some extent.
The Belgrade Waterfront project really set the precedent, but the world exhibition EXPO 2027 planned in Belgrade extended it. It is as if the government was conducting a practical experiment in how thoroughly a city can be severed from its inhabitants. The EXPO complex spreads across over 800 hectares, including the conversion of highly fertile agricultural land, located within the protected drinking water catchment zone. The process of implementing this project serves as a textbook example of deregulation in the service of accumulation. Just to name the most notorious element – an ad-hoc law was adopted just for this project, that de facto shortened public consultation stage; decoupled environmental impact assessment from the construction permit so that buildings can be built before anyone formally evaluates whether they are harmful; replaced occupation permits with a temporary-use certificate, which is much easier to obtain, but with fewer guarantees that it will be safe to walk through the exhibition complex. And all that in a year following the collapse of the canopy at the Novi Sad train station, which caused the tragic death of sixteen people.
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Author: Jovana Timotijević
Illustration: Jovana Ćosić
