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.

State, capitalism and infrastructure-led development: A multi-scalar analysis of the Belgrade-Budapest railway construction

“…The detrimental social and spatial effects caused by these transformations have sparked, however, one of the most spectacular Serbian urban movements of the past years, exemplified by Ne Davimo Beograd (NBD -'Don't Let Belgrade D(r)own') (Matkovic ́and Ivkovic , 2018). Even if NBD initially failed in its attempt to enter institutional politics, it joined a green-left coalition (Moramo) in the most recent 2022 Serbian elections which successfully gained mandates on both national and local levels (Pajvančic -Cizelj, 2022). Despite these results, it is too early to judge their potential to substantially influence politics from their minority position in the national and city assemblies.…”