Belgraders against investors: The fight for sun, air and greenery

Private security workers investors Vinko Ilić who wore yellow vests and the tenants of the buildings New Belgrade Block 4 who blocked the mixer at the construction site in Paris Commune Street fought several times on Wednesday. Curses were hurled, "screams were also heard, and one man fell", the N1 reporter reported.

Tenants pushed containers in front of the concrete mixer to physically block the street.

The men in the yellow vests called themselves security, but according to N1, "it is clear that they are not professional security."

Citizens from Block 4 have been protesting for several months because their building was walled up with the construction of an investor.

The police are only advising.

The citizens asked for the help of the police, and there were three police officers at the scene of the incident, who filmed what was happening, but did not provide assistance to the citizens, "but advised them what to do if there was another conflict with the security."

Later, however, the police approached the developer at one point and asked him to withdraw all the security workers to the construction site, and told the citizens that if they continued with the blockade, it would be qualified as a violation of public order and peace.

According to the N1 report, a citizen asked the security guard why he was doing this, to which he allegedly replied: "give me 5.000 dinars, and I will stop with you."

The fight for the Belgrade Garden on Zvezdara

The construction site in Block 4 is just one of many neuralgic points in Belgrade where citizens fight for sun, air and green spaces.

The residents of Zvezdara are thus fighting against the investor "Himmel gradnja doo" who wants to turn the Beograd bašta park into a residential building.

The citizens point out that "regardless of the promises" of city planner Marko Stojčić and the former president of Zvezdara municipality Vladan Jeremic, Belgrade garden park will be preserved as a public green area.

The investor is allegedly "using machinations in the Cadastre to make it appear that he is the only one who has the right to use the plot on which the Beograd Bašta park is located and to erase the municipality of Zvezdar as the user of this plot".

Shady actions in Knez Miloša

Residents of Kneza Miloša and Vojvoda Milenko streets have been protesting at the corner of those two streets since the beginning of May in order to prevent the construction of a building that would block their windows and potentially threaten the foundations of neighboring buildings.

Photo: Marija Janković

The object in question is being built despite the order of the construction inspection, which verbally ordered the work to be stopped, but the investor ignored it and continued with the construction.

Citizens claim that the building permit was issued with the use of false documentation in which the investor showed the neighboring building without terraces and windows, which is not the case.

Photo: Marija Janković

It is also disputed that both buildings between which the building is built are cultural monuments of the city of Belgrade.

Asphalting of green areas in New Belgrade

Residents of Novobeograd blocks 61, 62, 63 and 64 rebelled against investor urbanism last year, so they united against investor urbanism that turns green areas into residential and business complexes of huge square footage.

Although the general regulation plan guarantees areas with greenery and accompanying commercial content between the blocks of New Belgrade, the city authorities attack every such point and repurpose them for housing with plans of a lower urban order, so the construction of multi-storey buildings is planned on the green area in Jurija Gagarina Street.

“Terrorist urbanism”

Architecture "to the measure of man", Ottoman "right to view" or lush vegetation, have completely disappeared in today's residential construction projects. Instead, impersonal and megalomaniac residential "cubes" are being rapidly built, built and lined up next to each other.

"In the past, architectural and urban planning laws were respected. There was a General Urban Plan (GUP), which determined the places for housing, plans for general regulations were drawn up, a detailed urban project was worked on, which was under the jurisdiction of the then highly respected Institute of Urban Planning, which still exists today, only it is no longer respected. And at the end of each project, an urban plan was drawn up together with urban planners," explained architect Dragoljub Bakić earlier for "Vreme". creator of the term "terrorist urbanism".

Urban terrorism in action

Because when you do a project of what is underground and what is above ground at the same time, synchronous plans are made to fit all the installations. The difference is that no one does that anymore, that urban plans are no longer made and the results of that are visible.

"Belgrade has been destroyed by all those so-planted buildings that get a permit for six floors, then build ten, where one family with four members lived, thirty families now live, and the connections for installations and infrastructure have remained the same, the same width of the streets, the same width of the sidewalks, even though many new tenants are planned. This will lead to a moment when traffic in Belgrade will simply stop," warned Bakić.

He concluded that "since 2012, public interest no longer exists in Belgrade", that it is "dead". There is only rampant government, despotism that can be seen in all spheres of life, and that his profession and urban planning "showed it most nakedly".