Who Are Our Cities For?
One bitterly cold day in February, complete with freezing rain (I have the misfortune of only winding up in Belgrade when the weather is crap), my fiancé’s friend Peđa walked with us to Kalemegdan, the Belgrade Fortress. It was already dark, and the view of the glittering skyscrapers of Beograd na Vodi was not compelling enough before we retreated to a local leftist watering hole for some hot chocolate.
The story of the skyscrapers, built by shady investors on land forcibly expropriated by authorities and dubious criminal elements, now containing apartments far too expensive for most of the Serbian population, radicalized a generation of Belgraders, including Peđa and many of our friends. Besides having dubious political connections, the skyscrapers are also profoundly ugly. One, on which advertisements play on a video screen so bright it makes you wonder about the sleep quality of those in neighboring buildings, has been compared to a pill box and butt plug online.
One or two weeks later, on a day still in February but now so warm it caused not a bit of climate anxiety among our group, Robert and I stood on a bridge in Novi Sad with our friend Zeka, a city native and long-time antifascist. With our backs to Petrovaradin Fortress, he pointed out the skyscrapers sprouting out of the city center. Most of them are money laundering projects, most of them are prohibitively expensive, most of them are standing empty even in a city with a housing crisis. “I don’t recognize this city anymore, but maybe I’m too old to leave,” he told us.
We’ve traveled a lot in the region over the past few years of our relationship, and everywhere we go, we see cities that differ aesthetically, but are united in their hostility towards the people that live in them. The marble expanse of a public square in Šibenik, which reflects the sunlight during brutally hot Adriatic summers with no shade in sight. The glass apartment complex in Zagreb, with not one but two hipster bakeries and an inner courtyard that reminded me of New York’s Midtown office plazas, whose developers want to tear down the historic factory building next door. And of course, how could we forget Skoplje, the marble temple of money laundering, with towering (hideous) statues of Alexander the Great’s entire lineage, but whose civil servants make so little money they take the summers off to go wait tables in Croatia.
There’s one question that unites the region, whether you’re in Montenegro or Macedonia, Serbia or Croatia: who are our cities for?
You can tell who a city is for by looking at what the city authorities and local investors are building. In most Balkan cities, these are luxury apartment buildings in cities where the average wage is still frighteningly low. New shopping malls owned by dubiously-connected tycoons with stores many residents can’t afford to shop in. Rarely are the city’s resources directed towards expanding a public transportation network or building something else that would benefit everyone. Sometimes, it’s because the city has no resources of its own—all ground has been ceded to the private sector, and existing city coffers bled dry for someone else’s interests. Other times, it’s because the city authorities simply don’t care.
Sometimes, the absence of certain building projects tell us more about the city than what is present. I don’t mean to idolize the previous regime, but when you compare the massive blocks of social housing to the lack of a social housing policy in most post-Yugoslav states, it is telling.
The cities are not for us anymore. Interpret “us” however you want, my interpretation is “people without high incomes and well-placed inherited property from their grandparents.” The fact that we are unwanted is visible from the built environment, and in other ways.
Zagreb is a city I used to think was mine but one that definitely doesn’t love me back. Every time I go back I hear from friends and friends of friends about how rising rents are pushing them out, towards the outskirts of town, or in some cases back to derelict home towns and villages with only old people left. The only ones with some sort of safety net are those with wealthy parents, or those whose parents are from Zagreb so they can live with them (but living with your mom as you approach the mean end of 30 isn’t quite the safety net people want). Nothing is probably going to change because nobody in power cares enough for it to change.
I moved with my fiancé to Niš, his hometown, after a combination of visa issues and financial pressures pushed us into that decision. Here, like in many other cities in the region, nobody likes the ruling party and it’s hard not to see why. The city constantly makes decisions that to city authorities are small, but have an outsized impact on the quality of life of its citizens, such as cutting down trees and cutting funding to beloved cultural institutions. These decisions often seem so arbitrary. With no perceived benefit, it feels as if the city authorities are making decisions to make people’s quality of life worse, just because they can.
Over text, my friend Vasilije describes how living in a socialist building feels like a cocoon of certainty when the world outside feels so uncertain. The brutalist socialist blocks often get made fun of for their cinder block appearance, but the simple exteriors hides apartments that are sturdy, soundproof, and spacious, feeling like an oasis even in a busy city. The certainty of their construction also comforts us, which I felt when I moved into a Yugoslav-era apartment of my own. Not only is the apartment sturdy enough that I can’t regale you with tales of my neighbor’s marital discussions, the way I could in my more recently-built Zagreb apartment, but it also reminds me that there was a time when things were built for us.
That’s the thing that hurts me the most about our cities, I think, the uncertainty. Not knowing if you’ll find a job, how much it will pay you, and if you will get paid on time. Not knowing if you’ll keep your job or get pushed out when you’re too old to find a new one because somebody in the ruling party wanted your job more than you needed it. Not knowing if you’ll have healthcare when you get older or if the system will collapse by then. Not knowing if you’ll be able to afford your city next year, or if your landlord will decide to turn your apartment into an AirBnB or raise your rent so much that only digital nomads can afford it.
It’s hard to take care of your mental health, do self-care, or visit the therapist regularly when the world around you is crumbling. My generation has never known certainty, it seems, beyond a few of the very wealthy. It’s hard not to get even further paralyzed by the noise of anxiety or the ennui of depression.
As the cost of living gets higher, rents are raised, gentrification including from foreign “digital nomads'' pushes out years-long residents of Balkan cities, salaries remain low, and the government only makes things worse by approving development projects for millionaires and taking away little things that improve people’s lives, I ask again, who are our cities for? They are for the wealthy, they are for the powerful, they are for those with powerful connections, they are for the white foreigners with stronger passports (it’s important to specify which types of foreigners—our cities are definitely not for the guest workers from South Asia that now deliver food and work construction in the capitals). They are not for us
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