The Failure of Planning Endevour in North East Border Area of Serbia Towards Bulgaria

Abstract

With the transition, spatial planning was supposed to mitigate the negative effects of the new player -market to the public interest. But, seems like our planning didn't find the mechanisms to mitigate those effects created by the market inside it. Planning institutions in pretransitional period were exclusively in public sector. We now have on one side, some big planning institution, partially financed from the state's budget usually with the monopoly over elaboration of one group of plans and on the other side, smaller ones which are being privatized. Both are thrown to the market and are trying to acquire as much engagements as possible in order to secure enough financing. They are producing more plans for less money in a shorter period of time. As a result, these former public agents diverted by the new hostile conditions given by undeveloped market and neoliberal environment are still presenting traditional rigid planning model, deterministic and inflexible, with fixed land use parameters and regulations. Seems like the turbulent times in which the most important task is to survive didn't give them a chance to develop and to introduce more innovative and novel models in view of participative, strategic and action plan oriented planning. The failure of planning enterprise to achieve at least some balance in regional inequity is clearly visible in peripheral, i.e. border areas. The paper discuss the main objectives and planning concepts in various overlapping planning documents on national, regional and local levels elaborated for Timočka krajina, a border region situated in NE Serbia towards a frontier to Bulgaria, and the obvious gap between planning optimism and accurate demographic, social and economic decline of the region, despite both local and European based, mostly cross border related projects and initiatives.