Contradictions and Antagonisms in (Anti-) Social(ist) Housing in Serbia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i6.1731Keywords:
housing, SerbiaAbstract
This article tackles contradictions of social housing in contemporary Serbia. It shows how residualised social housing does not bring justice to marginalised groups affected by capitalist expropriation. In this article, the term (anti-)social(ist) housing will be introduced to describe the historically grounded, incomplete, and contradictory solutions that social housing is currently offering in Serbia, as well as its anti-social nature. By focusing on a particular case study, the Kamendin project situated in Zemun Polje, one of the very few social housing projects in Belgrade, the article explores debt crises produced by mechanisms of social housing; the production of racism, segregation, and responsibilisation; and mechanisms of passing responsibility on all levels in an attempt of the state to spend as little money as possible. (Anti-)social(ist) housing is further assessed as a space of struggle that includes different survival and resistance tactics that are used in order to oppose social housing violence. Following that, the article will focus on the possibilities of the activist art project Kamendynamics and the theatre peace How does fascism not disappear? Zlatija Kostić: I sued myself to confront the racialisation and culturalisation of problems by introducing collaborative visual, class-based, and historical-materialist analyses. By documenting and conceptualising mechanisms of social housing and reflecting on the role of activist art within housing struggles, I aim to contribute to anti-segregation and anti-racist housing struggles in Eastern European cities and beyond.
References
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Amnesty International. 2010. “Serbia: Stop the forced eviction of Roma settlements. London: AI.
Archer, Rory. 2016. “Paid by the workers, occupied by the bureaucrats: Housing inequality in 1980s Belgrade.” In Rory Archer, Paul Stubbs, and Igor Duda (eds.), Social inequality and discontent in Yugoslav socialism, pp. 58–76. London: Routledge.
Bobić, Mirjana. 2014. Beskućnici. Beograd: RZS.
Bodnaŕ, Judit. 2001. Fin de millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of urban life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Buden, Boris. 2012. Zona prelaska: O kraju postkomunizma. Beograd: Fabrike knjiga.
Čaldarović, Ognjen. 1975. “Neki pokazatelji prostorne socijalne diferencijacije i socijalne segregacije stanovništva Zagreba 197.” Revija za sociologiju 5: 58–66.
Čolić-Damjanović, Vesna-Mila. 2015. Unapređenje modela socijalnog stanovanja u Beogradu u okviru novih paradigm planiranja i projektovanja (PhD thesis). Belgrade: Univerzitet u Beogradu. Arhitektonski fakultet.
Ćurčić, Danilo. 2015, May 20. “Porez na siromaštvo.” Peščanik. Retrieved from http://pescanik.net/porez-na-siromastvo, last accessed October 30, 2016.
Damjanović, Dušan and Žaklina Gligorijević (eds.). 2010. “Socijalno stanovanje: prikaz stambenih politika Srbije i odabranih zemalja Evrope.” 2010. Belgrade: Palgo centar and Urbanistički zavod Beograda.
Değirmencioğlu, Serdar M., Walker, Karl (eds.). 2015. Social and psychological dimensions of personal debt and the debt industry. London: Palgrave and Macmillan.
EUROSTAT. 2019. Housing statistics. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Housing_statistics#Housing_quality, last accessed July 13, 2019.
Fassin, Eric. 2017. “Foreword.” In Giovanni Picker, Racial cities: Governance and the segregation of Romani people in urban Europe. (pp. x–xii). London: Routledge.
Fraser, Nancy. 2016. “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1: 163–78.
Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. New York: Routledge.
Hegedus, Jozsef, Martin Lux, and Nora Teller (eds.). 2013. Social housing in transition countries. London: Routledge.
Kirn, Gal. 2017. “A critique of transition studies on postsocialism, or how to rethink and reorient 1989? The case of (post)socialist (post)Yugoslavia.” In Marian Burchardt and Gal Kirn (eds.), Beyond Neoliberalism: Social analysis after 1989 (pp. 43–68). London: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Kovacs, Zoltan. 1999. “Cities from state-socialism to global capitalism: an introduction.” GeoJournal 49: 1.
Krstić, Iskra. 2018. “The housing policies in Yugoslavia.” In Vida Knežević and Marko Miletić (eds.), We have built cities for you: On the contradictions of Yugoslav socialism (pp. 283–286). Belgrade: Centar za kulturnu dekontaminaciju.
