Designing Tito's Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade

Introduction

xi Introduction At the end of the Second World War, the city of Belgrade lay in ruins. Having been subjected to eleven separate Allied bombing raids, it incurred further destruction from the occupation forces as they retreated during the Belgrade offensive that ended with the liberation of the city. By November 1944, the fighting had completely destroyed the city’s rail network, damaged 80 percent of its tramway network, wrecked nearly all of its trams and buses, and rendered 18 percent of its water supply and sewage lines unusable. Nearly half of its buildings —12,889 out of 30,000—were either damaged or destroyed.1 The new Partisan regime, led by Josip Broz Tito, immediately began to plan its reconstruction, appointing a modernist architect, Nikola Dobrović, to imagine a capital worthy of the new Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1950, on the sixth anniversary of the city’s liberation, Belgrade’s first socialist master plan was unveiled. Anticipating Nehru’s choice for Chandigarh, the new capital of Indian Punjab, and Kubitschek’s choice for Brasilia, Brazil’s new capital, the urban planning team had decided to transform the city into the modernist ideal of a functionalist city. In order to achieve this, the center of gravity of the city would be shifted westward, across the Sava River. A new city center, built in the image of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, would be erected on what had, until then, been a floodplain. In 1968, when Belgrade’s planning office began to work on a new master xii INTRODUCTION plan, it left this functionalist blueprint behind in favor of computer modeling and continuous planning. By this time, few Yugoslav planners espoused the utopian vision of the modernist functionalist city, and they were not alone— across the world, modernist planning had come under attack as a failed model. What brought about the rise of the modernist functionalist urban planning model, often attributed to Le Corbusier, in Yugoslavia and elsewhere in the world, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s? Why was it eventually abandoned and replaced by other approaches? In our search for answers, we need to cast our net wider than just the architectural and planning profession. As Stanislaus Von Moos proposed in his seminal study of Le Corbusier’s work, “the growth and form of cities is not determined by the will of architects, let alone that of one single architect, but by socio-economic forces and interests, institutional patterns, and a conception of progress and efficiency shared by the prevailing elites. Architects merely propose recipes that represent these forms and interests.”2 The Yugoslav socialist regime endorsed modernist functionalist urbanism both because it was compatible with its values and its project for economic and social modernization and because it bolstered Yugoslavia’s global image. A shift in the regime’s modernization strategy ultimately combined with dissatisfaction with the model locally and its obsolescence internationally, leading the regime to abandon this approach and adopt new, cutting-edge methodologies. Two excellent monograph-length studies and a number of journal articles have already begun to address the influence of modernism in socialist Yugoslavia . Architectural historian Ljiljana Blagojević’s detailed study of modernist architecture and urban planning in Belgrade, Novi Beograd: Osporeni Modernizam , has documented in detail and critiqued the development of a new modernist settlement in the heart of the capital, Belgrade. In their beautifully illustrated volume Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia, Vladimir Kulić and Maroje Mrduljaš have situated Yugoslav modernism in a broader context, arguing that Yugoslavia innovated a unique interpretation of modernism, blending socialism with a formal vocabulary developed in the West. Kulić has further explored Yugoslav modernism and its relationship to the state’s unique geopolitical context in his dissertation and several articles. These are valuable contributions to the history of modernism as an architectural movement in Yugoslavia. This study seeks to build on this foundation by relating it to the political, economic, and social development of Belgrade and Yugoslavia more broadly. Historian Predrag Marković has xiii INTRODUCTION sought to capture the political, social, and cultural life of Yugoslavia’s capital after the Second World War. Like Kulić and Mrduljaš, he frames his analysis in terms of Yugoslavia’s “in-betweeness,” balancing between an ideological model crafted in the Soviet Union and a diplomatic and cultural attraction to the West. While much of his analysis relates to the issues discussed in...