Clearing space: an anatomy of urban renewal, social cleansing and everyday life in a Belgrade mahala

Abstract

This article examines recent shifts in Belgrade's urban geography and built environments, with an accent placed on landscapes of social cleansing, gentrification and commercialization accompanying Serbia's emerging neoliberal governmentality. It does so by exploring the convergent translocal discourses and institutional structures that provided financing, conditionality and legitimacy for the forcible displacement of a sizeable Roma community living under Belgrade's Gazela Bridge and their involuntary relocation into housing containers on the city's outskirts in late August 2009. The article juxtaposes the violence of this site-specific biopolitical intervention into Roma everyday life, which was executed by local city authorities and financed by European financial institutions, with the alternative strategies deployed by the community and its allies in contesting Belgrade's racialized urban restructuring. The Gazela episode illustrates how functional re-inscriptions of urban space for the translocal needs of capital can simultaneously generate both violent cartographies of dispossession and precarious forms of subaltern reterritorialization.

Notes

¹ The year 2009 marked another step in Serbia's halting integration into global capitalism. The Serbian state's budgetary policy was further harmonized with neoliberal governmentality through a €3 billion stand-by arrangement concluded with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in late April. The lending package committed the Republic of Serbia to cutting its budgetary deficit to three per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) largely through public-sector retrenchment (IMF 2009a; 2009b). The same year also witnessed Belgrade's continued reinvention as an emerging European metropole: an attractive location for setting up the regional headquarters of global firms, a tourist destination and an increasingly popular site for international conferences, entertainment and sporting events.

² The key document here is ‘Operational directive: involuntary resettlement’ (OD 4.30) (World Bank 1990). Cernea (1999) explores some of the debates on this issue in a World Bank commissioned study. A critical literature on such procedures is well established, critiquing involuntary displacement from ecological, normative and socio-economic standpoints (see, for instance, De Wet 2006; Escobar 1995; McDowell 1996; Roy 1999). A recent Amnesty International report into the displacement of the Gazela Roma summarizes some of the shortcomings of OD 4.30 from an international human-rights perspective: ‘It does not … contain or require all the mandatory international human rights safeguards, including exploring alternatives to evictions, ensuring due process, and that resettlement sites comply with all the requirements for “adequacy” of housing set out under international human rights standards’ (Amnesty International 2010b, 9).

³ The project is intended to relieve traffic congestion on the E70/E75 highway given that the Gazela Bridge was built in 1970 to sustain some 36,000 vehicles a day (while estimates of current use place the figure closer to 150,000 vehicles a day). It is worth noting for instance that EIB funding has overwhelmingly privileged the improvement of transportation infrastructure in the region over other forms of social policy intervention. ‘Transport’ thus accounts for 55 per cent of EIB loans to the Western Balkans, while EIB financing for ‘Health, Education’ and ‘Water and Sanitation'account for, respectively, seven and two per cent of its lending (EIB 2007a).

⁴ The main local recipient of international financing for the Belgrade Highway and Bypass Project has been JP Putevi Srbije (Public Enterprise ‘Roads of Serbia’), which is meant to receive the bulk of the EBRD and EIB financing (EBRD 2007c; EIB 2007c). Another public-sector recipient is AD Centar za Puteve Vojvodine, receiving €1.753 million in EAR funding for the ‘Supervision of the rehabilitation of the Gazela Bridge’ (EAR 2008). Mostogradnja is a private company mentioned in press reports as a domestic subcontractor in the overall project (Politika 2010).

⁵ Belgrade is not alone in this, as the literature on post-communist Eastern Europe demonstrates. Urban planning and politics in the region often revolve around discourses and practices that seek to rebrand capital cities with ‘European’, ‘global’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ labels. Such projects also involve managing the risks associated with post-communist and post-industrial urban decline, high unemployment and widespread popular frustration with official corruption. These varied objectives are often achieved by applying emergent translocal technologies of municipal governance tailored towards managing urban ‘difference’ in accordance with the exigencies of global accumulation (Baldersheim 2003; Horak 2007; Razin 2007; Stanilov 2007; Strubelt and Gorzelak 2008).

⁶ The comparison was made explicit in a recent Amnesty International report, which concluded that the Gazela operation was a case of ‘forced eviction’ (Amnesty International 2010b). Similarly, the EIB's own Complaints' Office found that ‘this resettlement appeared as a “de facto” enforced eviction as in the presence of police as well as military police, home premises were demolished and residents were given the choice to enter the buses or to stay in the street’ (EIB Complaints Office 2010). In his study of anti-Roma racism in Europe, Bancroft (2005) has similarly noted how the logics of neoliberal spatial restructuring often tend to converge with the ‘spatial cleansing demanded by conservative-national politicians’ (ibid, 5). In Imperial Leather (1995), Anne McClintock provides a broader historical contextualization of how cleanliness discourses have been mobilized since the mid-nineteenth century to legitimate the civilizational and imperial claims of industrial capitalism (see, in particular, her chapter on ‘Soft-soaping empire: commodity racism and imperial advertising’: ibid, 207–231).