Kuljić, Todor. 2018. Prognani pojmovi. Beograd: Clio.
Lux, Martin and Petr Sunega. 2014. “Public housing in the post-socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe: Decline and an open future.” Housing Studies 29, no. 4: 501–19.
Lux, Martin and Petr Sunega. 2013. “New social housing strategies in post-socialist state: Effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability.” In Jozsef Hegedus, Martin Lux, and Nora Teller (eds.), Social housing in transition (pp. 307–330). London: Routledge.
Macura, Vladimir and Jovo Samaržić. 2017. “Romski stan u brojevima.” In Stanovanje Roma u Srbiji stanje i izazovi. Beograd: SANU.
Madden, David J. and Peter Marcuse. 2016. In defense of housing: The politics of crisis. London: Verso.
Marcuse, Peter. 2002. “Cities in quarters.” In G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds.), Companion to the City (pp. 270–81). Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Marcuse, Peter. 1997. “The enclave, the citadel, and the ghetto. What has changed in the post-Fordist U.S. city.” Urban Affairs Review 33, no. 2: 228–64.
Mikuš, Marek. 2019. “Contesting household debt in Croatia: The double movement of financialization and the fetishism of money in Eastern European peripheries.” Dialectical Anthropology 43, no. 3: 295–315.
Neducin, Dejana and Milena Krkljes. 2017. “Post-socialism and urban transition: Transforming the socialist city.” Facta Universitatis - Series: Architecture and Civil Engineering 15, no. 3: 347–57.
Ombudsman, 2012. “Container accommodation must be a temporary solution.” Retrieved from https://www.euractiv.rs/srbija-i-eu/4464-ombudsman-kontejnerski-smetaj-mora-biti-privremeno-reenje.
Perović, Lj. 2013, November 8. “Poštovanje stanarskih prava ili iseljene iz Kamendina.” Politika. Retrieved from http://www.politika.rs/scc/clanak/275203/Postovanje-stanarskih-prava-ili-iseljenje-iz-Kamendina, last accessed October 30, 2016.
Petrović, Mina. 2013. “Serbia: A patchwork of local options.” In Jozsef Hegedus, Martin Lux, Nora Teller (eds.). Social Housing in Transition, (pp. 241–261). London: Routledge.
Petrović, Mina, Caterina Berescu, and Nora Teller. 2013. “Housing exclusion of the Roma: Living on the edge.” In: Jozsef Hegedus, Martin Lux, and Nora Teller (eds.). Social housing in transition, (pp. 98–115). London: Routledge.
Phillips, Andrea and Fulya Erdemci (eds.). 2012. Actor, agents and attendants: Social housing-housing the social: Art, property and spatial justice. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Picker, Giovanni. 2017. Racial cities: Governance and the segregation of Romani people in urban Europe. London: Routledge.
“Počinju iseljenja iz Kamendina?” 2012, October 16. “Večernje novosti.” Retrieved from http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/beograd.74.html:401599-Pocinju-iseljenja-iz-Kamendina, last accessed October 30, 2016.
“Protest Roma zbog rušenja naselja” 2009, April 3. B92. Retrieved from https://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2009&mm=04&dd=03&nav_category=12&nav_id=353579, last accessed February 16, 2019.
Rolnik, Raquel. 2019. Housing under the empire of finance: Urban warfare. London: Verso.
RZS (Republički zavod za statistiku). 2017. Statistics. Updated June 2017. Retrieved from http://data.stat.gov.rs/Home/Result/31020304?languageCode=sr-Latn#.
Sardelić, Julija. 2018. “In and out from the European Margins: Reshuffling mobilities and legal statuses of Romani minorities between the post-Yugoslav space and the European Union.” Social Identities 24, no. 4: 489–504.
Schwab, Eva. 2013. Construction and governance of “unhygienic Roma settlements” in Belgrade. An anthropological investigation in urban citizenship rights (Master thesis). Vienna: Universität Wien.
Simeunović-Bajić, Nataša. 2013. “The representation of ethnic-cultural ‘otherness’: The Roma minority in Serbian press.” In Celin-Marie Pascale (ed.), Social inequality and the politics of representation. A global landscape, (pp. 66–81). Los Angeles: SAGE.
