INURA

A city’s development is inseparable from the life of the people inhabiting it and the aspirations to differently arrange that life. Alongside with the micro adjustments of the environment to the personal needs of the citizens, great ideas are born on how to reorganize or improve the entire society. Somewhere thereabout, between (grand) visions of a future society and ordinary life, lie realities of the city – its people, its ideologies, its construction sites, abandoned industries, luxurious buildings, suburbs without infrastructures, new facades and old habits. Today, that gap is a place of both a neoliberal expansion and a variety of resistance practices and social alternatives. A modern city bears witness to the new geopolitical constellations, the expansion of large capital interests, freedom of action, citizens’ association and the attempts to establish more equitable social relations.

The conference Between Big Ideas and Life’s Realities will present Belgrade as an “urban collage”, created through an interplay of large, formal development narratives (from a never embellished capital and a victim of unfinished modernization, to a newly proclaimed commercial center of South-East Europe) and the informal practice of housing development, cultural creativity and social activism.