Planning and societal context - The case of Belgrade, Serbia

Abstract

The problems of planning system and practice in Serbia have been concomitant with the overall institutional changes. Urban planning evolves in response to and by adjusting to the specific contexts and circumstances, namely political, socio-economic, and governing. The more extreme variations in planning practice and the response to the societal circumstances since 1989, offer rich opportunities for observing the relationships between planning and its broader context. Serbia is one of the six republics of the former Yugoslavia, which from the early 1990s disintegrated into five states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Serbia and Montenegro. The main characteristic of the 1990s was the re-centralization of government and the weakening of the constitutional role and planning authority of the local communes. The new planning practice was steered by a mixture of old habits, few institutional innovations and the social, economic and political turbulence of the transition period.