⁷ Illustrative of these discourses was the proclamation by Bojan Stanojević, the director of sales and marketing at the Holiday Inn in New Belgrade, that ‘These types of scenes leave an ugly impression about our city for foreign visitors.’ Representatives from the Expo Center similarly stated that, ‘while they haven't had direct complaints from clients that rent their space, such wild markets [referring to a nearby Roma flea-market] should be removed, since they certainly wreck the reputation of the city’. Local media similarly noted that ‘This ugly mockery [ruglo] of New Belgrade is also one of the “pictures of the city” that foreign visitors take [home] with themselves’ (Blic 2009b).

⁸ The Minister of Environment and Spatial Planning, Oliver Dulić, explained the national significance of the ‘Let's Clean Serbia’ campaign in the following terms: ‘We are gathered so that we can clean our country. Serbia is a dirtied and polluted country, in which the consciousness of citizens about this problem is very low, which demands that an action of its cleaning be implemented. The action of cleaning Serbia has to unite us all.’ The campaign of course, was framed in the new discourses of green capitalism, as Dulić reminded the assembled audience that ‘if we understand that trash isn't simply garbage but a resource … we can realize great savings, create new jobs and develop a new ECO-industry’ (Ministarstvo životne sredine i prostornog planiranja 2009). The nearly two decades of Roma innovation in this field were passed over in silence, thus providing a rupture between the frequently unpaid labour of Roma in providing Belgrade with informal networks of recycling and the business potential inherent in marketizing such operations. The biopolitical and disciplinary dimensions of this campaign were further underlined during Dulić's address to the Serbian Parliament outlining the campaign's goal to ‘change our habits’. He noted that, while 2009 would ‘be a year in which sadly many people will lose their jobs’, the year would also be remembered as one in which ‘the citizens of Serbia began to change their habits’ (Demokratska Stranka 2009).

⁹ In line with this new logic and under pressure from the local business community, in early December 2009, Đilas oversaw the demolition of the largest buvljak in New Belgrade, which served as an important source of livelihood for many Roma. Đilas justified the operation in familiar terms: ‘This place was difficult to describe with words, since it represented until yesterday an ugly mockery [ruglo] of Belgrade. It was a source of infection, filled with rats, with more than 2.5 thousand tons of garbage. Thanks to the great assistance of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the trade inspectorate the clearing of this space, used by the railroads and a large number of our citizens, is proceeding without problems. From this day forth, on this location, no form of street vending will be allowed. The trade inspectorate will monitor this space every day, and the location will be fenced off and security guards installed. Those who were selling things here will be offered the opportunity to formally purchase stands in the Open-Air Shopping Center while it exists at that location. Whoever doesn't want to do this will not be able to occupy themselves with that type of work in this way in Belgrade’ (Gradska Opština Novi Beograd 2009). During the clearing operation Đilas also restated his determination to complete the clearing of similar locations throughout Belgrade (Human Rights Watch 2010).

¹⁰ Many Roma (but also refugees/IDPs and pauperized workers dispossessed by recent wars and massive job losses) have sought to settle on underused public lands in Belgrade that are located near major bridges, ports, railway stations, warehousing complexes, manufacturing points, highways, hotels, etc. In this way, they can simultaneously avoid increasing rents while gaining access—as a reserve pool of labour—to the informal and contingent labour markets that characterize Serbia's cleaning, retail service and transportation industries, textile, assembly and manufacturing sweatshops, and the warehousing and packaging sectors, as well as opportunities in the emerging entertainment and tourism sector, particularly as musicians, but also in other types of (often illicit) labour (including sex work). For Bancroft (2005), these emerging economies are consistent with attempts to regulate economic life through the racialized ‘construction of networks of dark and light zones by socio-economic forces and state practices’ (ibid, 3).

¹¹ Picking up on the near ubiquity of the ‘container’, an online, pan-Balkan street-arts magazine has adopted the name Kontejner ( < www.kontejnermag.com>); it is also reflected in the title of Serbian playwright Dušan Kovačević's 1999 play Kontejner sa Pet Zvezdica (Five-Star Dumpster). The increasing use of intermodal containers for social housing has recently been popularized in the UK as well (see for instance < www.containercity.com>). Euromodul is the local firm producing such housing units in Serbia ( < www.euromodul.rs/>).

¹² EU Commissioner for Justice Viviane Redding recently echoed Vasić's claims (albeit controversially and in another context). Referring to official French policy targeting Roma EU citizens for deportation, Redding stated that ‘I personally have been appalled by a situation which gave the impression that people are being removed from a Member State of the EU just because they belong to a certain ethnic minority. This is a situation I had thought Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War’ (The Economist 2010). The consistent recurrence of these comparisons in relation to Roma communities indicates the extent to which the lessons of the Romani holocaust, the Porajmos or Samudaripen, have yet to be internalized by European publics (see, for instance, Huttenbach 1991; Lewy 2000; Barsony 2008).