Back on the map

Seen in Belgrade, Serbia, on 23 Mai 2015:

What is the difference between Belgrade waterfront and Rotterdam Kop van Zuid? Not much. Both are proud cities. Both lack a powerful economy. Both want something special, some icon, something new, to let the world know they are still attractive. Both developed bold plans that consist of glamourous highrise development on the waterfront in an area that could be described as a brownfield situation where the land value is low. Everything looks unreal, too expensive, too big. In Rotterdam (600.000 inhabitants) planning started at the end of the seventies, in Belgrade (2 million inhabitants) around the same time. Both plans need costly public infrastructure: bridges, metro, land clearance, otherwise it would never work. Because Dutch government was willing to pay, Rotterdam could start building its Kop van Zuid in the early nineties. Belgrade had to wait for the end of the Balkan war. Now it seems to have found its private money. Developers from the United Arab Emirates pour in. Everybody knows that this could not be done without the help of promises, tax reductions, soothing gifts, special laws. Citizens will have to pay for it anyway.

So in the end there remains this one big question: does it work? Can it boost an economy? Does it make the city any better? And does it improve the lives of its citizens? We don’t know. There will be a shopping mall, so people will start consuming, but shops in the inner city will go bankrupt. Tourists and visitors from abroad will come to spend their money. Belgrade might even become a regional centre in Southeastern Europe. You never know. Air Serbia is in arab hands now; its new owners are introducing transfer traffic, turning Belgrade airport into a minor regional hub. Was it really worth all the public money? Time will tell. Kop van Zuid at least costed a fortune (a bridge and metrostation of 500 mio euro, a palace of justice, a harbour office tower, subsidized housing etc.). In the end the most important goal was to put the city ‘back on the map’. A kind of global citymarketing. Just want to remind you of John Friedmann’s words: “Sustainable development is never bestowed from the outside but must be generated from within the regional economy itself.” This, the American planner wrote in 2004, was the key point in Jane Jacobs’s analysis with which he was in full accord. So am I.