In the years following Yugoslavia's collapse, New Belgrade's residential bloks—once conceived as ideal urban communities for socialist workers—have increasingly become the targets of commercial development. Scholars have deemed the current era of urbanization in New Belgrade inhumane and unsustainable, as once ample urban commons and green spaces have been rapidly privatized and developed. This process has been enabled by an increasingly undemocratic government, which has been characterized by scholars as a manifestation of authoritarian neoliberalism, giving way to an urban development climate rife with abuses. In response, residents of New Belgrade's bloks have begun resisting proposed developments in their communities. This paper focuses on two urban communities that have held anti-development protest movements in New Belgrade—Bloks 33 and 37. It seeks to understand the underlying motivations that drove residents' resistance and considers how their motivations change our understanding of the meaning of urban movements. Centered on interviews with residents of the two bloks, this paper finds that the urban movements are grounded in a complex array of circumstances and sentiments, ranging from highly localized concerns to broader, systemic issues. This study finds that the movements are neither reactionary efforts to resist all change, as community-led opposition to development is often portrayed, nor explicitly political efforts seeking to enact structural change, a criterion some scholars use to define a movement's effectiveness. Rather, the movements are part of a sustained process of local self-management and an assertion of residents' right to shape their urban spaces within a formal system of urban development that consistently fails to serve their needs.
Maya McWilliams (Sun,) studied this question.