By some accounts, Belgrade has been razed and rebuilt more than 40 times.

Names of other cities often turn up in discussions of Belgrade’s future direction, as if the city were itself a traveler. These days, the analogy everyone wants to draw is to Manhattan, which seems far-fetched but the sentiment is real. Controversially, a Dubai development firm, Eagle Hills, plans to develop a 90 hectare site along the Sava River into a complex of luxury condos, complete with a Freedom Tower skyscraper. “Belgrade’s Manhattan,” says Milutin Folić, the City Architect, explaining the government’s vision for the recently approved Belgrade Waterfront, or Beograd Na Vodi. Should it succeed, the project will remake the city more profoundly than anything since World War II.

Until now, that distinction has belonged to New Belgrade, the residential tower-garden district across the river from the Dubai-Manhattan site. New Belgrade is the largest of the city’s 17 municipalities, a Radiant City planned by Tito’s government in the late 1940s on a flood plain behind a former Nazi concentration camp at the old city’s trade fair. Built out in the 1950s and ’60s, New Belgrade houses more than 200,000 people in 72 superblocks, the outcome of an ambitious statist modernism, designed as a paean to the progressive living standards enshrined by the Congress of International Modern Architecture’s Athens Charter, a one-size-fits-all prescription for maximizing utility and the good life.

Like that earlier project, Beograd Na Vodi is the product of a top-down, central planning process that expresses the prevailing ideology of the day. The current government — economically liberal, socially conservative, proudly nationalist — is building an architectural monument to the new Serbia. The development speaks the unofficial (but no less influential) global language of what architecture theorist Dubravka Sekulić terms “investor urbanism.” The rendering depicts a gleaming white capitalist utopia, a “live-work-play” space — in developer group parlance — for an elite managerial class. As planned, the Belgrade Waterfront will pack 1.6 million square meters of office and residential space into a 2 square kilometer site, crowned by a 220 meter office tower. Less than 1 percent of the square footage has been designated for public services like schools and clinics. The population density would be nearly twice that of New Belgrade, which is already highest in the country.

“The government wanted the world’s best teams and did not want a competition,” Folić explains, passing over one of the major points of contention with local architects. He ticks off the international firms consulted by the government or the developer: “RTKL did the draft master plan before it was presented here, and the team they had on board was maybe the world’s best. RTKL as the head, Arcadis engineering from Holland for the riverbank and flood prevention, SWA from Los Angeles for the public spaces, COWI from Denmark for the traffic.” Again, he says, “the world’s best teams were united for this project,” with the breathless excitement of a fantasy football fan boasting about his roster. “The center tower is being done by SOM, from Chicago!” Throughout our interview, Folić adroitly represents the values the government wants to project: technocratic, responsibly elitist, supply-side and foreign-investor focused, tourist-friendly.

Folić is not a man of the people, even if some of his ideas might ultimately redound to their benefit. Refuting the rumor that The Great War Island, one of Belgrade’s largest green spaces, will be sold off to a casino developer, he says that he’d like it to become a bird sanctuary. Then he adds, with an oddly charming lack of diplomacy, that “it will be only for the tourists to go there, people in the West who are already more sick of civilization.” His impolitic frankness, delivered with humor, makes it difficult to dislike him, even as he radiates the serenity of a true believer in Hausmannized urban planning.

...

And yet Serbia’s only remaining asset, at this point, is its land, and trading it away to foreign owners could prove to be a costly mistake. Among the more engaged core of Belgrade’s architects, urbanists, and civic activists, the Na Vodi project generates anxiety and frustration. Belgrade’s Academy of Architects, a fairly conservative group, denounced the design as something that “can be seen around the world — there’s no identity here.” Former City Architect Đorđe Bobić has said that “Belgrade will be left to peer shyly from behind a bunch of senseless, aggressively scattered skyscrapers.” ... Despite their radical styles and actions, the Ministry of Space and its offshoots, including Ko Gradi Grad?, are engaged in a civil society reform movement. Their demands are straightforward: that citizens have a stake in shaping the future of their city, and that the government apply a set of laws equally to everyone, including itself. Like other regions of southern Europe, and like many post-Communist countries, Serbia has a well-documented history of corruption, patronage networks, and parallel or “deep” state structures. The question of who builds the city may seem innocent enough, but the activists’ demand for transparency represents a threat to entrenched ways of doing business. In Belgrade’s current atmosphere, where illegal and “off the books” building is rampant, from the lowest levels of society to the highest, the city offers an ironic spectacle: Building without architects and planning without planners, while the professionals turn their energies to growing communities that might one day want their services.