InterCities: Belgrade with Dubravka Sekulić

InterCities is a brand new podcast from the team at Open City. In this six-part series, we travel to a number of cities and boroughs around the world that have transformed over time to discover what we can learn from these places’ achievements, struggles, successes and mistakes.

In this episode, our host Owen Hatherley is joined by the author and academic Dubravka Sekulić. Sekulić was born in one of Serbia’s lesser-known cities Niš but today, she’s walking us through the capital of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and current capital of Serbia, Belgrade. As we find out, the history of Belgrade’s built-environment is influenced not only by attempts at constructing a socialist state, but also by its notable role in the Non-Aligned Movement, a forum of 120 countries not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc that sprung up after the Second World War. It’s also been shaped by Energoprojekt, an engineering firm which built an enormous number of projects across Serbia and other non-aligned countries in Africa and Asia in the latter half of the 20th century. Ultimately, we learn it’s the city’s historical and political status as a regional outlier that makes it the complex, yet often overlooked, place it is today. 

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Photo credit: Owen Hatherley portrait © Antonio Olmos

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