Scaling up? From urban movements to citizen's platforms in Serbia

ABSTRACT

This paper brings the “scale question” into the discussion of urban movements in Southeast Europe and offers a multispatial framework for their analysis. It focuses on the shifting scale of urban movements in Serbia, which was recently united in a wider citizen's platform. The paper reveals that scaling up from the single-issue initiative to a national political alliance is a challenging process that takes place on multiple scales. The main challenges are co-optation and tension between urban issues and issues in other spaces beyond the (capital) city. My explanation considers the centralised semi-authoritarian national government and the urban-rural divide in Serbia.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatialities of urban movements
• scaling up
• citizen platforms
• Balkans
• Serbia

Introduction

From the paradigmatic example of participatory budgeting and civic forums in Porto Alegre in 2001, through the Occupy movement in the US and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013, urban movements gained momentum and attracted the growing attention of scholars. In his masterpiece Rebel Cities, David Harvey observed how the urban movements of the late 1960s were revived as a response to a “brutally neoliberalising international capitalism that has been intensifying its assault on the qualities of daily life since the early 1990s” (2013, xii). However, according to Harvey, the revolutionary potential of urban movements is neglected because they are often understood as “reformist attempts to deal with specific (rather than systemic) issues, and therefore neither revolutionary nor authentically class movements” (2013, xiii–xiv). However, some of these movements have evolved into broader alliances of local initiatives, such as the National Alliance for the Right to the City in the US, Barcelona en Comú in Spain, and Možemo! in Croatia, showing the potential to unite more general issues and enter the national political arena. In this sense, the “scaling up” of urban movements into broader civic platforms could be seen as their maturation from problem-driven reactions to systemic political alternatives. Despite increasing research interest in urban movements, the “scaling-up” process is not yet fully understood.

In this paper, I address two related gaps in the literature on urban movements. The first arises from the limited attention to the “scale question” in the existing research, which often fails to consider the complex spatial genealogy and evolution of urban movements. This is particularly important in light of globalisation because urban processes, especially since the end of the 1990s, have become increasingly global in scale (Pajvančić-Cizelj 2017). The development of urban movements has taken place in complex socio-spatial relations as a result of the emergence of the transnational networking of urban actors. The consolidation of the global financial market corresponds to the proliferation of urban megaprojects and “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2011), as well as the urban movements that oppose them. In addition, protesters who claim their right to the city in different socio-political and economic circumstances can imagine their struggles in a very similar way due to the “intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson 1992, 8).

The second gap refers to insufficient research on urban movements in non-Western societies with growing authoritarian tendencies, such as the Balkans. Cities are the main sites of grassroots mobilisation, but are also the primary places where social control and surveillance of various forms of resistance develop. The degree of political opportunities available to movements differs profoundly across political regimes, and variations in political opportunities can explain cycles of expansion and contraction in social movements (Nicholls 2007). Therefore, it is important to contextualise this region and its political systems better within the, mainly Western-centric, “right-to-the city” literature.

The aim of this study was twofold: first, to draw attention to some of the recent insights about the “scale question” (Brenner 2019) in urban studies that could contribute to a better understanding of the shifting scale of urban movements, and second, to use this framework to analyse urban movements and civic platforms in Serbia, as a state with growing authoritarian tendencies (Castaldo 2020).

To that end, I analyse secondary data available on online media portals, social media, and official websites of movements. I focus on the period from 2014 to 2020, when the main urban movement in Serbia – Don't Let Belgrade Drown (Ne Davimo Beograd, NDB) – began its activities through opposition to the urban megaproject Belgrade Waterfront in Belgrade, and initiated a series of grassroots activist demonstrations at the local level throughout Serbia. In 2018, the NDB took part in local elections but did not get enough votes to enter the local parliament. In 2019, the NDB united with several similar organisations from other cities in Serbia on the national political platform Civic Front. In the same year, several organisations left the Front and returned to issues in their local communities. This sequent of events points to the need for the unification of urban movements into the national political platforms, but at the same time, it reveals the difficulties they encounter in the process.

By focusing on everyday urban life, which was a blind spot of Serbian politics for a long time, the NDB initially managed to mobilise and politicise numerous residents who would have not otherwise participated in the political processes. Given the low level of trust in institutions and resistance to institutional policy among Serbian citizens, this could have significant potential for mobilising politically passive citizens. However, it is still unclear whether such local mobilisation around specific issues can spill over into broader socio-political alliances and become a more significant political alternative in the country. In line with the concepts presented in the theoretical part of the paper, I argue that the answer to this question must consider the wider spatialities of urban movements in the Serbian context, beyond the (capital) city.

Scaling up of urban movements: beyond the right to the city

Much of the social movement literature draws from general political theories, which tend to neglect the question of space. Geographers and urban sociologists have questioned this view for a long time by drawing attention to urban space as the constitutive level for political mobilisation (Castells 1983).

Urban movements can be defined as “social movements through which citizens attempt to achieve some control over their urban environment” (Pruijt 2007, 1–4). According to Harvey, urban movements organise around the call for greater democratic control over the production and use of the surplus. “Since the urban process is a major channel of use, then the right to the city is constituted by establishing democratic control over the deployment of the surpluses through urbanization” (2013, 23).

