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StadtBauwelt | Belgrade

Total-Edge-City-Belgrade

You are approaching Belgrade from one of the two main roads that connect the city with its surrounding region and the Serbian countryside. You are moving west. Looking forward to entering the city you are excited, hoping for a change of view, anticipating the scale and buildings of the city. You are counting seconds, minutes and kilometers. You are within reach, but signs of the city appear and then vanish under the blur of speed. And you find nothing of the expected definitive change from small-scale to large, from suburban sprawl to dense city landscape. Instead, alongside the road you sense the long and slow synchronized rhythm of exchange between the post-war city and the eternal village.

Besides physically connecting the city with the province, these two roads are channels of a mutual interchange between Serbian urban and rural cultures, representing the Balkan's historical torment between the Orient and Occident. On the edge of both, Belgrade did not succeed in integrating them, but left both to exist side by side, a surreal palimpsest of province and metropolis. In the end it has become an unprecedented multiple edge-city of 1.5 million inhabitants, wherein layers are scrambled, upside-down and inside-out. In the very core of the city, quaint country houses are imposed on urban apartment buildings from the first half of the 20th century, creating a mimicking vertical edge-city, a new rural layer upon what had once been the city.

This has to be seen as a last act of the post-war urbanization processes exercised on the city's periphery - where urban slabs and housing towers mix with the spontaneously developed suburban neighborhoods and dominate the surrounding landscape. These so cold 'city-gates' occurred as a result of state megalomania and urban planning doctrine oriented towards an impressive-city approach that failed to consider it's inhabitants. Persistent implementation of this doctrine alongside the high-rise city guardians inhabited by common people, perpetuated its own demise: the emergence along the edges of self-help settlements, occupying hundreds of thousands hectares of fertile land, city fringes and surrounding nature. Thus, layer after layer, spontaneous after planned developed edges and vice versa, left the inner city hidden deep inside a huge continuous territory of a half-urban half-rural sprawl.

That was four, three, two, one - you counted all dimensions in a few minutes of site seeing. Now you are on the road again and moving towards Europe. In the blur of speed you couldn't find the key code. Thus, you failed to recognize that you just passed through a unique four-dimensional edge-city.

Bauwelt 00/2004
http://www.BauNetz.de/arch/bauwelt