Skenderija, J. Ž. and D. Ljutić. 2013, December 6. “Zemun Polje: Problem su Romi, šuga i krađe!” Večernje Novosti. Retrieved from http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/beograd.74.html:462515-Zemun-Polje-Problem-su-Romi-suga-i-kradje, last accessed February 16, 2019.
Spry, Tami. 2011. Body, paper, stage: Writing and performing autoethnography. London: Routledge.
Stojković, Dragan. 2003, March 8. “Sukob interesa građana Zemun Polja i gradske vlasti oko Kamendina: Zvižduci za visoke goste.” Zemunaska hronika no. 72/8.
Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting subjects: Social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books.
Trnka, Susanna and Catherine Trundle. 2014. “Competing responsibilities: Moving beyond neoliberal responsibilisation.” Anthropological Forum 24, no. 2: 136–53.
Tsenkova, S. 2009. Housing policy reforms in post socialist Europe: Lost in transition. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag.
Vilenica, Ana. 2017. “Contemporary housing activism in Serbia: Provisional mapping.” Interface: Journal for and about Social Movements 9, no. 1: 424–447.
Vilenica, Ana and kuda.org. 2013. “’Prendiamoci la cita!’ (‘Preuzmimo grad!’) - Kako?” In Na ruševinama kreativnog grada, (pp. 6–25). Novi Sad: kuda.org.
Vujović, Sreten. 2017. “Stanovanje Roma u socijalističkoj Srbiji.” In Stanovanje Roma u Srbiji stanje i izazovi, (pp. 169–187). Beograd: SANU.
Vuksanović-Macura, Zlata. 2017. “Socijalno stanovanje u Srbiji i Romi.” In: Stanovanje Roma u Srbiji stanje i izazovi, (pp. 65–88). Beograd: SANU.
Wacquant, Loic J. D.1993. “Urban outcasts: Stigma and division in the black American Ghetto and French urban periphery.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Planning, 17(3):366–383.
Watt, Paul. 2017. “Social housing and urban renewal: An introduction” in: Watt, Paul, and Peer Smets (eds.), Social housing and urban renewal: A cross-national perspective. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing.
Y03 Izveštaj o radu. 2016. Belgrade: YUCOM.
“Zakon o socijalnoj zaštiti.” (Law on Social Welfare) 2011. Službeni glasnik RS br.24/2011.
“Zakon o stanovanju i održavanju stambenih zgrada.” (Law on Housing and Building Maintenance) 2016. Službeni glasnik RS br. 104/16.
Zemunska hronika. “Zemun Polje je i bukvalno gorelo u nedelju 9. marta, kao opomena za sve: Samo dogovorom do rešenja.” Zemunska hronika no. 73/22. March 2003.
Amnesty International. 2010. “Serbia: Stop the forced eviction of Roma settlements. London: AI.
Archer, Rory. 2016. “Paid by the workers, occupied by the bureaucrats: Housing inequality in 1980s Belgrade.” In Rory Archer, Paul Stubbs, and Igor Duda (eds.), Social inequality and discontent in Yugoslav socialism, pp. 58–76. London: Routledge.
Bobić, Mirjana. 2014. Beskućnici. Beograd: RZS.
Bodnaŕ, Judit. 2001. Fin de millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of urban life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Buden, Boris. 2012. Zona prelaska: O kraju postkomunizma. Beograd: Fabrike knjiga.
Čaldarović, Ognjen. 1975. “Neki pokazatelji prostorne socijalne diferencijacije i socijalne segregacije stanovništva Zagreba 197.” Revija za sociologiju 5: 58–66.
Čolić-Damjanović, Vesna-Mila. 2015. Unapređenje modela socijalnog stanovanja u Beogradu u okviru novih paradigm planiranja i projektovanja (PhD thesis). Belgrade: Univerzitet u Beogradu. Arhitektonski fakultet.
Ćurčić, Danilo. 2015, May 20. “Porez na siromaštvo.” Peščanik. Retrieved from http://pescanik.net/porez-na-siromastvo, last accessed October 30, 2016.
Damjanović, Dušan and Žaklina Gligorijević (eds.). 2010. “Socijalno stanovanje: prikaz stambenih politika Srbije i odabranih zemalja Evrope.” 2010. Belgrade: Palgo centar and Urbanistički zavod Beograda.