Although organised around local issues, the socio-spatial scale on which urban movements are produced, reproduced, and transformed is much more complex. Some authors suggest the term “urban movements in urban society” instead of “urban movements” to emphasise the complex socio-spatial configurations underlying contemporary urban phenomena (Rodgers, Barnett, and Cochrane 2014, 1551–1560). The socio-spatial approach to contentious urban politics suggests moving beyond localised right-to-city discourses (Miller and Nicholls 2013) and seeing contention from relational, global, and spatial perspectives (Uitermark, Nicholls, and Loopmans 2012). Urban movements consist of many converging and relational spaces (local, regional, national, and global). They are faced with specific opportunities and constraints, and they actively produce and change these spaces. Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto (2008) draw attention to the relationship between these multiple spatialities and contentious politics.

Multiple spatialities—scale, place, networks, positionality, and mobility—are implicated in and shape contentious politics. No one of these should be privileged; in practice, participants in contentious politics frequently draw on several at once. Thus, it is important to consider all of them and the complex ways in which they are co-implicated with one another, with unexpected consequences for contentious politics. (Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto 2008, 157)

This means that a socio-spatial approach combined with context-specific empirical enquiry is indispensable for understanding contemporary urban movements.

The socio-spatial and contextual approach to urban movements allows us to analyse their similarities and convergences arising from global flows, the dispersion of economic activities in space, and the differences between them resulting from the uneven nature of capitalism and the specific territorial concentration of power in global urban centres (Sassen 1992).

In contemporary circumstances, movements develop in a relational manner. The concept of spillover emerged to describe these various mutual influences where “activists define themselves, frame their issues, develop tactics, and establish organizations with reference to what other collective actors have done” (Whittier 2013). Dominant movements can form frameworks that later influence similar movements. Membership in movements often overlaps, so spillover also occurs through the contact of actors and the creation of alliances. Movements can also participate in broader global networks that can mediate the spillover “from above”. The focus on the evolution of pre-existing networks between different spaces and spillover effects can help to better understand episodes of contention in cities that can seem spontaneous but in fact result from a long-term process (Flesher Fominay 2015, 142–163). Thus, spillovers are an important concept for understanding how urban movements scale up into broader platforms, and they take place at different spatial levels.

Although socio-spatial theorising has a relatively long history in urban movement literature, empirical research on the scaling up of urban movements into wider national, regional, or global alliances is still scarce and new. Nicholls, Gnes, and Vermeulen (2021) noted that especially missing are the studies that look into the question of why organisations get stuck in certain places and why they shift scale when they eventually do. According to these authors, a scale shift can occur when political opportunities and threats emerge at a new geographical level, where movement activities and networks also expand (Nicholls, Gnes, and Vermeulen 2021). The shift depends on available resources (both human and financial) as well as on place-based interactions and trust. Strong local relations can provide benefits early on, but later dependency on those relations can lead to the scalar lock-in of resource – poor organisations, even when opportunities and threats shift elsewhere. Their research, based on the US immigrant rights movement that took 10 years to “scale up” from the local to national level, suggests that shifting scale can be a long and difficult process.

The state represents an important spatial level and framework that defines the development of urban movement. Uitermark, Nicholls, and Loopmans (2012) hypothesise that radical change occurs when members of the movement build strong ties between different sectors, places and scales, which is possible when there is no strong control of the state. When such control exists, networking becomes more difficult, and movements remain limited to sectors, places, or cities. Nicholls, Uitermark, and Haperen (2020) examined the opportunities and risks that emerged when the U.S. immigrant rights movement went national. Their research showed the contradictory consequences of scaling up – it created an opportunity for making demands in national politics, but also led to the co-optation – accumulation (Holdo 2019) of resources by a small number of professionalised organisations, making the movement prone to unequal power relations and internal conflicts.

Urban movements in the Balkans

Urban movements have so far been mostly examined in the context of Western (mostly American) cities (Castells 1983) and somewhat less so in the context of Central and Eastern European cities (Jacobsson 2020), while urban movements in the Balkans have only recently attracted the attention of researchers (Božilović 2019; Bieber and Brentin 2019; Petrović and Backović 2019; Tomašević et al. 2018; Dolenec, Doolan, and Tomašević 2017).

Contention in the Balkans’ urban context reflects trends observed in the developed cities of the West, the influence of the post-socialist context specific for Central and Eastern European countries, and some specific socio-spatial features arising from distinctive socio-political circumstances in the region.

The largest and most prominent urban movements, developed in the West, define the main global frameworks within which the movements in the Balkans are mobilised and reshaped. Scholars studying urban movements in the Balkans usually adopt Western-based theoretical concepts. The post-socialist context is now marked by the liberalisation of housing and urban policy, inadequate policies of urban planning, conflict related to restitution and privatisation of property, deterioration of housing stock, insufficient production of social housing, rising rents, gentrification, privatisation of public spaces, and so on (Jacobsson 2020). The intensity of transitional changes is accompanied by the sudden activation of grassroots urban movements across the region, which challenges the idea of ⁣an underdeveloped civil sector in postsocialist countries.

