The Legitimacy of Informal Settlements in Balkan States (original) (raw)
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This chapter discusses informal settlements in five capital cities in the Balkans: Belgrade (Serbia); Pristina (Kosovo); Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina); Skopje (Macedonia); and Tirana (Albania). Here informal settlements contain mostly housing construction of good quality, sometimes on legally-owned land. The illegal nature of these developments is associated with the lack of formal urban plans and/or building permits. Drawing on interviews of local experts, the chapter aims to provide a better understanding of the mutual relationship, perception, and perhaps stereotyping between informal settlement dwellers and planning experts and governments in the Balkan post-socialist context. It elucidates the divisions in the views of planning experts, government officials, and members of the public on the informal settlement issue. While legalization is a contested policy, critiques are advanced rather peacefully and few demolitions have taken place. In none of these countries has housing legalization led to major antagonism or political friction. Tolerance prevails in the Balkans.
Urban form of informal settlements in the Western Balkans
This chapter analyzes the urban form of informal settlements in the Western Balkans. Informal housing is now a permanent fixture of the urban landscape in this region. Given the widespread and increasing scale of informal settlements, it is important to record their spatial qualities and compare them to informal settlements elsewhere. A five-point framework is employed, which considers the context in which informality takes place; the settlement itself; the houses contained therein; the dwellers of those houses; and the process through which a settlement is originally formed and then transformed over time. Note: All accompanying images are at the end of this manuscript.
Abstract: Regional roads in post-Yugoslav space is characterised by colourful presence of informal housing. These structures are criticized in the media. The article challenges these criticisms by researching the relation between the informal construction and the class by looking at two cases of informal housing developments, Croatian Adriatic highway and Koridor in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The article focuses on private entrepreneurs (privatnici). In specific , it questions how are the aesthetics of the informal house negotiated and the role of urban planning is delineated through the relationship of the state, instrumentalised by already established socialist elites and privatnici, the newcomers. Consequently, it further explores how the post-socialist weakening of the state changed this aesthetic and urban developments by exposing the houses to constant economic involvement with travellers and new realities of the roadside dominated by disarrayed private interests.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2016
This article demonstrates residents' transformative practices and discusses atten dant outcomes to contribute to an understanding of statebuilt housing estates for peo ple affected by urban transformation projects. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a social housing estate (KTOKI) in the Northern Ankara Entrance Urban Transformation Project (NAEUTP). It addresses questions on why formalization of infor mal housing takes place today, under what conditions it is countered by reinformalization practices, and what the outcomes of this process are. As informal housing became for malized by NAEUTP, gecekondu dwellers were forced into formalized spaces and lives within KTOKI, which was based on a middleclass lifestyle in its design and its legally required central management. Informality reemerged in KTOKI when the state's housing institution, in response to the estate's poor marketability, moved out, allowing residents to reappropriate spaces to meet their needs and form their own management system. When cultural norms that are inscribed in the built environment and financial norms that treat residents as clients conflict with everyday practices and financial capabilities, the urban poor increasingly engage in acts of informality. I argue that the outcome of this informality in a formal context is a site of multiple discrepancies.
Journal of Urban History, 2018
This article describes a squatter settlement that arose in Belgrade between the two world wars and the communities that lived in it and fought for their right to housing. At the end of the war in 1918, a completely new phenomenon appeared in Belgrade—the squatter settlement. Jatagan-mala was the largest and best known among them. It is used as a case in point to analyze the municipal authorities’ attitude toward squatter settlements and their residents. It is shown how Belgrade Municipality threatened to demolish Jatagan-mala and then partially tore it down, and how it dealt with those who, as a result, were left without a roof over their head. The article also describes the residents’ battle not to lose their homes. Organized and strong in the beginning, over time, their efforts flagged, and in the end, they haggled over monetary compensation for their demolished homes.
Culure Unbound, 2019
Mainstream mass media and politicians tend to portray squatters as civic evils. Breaking in and trespassing on private property is clumsily equated with the occupation of empty premises. Squatting is often represented as a serious criminal offence even before any legal verdict has been determined. The social diversity of squatters and the circumstances around this practice are usually omitted. Dominant narratives in Western European cities were effective in terms of criminalisa-tion of squatting and the social groups that occupied vacant properties-homeless people in need of a shelter, those who cannot afford to buy or rent convenient venues for performing social activities, activists who squat as a means of protest against real estate speculation, etc. This article reviews the available evidence of those narratives and disentangles the main categories at play. I first examine ho-mogenisation stereotypes of squatters as a whole. Next, I distinguish the divides created by the conventional polarisation between 'good' and 'bad' squatters. It is argued that both dynamics foster the stigma of squatting and facilitate its repression , although these discursive struggles engage squatters as well. As a consequence , I discuss the implications of 'reversive' and 'subversive' narratives performed by squatters to legitimise their practices and movements. In particular, the anti-capitalist features of these counter-hegemonic responses are identified and elaborated, which adds to the topic's literature.
Contradictions and Antagonisms in (Anti-) Social(ist) Housing in Serbia
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019
This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residualised social housing does not bring justice to marginalised groups affected by capitalist expropriation. In this article, the term (anti-)social(ist) housing will be introduced to describe the historically grounded, incomplete, and contradictory solutions that social housing is currently offering in Serbia, as well as its antisocial nature. By focusing on a particular case study, the Kamendin project situated in Zemun Polje, one of the very few social housing projects in Belgrade, the article explores debt crises produced by mechanisms of social housing; the production of racism, segregation, and responsibilisation; and mechanisms of passing responsibility on all levels in an attempt of the state to spend as little money as possible. (Anti-)social(ist) housing is further assessed as a space of struggle that includes different survival and resistance tactics that are used in order to oppose social housing violence. Following that, the article will focus on the possibilities of the activist art project Kamendynamics and the theatre peace How does fascism not disappear? Zlatija Kostić: I sued myself to confront the racialisation and culturalisation of problems by introducing collaborative visual, class-based, and historical-materialist analyses. By documenting and conceptualising mechanisms of social housing and reflecting on the role of activist art within housing struggles, I aim to contribute to anti-segregation and anti-racist housing struggles in Eastern European cities and beyond.