ТHE TYPOLOGY OF ARCHITECTURAL AND URBANISTIC TRANSFORMATIONS OF BELGRADE (19TH – 21ST CENTURY)

Text topic: Critical History of Transforming Belgrade Public Spaces - from the End of the 18th Century to the Beginning of the 21st Century

Text author: Александар Кадијевић

So far, the historiographic thought has not paid enough attention to the processes of transforming urban patterns of Belgrade, caused by changing socio-economic interests. Evasive in real time and comprehensible only from a time distance, the cultural identity of the Serbian capital has often changed over the last two centuries, in parallel with its spatial growth, dense development and demographic boom. Its transformations, sometimes radical and sometimes more moderate, were primarily dictated by war destructions, discontinued social developments, overturning of political systems and with it ruling and architectural ideologies, which resulted in too many different styles and non-harmonized height lines of the constructed edifices. The alternations were usually initiated by decisions of state urban planners or spontaneous, mainly unjustified manifestations of “silent” building evolution. These transformations of the Serbian capital which first occurred in a vassal and then in an independent Serbian and later Yugoslav state, had different impacts on the existing system of the city structures and the city life. According to critical thought so far, these transformations can be differentiated by the scope of their completion, civilizational appropriateness (or inappropriateness), degree of justifiability, urbanistic-architectural methodology and ideological-economic platforms that inspired them.