Political regimes in the Balkans are today considered grey zones between democracy and authoritarianism. They are often called competitive authoritarianism, meaning that formal democratic institutions such as elections exist, but are systematically violated by incumbents, resulting in an uneven playing field between government and opposition (Levitsky and Way 2002). According to Bieber (2017), the second wave of competitive authoritarianism in Western Balkans,¹ which started in the late 2000s, was built upon a failure of previous reformist attempts during the early 2000s and the insufficient transformative power of external actors, namely the EU. Kapidžić (2020) explains democratic decline in the region by focusing on the governing practices of parties in power and illiberal politics.

Illiberal politics are sets of policies that extend an electoral advantage for governing parties with the aim to remain in power indefinitely. This includes perpetuating advantageous socio-economic structures and governing practices as well as specific and targeted restrictive actions against political opponents and independent institutions (Kapidžić 2020, 6).

According to the author, ruling parties and leaders use structural deficiencies in the system (such as strong executive, weak control, and informality) to push illiberal policies and take advantage of electoral processes while maintaining elections. Examples of illiberal politics are limitations of the right to vote or to run for office; changes to electoral rules so they favour incumbents; restriction of opposition parties and independent candidates or the public assembly and the freedom of expression; media control; strong executive control over the legislature, judiciary, and independent institutions; the appointment of loyal individuals as heads of independent agencies; reliance on informal and non-institutional executive decision-making; intimidation of protesters; public shaming of vulnerable groups; and so on (Kapidžić 2020). One of the important elements of competitive authoritarian regimes in the Balkans is the “state capture”, or the control of state resources for illicit purposes by the leadership of the ruling parties (Bieber 2017).

There is no doubt that competitive authoritarianism, built upon illiberal politics and state capture at the national level, influences politics on other spatial scales such as local/urban. However, systematic exploration of the links between the urban political arena and the consolidation of authoritarian or hybrid regimes at the national level is still lacking in the literature. Focusing on the case of Turkey, Ergenc and Yuksekkaya (2022) recently showed that the rise of neoliberal authoritarianism is reinforced by the centralisation of urban decision-making processes, namely the shifting of decision-making powers from municipalities to central state organs. This kind of subsumption of urban politics under the national state could be one of the mechanisms through which competitive authoritarianism uses local democratic institutions and urban resources to realise its interests and stay in power. But how does that effect the urban movements and their attempts to gain more control over the “captured” urban environment?

In that regard, Bieber and Brentin argued that “protest movements in Southeast Europe mobilized around the sense of grievance with the way the authorities administer the common good, public spaces, and the state” (2019, 1). According to the authors, the dissatisfaction of protesting citizens was less ideological but focused on the evident state capture by predatory political elites. Because the European Union (EU) and its integration process seem not to have provided an answer as to how to control political elites, protesters challenge the larger paradigm of democratic and economic transition, but also lack a clear alternative. Božilović similarly observed that by demanding their right to the city, urban movements in Serbia “point to deeper systemic and institutional fractures, injustices, and the narrow interests of the power-wielding elite, which come to life in interactions between the local and state authorities” (2019, 151). Therefore, the question can be posed whether the urban movements in Serbia should be seen as a reaction to the neoliberal urban restructuring (as in the Western right-to-the-city framework) or as a reaction to (unsuccessful) consolidation of democracy in the region and the rise of competitive authoritarianism. In the Balkans, these dilemmas might be inappropriate because the democratic decline and rising authoritarianism in the region could go hand in hand with the neoliberal austerity policies (Pavlović 2019).

Dolenec, Doolan, and Tomašević's research (2017) on the Right to the City movement in Croatia showed that this movement managed to “build a coherent critique of the process of enclosure and commodification of public space as well as articulated demands for democratising public sector governance” (2017, 1422) as a response to the democratic decline that followed post-socialist neoliberal urbanisation. According to the authors, the right to the city movement in Croatia avoided Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” and managed to maintain flexibility, initial radical impulse, and activism while building the organisational robustness necessary to structure contention (Dolenec, Doolan, and Tomašević 2017). The authors explain this by “tactical networking” with actors and organisations in various fields across the country, primarily in the field of civil society, but also with trade unions and others. This means that networks between places, cities, and sectors played an important role in scaling up urban movements in Croatia.

Milan and Oikonomakis (2019) specifically addressed the question of how and why some movements managed to develop from single-issue protests into wider opposition, while others failed in that process. In their analysis of the development of the protests in Greece, Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina between 2011 and 2013, they used the metaphor “missing the forest for the trees” to explain how some single-issue mobilisations, such as the one in Bosnia and Herzegovina, failed to act beyond the specific issue and to articulate a critique of the wider socio-political circumstances (Milan and Oikonomakis 2019, 113–130). The authors explained the success of the protests in Greece and Turkey in transcending a single issue through pre-existing movement networks that were lacking in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Urban development in Serbia has been studied by several authors who analysed the main urban megaproject in Serbia, the Belgrade Waterfront in Belgrade. Grubbauer and Čamprag (2019) showed that this project, similar to other projects in the West, built on global circuits of knowledge in which expertise on development schemes, project management, and market standards in real estate are circulated, but differ because nation-state politics have considerably more influence on cities than in Western contexts. The Belgrade Waterfront project is being implemented by the national government with the exclusion of the local community from decision-making by the adoption of the Lex Specialis (Special Law), which defines the project as being of national significance (Zeković, Maričić, and Vujošević 2018) and is therefore subject to special procedures for expropriation and construction permits. Thus, there is a need to further conceptualise nation-state politics and autocratic rule as driving forces of urban development processes in Serbia and the factors that shape the development of urban movements.