Değirmencioğlu, Serdar M., Walker, Karl (eds.). 2015. Social and psychological dimensions of personal debt and the debt industry. London: Palgrave and Macmillan.
EUROSTAT. 2019. Housing statistics. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Housing_statistics#Housing_quality, last accessed July 13, 2019.
Fassin, Eric. 2017. “Foreword.” In Giovanni Picker, Racial cities: Governance and the segregation of Romani people in urban Europe. (pp. x–xii). London: Routledge.
Fraser, Nancy. 2016. “Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1: 163–78.
Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. New York: Routledge.
Hegedus, Jozsef, Martin Lux, and Nora Teller (eds.). 2013. Social housing in transition countries. London: Routledge.
Kirn, Gal. 2017. “A critique of transition studies on postsocialism, or how to rethink and reorient 1989? The case of (post)socialist (post)Yugoslavia.” In Marian Burchardt and Gal Kirn (eds.), Beyond Neoliberalism: Social analysis after 1989 (pp. 43–68). London: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Kovacs, Zoltan. 1999. “Cities from state-socialism to global capitalism: an introduction.” GeoJournal 49: 1.
Krstić, Iskra. 2018. “The housing policies in Yugoslavia.” In Vida Knežević and Marko Miletić (eds.), We have built cities for you: On the contradictions of Yugoslav socialism (pp. 283–286). Belgrade: Centar za kulturnu dekontaminaciju.
Kuljić, Todor. 2018. Prognani pojmovi. Beograd: Clio.
Lux, Martin and Petr Sunega. 2014. “Public housing in the post-socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe: Decline and an open future.” Housing Studies 29, no. 4: 501–19.
Lux, Martin and Petr Sunega. 2013. “New social housing strategies in post-socialist state: Effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability.” In Jozsef Hegedus, Martin Lux, and Nora Teller (eds.), Social housing in transition (pp. 307–330). London: Routledge.
Macura, Vladimir and Jovo Samaržić. 2017. “Romski stan u brojevima.” In Stanovanje Roma u Srbiji stanje i izazovi. Beograd: SANU.
Madden, David J. and Peter Marcuse. 2016. In defense of housing: The politics of crisis. London: Verso.
Marcuse, Peter. 2002. “Cities in quarters.” In G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds.), Companion to the City (pp. 270–81). Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Marcuse, Peter. 1997. “The enclave, the citadel, and the ghetto. What has changed in the post-Fordist U.S. city.” Urban Affairs Review 33, no. 2: 228–64.
Mikuš, Marek. 2019. “Contesting household debt in Croatia: The double movement of financialization and the fetishism of money in Eastern European peripheries.” Dialectical Anthropology 43, no. 3: 295–315.
Neducin, Dejana and Milena Krkljes. 2017. “Post-socialism and urban transition: Transforming the socialist city.” Facta Universitatis - Series: Architecture and Civil Engineering 15, no. 3: 347–57.
Ombudsman, 2012. “Container accommodation must be a temporary solution.” Retrieved from https://www.euractiv.rs/srbija-i-eu/4464-ombudsman-kontejnerski-smetaj-mora-biti-privremeno-reenje.
Perović, Lj. 2013, November 8. “Poštovanje stanarskih prava ili iseljene iz Kamendina.” Politika. Retrieved from http://www.politika.rs/scc/clanak/275203/Postovanje-stanarskih-prava-ili-iseljenje-iz-Kamendina, last accessed October 30, 2016.
Petrović, Mina. 2013. “Serbia: A patchwork of local options.” In Jozsef Hegedus, Martin Lux, Nora Teller (eds.). Social Housing in Transition, (pp. 241–261). London: Routledge.
Petrović, Mina, Caterina Berescu, and Nora Teller. 2013. “Housing exclusion of the Roma: Living on the edge.” In: Jozsef Hegedus, Martin Lux, and Nora Teller (eds.). Social housing in transition, (pp. 98–115). London: Routledge.
Phillips, Andrea and Fulya Erdemci (eds.). 2012. Actor, agents and attendants: Social housing-housing the social: Art, property and spatial justice. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Picker, Giovanni. 2017. Racial cities: Governance and the segregation of Romani people in urban Europe. London: Routledge.