New interest in research on social movements in the Balkans has not been accompanied by sufficient problematisation of the underlying socio-spatial scale that defines their development. While research on protests and movements that arise in cities is relatively common, the problematisation of their relationships with changing urban context is still rare. Cities are not passive backgrounds where protests take place and movements consolidate; they also play an important role in their development and (uneven) outcomes. In addition, the focus of this research is mainly on dominant movements and capital cities. Therefore, the complex interactions between the dominant movements in the capital cities and actors operating in other spaces and scales (other cities and municipalities in the same country, state, region, global level, etc.), as well as the role of the “urban hinterland” (Brenner 2016)² are not sufficiently investigated.

It should be noted that Serbia has very high levels of inequality and territorial disparity. The Gini coefficient of equivalent disposable income in Serbia is higher than that in other post-Yugoslav countries and is also higher than the European Union (EU) average (Mirkov and Manic 2021). There are huge regional differences, primarily in the areas of the economy (employment, GDP, GDP per capita, gross value added, average salary, and total investment) and demography (demographic ageing process migration flows with significant regional differences) – jobs, investments, and production are concentrated in a few large urban centres, while peripheral areas, especially rural ones, are characterised by relatively large disinvestment, high unemployment, and low investor interest (Manić, Popović, and Molnar 2013). Bartlett observed that “as transition has proceeded, disparities between capital cities and rural areas have increased, while weak administrative capacities have hindered the implementation of effective local development policies to counteract these effects” (2009, 21)

The role models and financial background of urban megaprojects in Serbia are becoming increasingly transnational and non-Western. The investor behind the Belgrade Waterfront project was a private company from the United Arab Emirates. Koelemaij (2020) argued that the Belgrade Waterfront project is an element of a wider bilateral deal between Serbia and Emirates central governments, driven by geopolitics and geo-economic interests (such as strategic military or trade agreements) that also import the so called “Dubai-model” and authoritarian urban development. “When political elites invite UAE-based developers to bring in both capital investment and expertise to develop a large-scale urban project, they inevitably also import their habits in terms of top-down and nontransparent forms of decision-making” (Koelemaij 2020, 14). This shows that in the Belgrade case, local urban problems, most clearly expressed in urban megaprojects, are shaped not only by the local and national governments but also by distant events, actors, and models that originated outside the West. The multiscalar nature of urban development is still not accompanied by equal multiscalar urban contention. Besides, while there is shifting underlying power geography behind the urban development, refocused on the (Middle) East, urban movements still “look into” the Western models which also often provide them with training and other assistance (Kramer 2019).³ Piletić nevertheless argues that “authoritarian neoliberal rescaling has triggered the emergence of new forms of increasingly networked and consolidated – contestation” … thus “opening new avenues for radical social change” (2021, 12).

This further highlights the importance of studying the spatialities of urban movements in different contexts and questions the adequacy of dominant Western (US)-based concepts for explaining urban movements in the Balkans, especially Serbia. According to Cox, what Harvey observed in the United States was largely a politics of urban development, territorial competition, and conflict, made possible by a highly decentralised United States federal state structure that pitted city against city in the quest for capital investment and tax revenue, thereby generating relatively autonomous urban politics (Cox 2001). The situation in Serbia significantly differs concerning the low level of local autonomy, centralised national government, weak democracy, state capture, informality, the influence of actors from the Middle East, and so forth.

From urban movements to citizen platforms in Serbia

By relying on previous theoretical remarks related to the spatialities of urban movements and their specific features in the Balkans, I analyse urban movements in Serbia. My aim is to identify the spatially relevant elements of these movements and the challenges they face in “scaling up” to create and maintain a wider coalition of local urban actors and to broaden their political impact.

Until the emergence of the “Do not let the Belgrade drown” (NDB) initiative in 2014, urban problems were not significantly present in the Serbian public discourse. Since democratic changes in 2000, public attention has been mainly focused on “major state issues”, such as Kosovo and European integration. The NDB initiative grew out of a series of protests against the implementation of the massive urban “Belgrade Waterfront” megaproject. The protests were initially triggered by the illegal character of the Belgrade Waterfront project, the suspension of the rule of law and institutions, and the violation of freedoms and rights that predated and enabled it. In 2016, a group of masked offenders illegally demolished private buildings in the city where the project was planned, while the police were not reachable for citizens. To date, perpetrators have not yet been identified or prosecuted. Protests gathered mostly younger people who had a higher education, belonged to the middle class, lived in urban areas (most often in the capital, Belgrade), and were predominantly in favour of the left political spectrum (Džuverović and Milošević 2021). Although the NDB continued to focus on this project, it also managed to overcome the single-issue approach and transform into the left-representing urban movement focusing on “citizens” everyday life issues, protection and fair use of the common and natural resources, building the democratic institutions, sustainable urban development, urban and cultural policy, and involvement of citizens in the development of their environment”.⁴ As Piletic noted, “NDB developed from a single-issue movement that emerged organically in response to the Belgrade Waterfront project to an increasingly formal organization with capacities to tackle a variety of urban and social justice issues across Belgrade and the rest of the country” (Piletić 2021, 11).

NDB initiated a national “spillover” and emerged as a “right-to-the-city” framework-maker for other similar initiatives in Serbia. According to Piletić (2021) the NDB became an “anchor within a budding ecosystem of solidarity” at the local level. Some of those organisations, such as the Ministry of Space from Belgrade and the Group for Conceptual Politics (GKP) from Novi Sad, existed before the NDB – they were both founded in 2011. The NDB was formed by a group of people who were engaged in different civic associations, CSOs, and collectives (in some cases, for over a decade) before joining the initiative (Petrović 2019). Some of the movements focused on the local urban issues emerged after, such as Ujedinjeni pokret slobodnih stanara iz Niša (United Movement of Free Tenants), the grassroots initiative from the city of Niš, founded in 2015,⁵ and Združena akcija “Krov nad glavom” (The Common Action for “The Roof Over Our Heads”) an anti-eviction resistance movement, founded in 2017.⁶

At the regional level, the wave of grassroots urban movements spilled over from neighbouring Croatia, where it originated somewhat earlier, between 2009 and 2011 (Horvat and Štiks 2012). The right to the city movement in Croatia consolidated between 2005 and 2010 (Dolenec, Doolan, and Tomašević 2017) and then scaled up at the national level, resulting in the formation of the national political platform Možemo! (“We Can!”) by local green and urban movements and initiatives in 2019. In an interview on the occasion of the electoral success of the political platform Možemo! in Zagreb, Radomir Lazović from NDB pointed out the similarities between the two organisations, and the fact that the NDB members closely follow the activities and success of Možemo! and concludes with Možemo i mi! (“We Can Too!”).⁷ Therefore, the regional level represents an important scale on which urban actors find inspiration, reflect on their activities, and modify political tactics.

However, many analyses done in Serbia after the victory of the Možemo! platform in Zagreb pointed to structural political differences because the success of urban movements in Croatia cannot easily spill over into Serbia.⁸ After the introduction of neoliberal urban policies in Serbia, the democratic deficit and state control became much more pronounced, which calls into question the existence of minimum conditions for free and democratic elections. According to Dobrica Veselinović, one of the leading members of the NDB, “The more Croatia as a society is ahead of Serbia in terms of the development of democracy – the further we are from the results achieved in Zagreb”.⁹ For example, NDB mostly relies on the Internet and social media as information and dissemination channels, and lacks access to mainstream media due to severe state control (Džuverović and Milošević 2021). Thus, the reason for the emergence of the movement can be very similar (neoliberal urban transformation), but the general political context and role of the state lead to different development and outcomes.

In terms of international networking, the NDB is a part of a

growing wave of local municipal movements and has been supported by many European movements and over 80 progressive intellectuals across Europe, including Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, Berlin Deputy Mayor Ramon Pop, Janis Varufakis from the Diem25 movement, as well as Ska Keller from the European Greens/European Free Alliance political group in the European Parliament.¹⁰

As a result of international reputation and support, in June 2019 a large international conference, “Fearless Cities”, was held in Belgrade, which brought together representatives of over 60 local municipal movements from cities across Europe.¹¹ This international network can be considered an antipode to the constraints present at the national level. Within this international conference, the opening panel was called “One Region, Same Fight”, which gathered participants from organisations and initiatives from Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, and North Macedonia,¹² reflecting the mutually constitutive and relationally intertwined character of different spatial scales that influence movement development.

Even though it managed to overcome the single-issue approach, the NDB remained focused on local topics – more precisely, the urban problems of the city of Belgrade, such as public transportation, public spaces, and housing. This was shown when the NDB entered formal political processes in 2018 and took part in local elections in Belgrade.¹³ In addition to its formal members, other activists who informally advocated for the preservation of the urban commons in Belgrade, as well as experts who supported the initiative, also joined the campaign. The Belgrade Waterfront project became only one of the issues for which the initiative focused on elections. The electoral programme also included other problems in the city of Belgrade, such as the privatisation of the Belgrade agricultural corporation PKB, the privatisation of the city sanitation and waste management services (the case of a landfill in Vinča), and the sale and privatisation of parts of the Danube coast (Zemun quay).¹⁴ Given the size of Belgrade, its diversity, and the complexity of its social problems, this step can be seen as the first indication of scaling up, in which the initiative managed to find a common denominator for the various problems faced by citizens in different parts of the city.