“Počinju iseljenja iz Kamendina?” 2012, October 16. “Večernje novosti.” Retrieved from http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/beograd.74.html:401599-Pocinju-iseljenja-iz-Kamendina, last accessed October 30, 2016.
“Protest Roma zbog rušenja naselja” 2009, April 3. B92. Retrieved from https://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2009&mm=04&dd=03&nav_category=12&nav_id=353579, last accessed February 16, 2019.
Rolnik, Raquel. 2019. Housing under the empire of finance: Urban warfare. London: Verso.
RZS (Republički zavod za statistiku). 2017. Statistics. Updated June 2017. Retrieved from http://data.stat.gov.rs/Home/Result/31020304?languageCode=sr-Latn#.
Sardelić, Julija. 2018. “In and out from the European Margins: Reshuffling mobilities and legal statuses of Romani minorities between the post-Yugoslav space and the European Union.” Social Identities 24, no. 4: 489–504.
Schwab, Eva. 2013. Construction and governance of “unhygienic Roma settlements” in Belgrade. An anthropological investigation in urban citizenship rights (Master thesis). Vienna: Universität Wien.
Simeunović-Bajić, Nataša. 2013. “The representation of ethnic-cultural ‘otherness’: The Roma minority in Serbian press.” In Celin-Marie Pascale (ed.), Social inequality and the politics of representation. A global landscape, (pp. 66–81). Los Angeles: SAGE.
Skenderija, J. Ž. and D. Ljutić. 2013, December 6. “Zemun Polje: Problem su Romi, šuga i krađe!” Večernje Novosti. Retrieved from http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/beograd.74.html:462515-Zemun-Polje-Problem-su-Romi-suga-i-kradje, last accessed February 16, 2019.
Spry, Tami. 2011. Body, paper, stage: Writing and performing autoethnography. London: Routledge.
Stojković, Dragan. 2003, March 8. “Sukob interesa građana Zemun Polja i gradske vlasti oko Kamendina: Zvižduci za visoke goste.” Zemunaska hronika no. 72/8.
Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting subjects: Social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books.
Trnka, Susanna and Catherine Trundle. 2014. “Competing responsibilities: Moving beyond neoliberal responsibilisation.” Anthropological Forum 24, no. 2: 136–53.
Tsenkova, S. 2009. Housing policy reforms in post socialist Europe: Lost in transition. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag.
Vilenica, Ana. 2017. “Contemporary housing activism in Serbia: Provisional mapping.” Interface: Journal for and about Social Movements 9, no. 1: 424–447.
Vilenica, Ana and kuda.org. 2013. “’Prendiamoci la cita!’ (‘Preuzmimo grad!’) - Kako?” In Na ruševinama kreativnog grada, (pp. 6–25). Novi Sad: kuda.org.
Vujović, Sreten. 2017. “Stanovanje Roma u socijalističkoj Srbiji.” In Stanovanje Roma u Srbiji stanje i izazovi, (pp. 169–187). Beograd: SANU.
Vuksanović-Macura, Zlata. 2017. “Socijalno stanovanje u Srbiji i Romi.” In: Stanovanje Roma u Srbiji stanje i izazovi, (pp. 65–88). Beograd: SANU.
Wacquant, Loic J. D.1993. “Urban outcasts: Stigma and division in the black American Ghetto and French urban periphery.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Planning, 17(3):366–383.
Watt, Paul. 2017. “Social housing and urban renewal: An introduction” in: Watt, Paul, and Peer Smets (eds.), Social housing and urban renewal: A cross-national perspective. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing.
Y03 Izveštaj o radu. 2016. Belgrade: YUCOM.
“Zakon o socijalnoj zaštiti.” (Law on Social Welfare) 2011. Službeni glasnik RS br.24/2011.
“Zakon o stanovanju i održavanju stambenih zgrada.” (Law on Housing and Building Maintenance) 2016. Službeni glasnik RS br. 104/16.
Zemunska hronika. “Zemun Polje je i bukvalno gorelo u nedelju 9. marta, kao opomena za sve: Samo dogovorom do rešenja.” Zemunska hronika no. 73/22. March 2003.
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2019-12-16
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Vilenica, A. (2019). Contradictions and Antagonisms in (Anti-) Social(ist) Housing in Serbia. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(6), 1261–1282. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i6.1731
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