Nevertheless, the socio-spatial reach of the newly established political discourse was not significant enough to enter the local parliament, since the NDB achieved 3.5% votes and 5% was needed for representation in the city council. Kralj (this volume) argues that the electoral turn of the NDB in Serbia was much less likely compared to Western as well as some Southern European societies such as Croatia. According to the author, the party system of Serbia is unfavourable for new entrants, not only because of its dominant-party form and competitive authoritarian features of the regime, but also because of the demanding formal and financial burden for the registration of new political parties. In addition, once they attempt to compete in an election, new entrants are confronted with the electoral system that defines the whole country as a single electoral district, which can further constrain the entrance of smaller and regional parties into the parliament (Kralj, this volume).

The NDB members were aware of the importance to institutionalise and reach more people outside the capital (Petrović 2019; van der Wielen 2019). The next step in scaling up took place in 2019 when the nationwide network Civic Front was formally established and composed of eight local organisations from different cities in Serbia. In addition to the NDB, members of the Civic Front were the United Movement of Free Tenants from Niš, Local Front from Kraljevo, the Initiative for Požega, Local Front Valjevo, the Citizens Front Vlasotince, the Critical Mass Kula, and Without Fear Apatin.¹⁵ Initially, the Civic Front was created for the first time in the city of Niš and consisted of the United Movement of Free Tenants (UPSS), the Belgrade Bureau for Social Research (BIRODI), Local Front Kraljevo, NDMBG, the Roma League, and the Multiethnic Center for the Development of Danube 21 from Bor. The statement of Đokica Jovanović, a university professor and leader of UPSS from Niš in 2018, shows that even then, there was a clear idea about the importance of scaling up from the local to the national level:

In the last two years, our initiatives have consolidated, and we learned how to function and cooperate … .The Civic Front should fill the absence of the social and political left in Serbia, and we are all already dealing with politics from a leftist position, non-dogmatic, modern. This is why we will insist on the policy of full employment and on rejecting the phrase about social justice, which means nothing more, and on introducing a concrete fight for the establishment of social security, which no one even mentions.¹⁶

As the emergence of the Civic Front was initiated in Niš by numerous organisations from local movements throughout Serbia, it can be said that the socio-spatial dynamics of constituting the Civic Front – that is, scaling up – is much more complex than the usual views focused mainly on events in the capital city.

The Front was formally established in 2019 by signing the joint platform and identifying itself as “an association of Serbian citizens” organisations gathered to build a non-authoritarian political culture and democratic institutions through the direct participation of citizens in political decision-making and a society based on freedom, equality, solidarity, social security, and interculturalism.¹⁷ The members emphasised that every local community has specific problems, and insisted that every organisation should maintain its autonomy within the Front.¹⁸ However, they also recognised the common interest that derives from opposition to “destruction of institutions and everything that people pay to regulate the system, abuses for the robbery of the resources, abuses of functions … ”.¹⁹ Unlike the individual members whose work is related to local issues and to the right-to-the-city framework, the Civic Front platform loses its urban sensibility and highlights areas of action that focus on more general, nationally relevant themes: defending the right to a decent life; fighting corruption; defending and managing public resources; fight for public governance in service of citizens; zero tolerance for corruption; balanced regional development; media freedoms and the plurality of politics and citizen participation”.²⁰

Although the official documents available on the Civic Front website target mostly nationally relevant issues, the content shared on social media is still politically focused at the local level. This indicates a tension between the intended political shift to the national level embedded in the official documents on the one hand, and the retention of local content that provides local support to the movements on the other. Thus, the scale shift of urban movements manifests in framing and messaging strategies (Nicholls, Beaumont, and Miller 2016).

The Civic Front quickly faced the first challenges. In September 2019, several organisations left the Front because “it failed to become actively involved in Serbian political life”.²¹ These organisations, which come from Serbian cities other than Belgrade, also state that some members of the Front “found themselves in a gap between publicly proclaimed equality and objective inferiority within the Civic Front, which blocked the creative and productive work of the association”.²² They also announced their return to local issues in their communities. On the other hand, there is a re-emerging idea of a new strategy for ⁣⁣overthrowing the central government by winning Belgrade first, which could lead to snowball effects among other cities.²³ Unlike the scaling-up strategy, this strategy does not include national unification but rather a series of small local steps.

Discussion

The NDB was formed in response to the urban megaproject in Belgrade, initiated by the ruling party in the context of competitive authoritarianism, state capture, and illiberal politics at the national level. The movement grew within a dense activist network operating on different converging and relational spaces, from local spaces of different Serbian cities through regional to global space. This network produced a relational spillover process in which the dominant movement (NDB) was simultaneously shaped by the previous ones but also influenced the others that emerged later. It also facilitated the overcoming of the initial single-issue approach of the NDB in the wider right-to-the-city discourse.

The initial scaling up of the NDB, from the single-issue initiative targeted against the Belgrade Waterfront Project to an urban movement lobbying for broader social changes in Belgrade, was successful. Nevertheless, given the relatively poor local election results (in 2018) this process does not yield sufficient results. To understand this, we must consider the overall political context marked by weak democracy, illiberal politics, and rising authoritarianism, as previously described in the paper. The character of the political regime in Serbia and its influence on local democracy can be illustrated by the fact that the ruling party, which came into power at the national level in 2012 (the Serbian Progressive Party, SNS), managed to take over almost all the local municipalities in Serbia (159 out of 168).

The next step in scaling up took place in 2019, when the national alliance of local movements called the Civic Front was formed. In that process, the alliance lost its urban sensibility and focused on general social issues, such as corruption and media freedom. The new alliance faced a co-optation problem, where smaller organisations outside Belgrade felt in a subordinate position in relation to the dominant NDB. As some of these organisations left the Civic Front, the movement experienced scalar lock-in at a local level (Nicholls, Gnes, and Vermeulen 2021) and insufficient spatial framing needed for effective confrontation with national political leaders. The paradox of unification occurs when the movement realises the need to go beyond the city to address the threat at the national level and win more support, but on the other hand, loses the basic motive thanks to which it was created – the focus on everyday urban life, with the initial impulses and resources built on local relationships and trust. Thus, there is obvious tension between the urban as the basic focus of movements and the fact that the problems that the movements want to address are increasingly scattered in various spaces beyond the city. As noted by Miller, this “disjuncture between the geographies of the lifeworld and the geographies of systems represents one of the most intransigent and paradoxical problems facing social movements” (2000, 67)

Following the argument that movements politically mobilise from the material conditions of their (local) spaces (Routledge 2013), inequalities within the Civic Front can be said to reflect the huge territorial disparities in Serbia, with a pronounced dominance of Belgrade and the subordination of more peripheral urban areas. Previous research indicated that the participants in one of the protests initiated by the NDB were mostly highly educated people living in central Belgrade municipalities (Nikolić 2019). Despite the unifying right-to-the-city framework, actual urban problems could be significantly different in a territorially uneven and centralised society which may be an obstacle to creating wider national and even local and regional alliances. If we consider the urban–rural divide and access to social media in peripheral areas, which NDB uses as a main channel of communication because of the barriers in state-controlled mainstream media, the problem of creating a broad political discourse becomes even greater.

As Routledge pointed out, “Rapid economic growth in one location may create conditions of environmental degradation, gentrification, or urban redevelopment, while the economic decline in another location may generate conditions of unemployment, factory closures, or inner-city decline” (2013) The former can be said of the central parts of the city of Belgrade which were the main spaces of post-socialist capital accumulation, neoliberal economic transformation, and urban restructuring in transition, while the latter refers to peripheral urban and rural areas in Serbia, which were left out of the main transformational processes during the same time. This may indicate the difficulties of NDB, primarily focusing on urban issues derived from neoliberal urban development, such as the Belgrade Waterfront megaproject, to reach people in peripheral urban areas of Belgrade, outside Belgrade, and in other urban areas, especially rural areas in Serbia, facing different problems. Therefore, the challenge is to scale up at the national level but focus on everyday problems in a territorially uneven society such as Serbia. Hence, the uneven articulation of economic and state power at the macro level geographically differentiates the grievance structures of social movements and presents different sets of political opportunities for actors in different locations (Nicholls 2007).

Although all organisations belonging to the Civic Front, as well as most other local initiatives in Serbia (both urban and rural²⁴), are increasingly focused on environmental issues that have recently become pressing in the Balkans, the Civic Front has not used environmental discourse as a master frame for assembling into a wider national coalition.²⁵

However, this happened in the following period. Although my analysis did not cover these most recent developments, it is worth noticing that the results of the general elections held in April 2022 in Serbia point to the more successful scale-shift and political mobilisation of urban movements in Serbia. Before the elections, Moramo (We must) coalition was formed from NDB, Together for Serbia (Zajedno za Srbiju) and Ecological Revolt (Ekološki ustanak). In that way, the NDB connected itself with a multitude of ecological movements united in the Ecological Revolt, which had previously successfully mobilised both urban and rural populations and organised a series of ecological protests in Serbia. Moramo won 4.84% of the votes in the parliamentary elections and managed to enter the National Assembly with 13 deputies. After entering the National Assembly, the coalition was reorganised and divided into three groups – NDB, Together (Zajedno) and Solidarity Platform.²⁶ In local elections in Belgrade, NDB as a representative of the coalition Moramo won 10,8% votes and entered the City Assembly of Belgrade with 13 councillors or 11,8% mandates.²⁷ Given the fact that the consolidation of the green-left political option in Serbia is proving to be extremely dynamic and changeable, it is not entirely clear what is the current position and role of urban movements other than NDB that were part of the Civic Front in the new Moramo coalition. Further analyses are needed to better understand the dynamic transformations of urban movements into national political actors, their contextually embedded socio-spatial challenges and their potential to substantially influence the politics in South East Europe.

Conclusion

In this paper, I used recent insights from socio-spatial theories to explain the shifting scale of urban movements in Serbia, a post-socialist country with growing authoritarian tendencies. The multispatial lens, used in this study, enabled identifying the social relations and phenomena beyond the city level, that are important for scaling up urban movements. The case of urban movements in Serbia presented in this paper pointed to specific constraints coming from competitive authoritarian national political regimes and urban-rural divides, as well as impulses from the regional level and global networks.

The study showed that the Serbian urban movements cannot be seen only as a reaction to the neoliberal urban restructuring but also to an (unsuccessful) consolidation of democracy in the region. Urban processes and movements in Serbia are significantly mediated by the national state which is not sufficiently recognised as relevant in urban studies and urban movements literature. In the specific context of the Balkans, in which post-socialist conditions, the EU conditionality and the unfinished process of consolidation of democracy are intertwined, urban movements cannot be interpreted exclusively based on neo-Marxist theoretical frameworks and especially those build on the US urban experience. Therefore, multispatial approach can also overcome the western bias of the urban movements literature.

The (capital) city, as a traditional focus of urban movements, appears to be the main, but not the only site of contention. The usual and oversimplified spatial perspective that looks into top-down vs. bottom-up division, as well as the local/national dichotomy, is insufficient to explain the complex spatial dynamics of these movements.

As the analysis presented in this paper is based on limited secondary data that were available at the time of the research, further research could explicitly focus on spatialities of urban movements in the Serbian context based on primary data. Future research could look at this topic comparatively, especially concerning a similar but more successful example of scaling up that took place in neighbouring Croatia.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author acknowledges the financial support of the University of Graz. Part of this research was conducted within the project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101028592.

Notes on contributors

Ana Pajvančić-Cizelj

Ana Pajvančić-Cizelj is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellow at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Grac. She also holds a position of Associate professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad. Her research interests are in the area of urban sociology with a focus on global urban processes, feminist urban studies, urban ecology and cities in Southeast Europe.

Notes

1 Bieber writes: “The term Western Balkans reflects political expediency during the 2000s to encompass the post-Yugoslav region and Albania, but not Slovenia, as it was part of the 2004 EU enlargement. With the EU membership of Croatia in 2013, it is often no longer considered part of the Western Balkans” (2017, 350).

2 Hinterland – a region lying beyond urban center is, according to Brenner, no longer exterior to the urban; it has become a strategically essential terrain of capitalist urbanisation.

3 In all the Balkan countries, the most important external actors vis-à-vis protest movements have been the EU and NATO, along with the Council of Europe, the ECHR, the European Court, and the OSCE.

4 https://nedavimobeograd.rs/o-nama/

5 Grupa za konceptualnu politiku, Javna diskusija: UPSS – Udruženi pokret slobodnih stanara Niš u Novom Sadu, 30.03.2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EUCF2r0aHc

6 https://zakrovnadglavom.org/

7 https://nova.rs/vesti/politika/radomir-lazovic-o-hrvatskim-izborima-mozemo-i-mi/, 20 August 2020.

8 Teofil Pančić, Beograd i Zagreb, ili zašto 'Možemo!' može, a 'Ne možemo!' ne može, 31 May 2021, Slobodna Evropa, https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/teofil-pan%C4%8Di%C4%87-beograd-zagreb/31282442.html

9 “Most: šta Beograd može da nauči od Zagreba”, 13 June 2021, Slobodna Evropa https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/most-%C5%A1ta-beograd-mo%C5%BEe-da-nau%C4%8Di-od-zagreba-/31304018.html

10 https://nedavimobeograd.rs/english/

11 https://nedavimobeograd.rs/o-nama/

12 https://fearlesscities.nedavimobeograd.rs/schedule/

13 https://www.danas.rs/politika/inicijativa-ne-davimo-beograd-podnela-listu-za-gradske-izbore/

14 https://nedavimobeograd.rs/program/

15 http://www.gradjanskifront.rs/front-slobodnih/

16 https://nedavimobeograd.rs/nin-nova-politicka-snaga-u-srbiji-gradjanski-front/

17 http://www.gradjanskifront.rs/wp-content/uploads/Gra%C4%91anski-front-platforma.pdf

18 http://rs.n1info.com/Vesti/a476018/Formiran-Gradjanski-front.html

19 http://rs.n1info.com/Vesti/a465067/Stvaranje-Gradjanskog-fronta-Mnogo-je-problema-i-nezadovoljstva-u-drustvu.html

20 http://www.gradjanskifront.rs/wp-content/uploads/Gra%C4%91anski-front-platforma.pdf

21 http://samolokalno.rs/sl-saopstenja/saopstenje

22 http://samolokalno.rs/sl-saopstenja/saopstenje

23 https://nedavimobeograd.rs/lazovic-za-nin-o-potencijalu-za-promene-u-beogradu/

24 Such as a successful movement called Defend the Rivers of Stara Planina, https://novastaraplanina.com/

25 In this context, it should also be noted that the second largest city of Serbia – Novi Sad – did not produce a recognizable urban movement, although there are a large number of grassroots initiatives, neighbourhood groups and professional associations dealing with urban issues. Although the city was heavily restructured in the previous decade and its grassroots initiatives flourished (Pajvančić-Cizelj 2019), Novi Sad has failed to make an initial scale-up and did not even have its representatives in the Civic Front.

26 The National Assembly was constituted 4 months after the elections, on 1 August 2022.

27 The City Election Commission, https://rs.n1info.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/09/1652109524-Tabela1_konacni-rezultati-Bgd.pdf.

The City Assembly of Belgrade was constituted on 11 June 2022.