| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines recent shifts in Belgrade's urban geography and built environments, with an accent placed on landscapes of social cleansing, gentrification and commercialization accompanying Serbia's emerging neoliberal governmentality. It does so by exploring the convergent translocal discourses and institutional structures that provided financing, conditionality and legitimacy for the forcible displacement of a sizeable Roma community living under Belgrade's Gazela Bridge and their involuntary relocation into housing containers on the city's outskirts in late August 2009. The article juxtaposes the violence of this site-specific biopolitical intervention into Roma everyday life, which was executed by local city authorities and financed by European financial institutions, with the alternative strategies deployed by the community and its allies in contesting Belgrade's racialized urban restructuring. The Gazela episode illustrates how functional re-inscriptions of urban space for the translocal needs of capital can simultaneously generate both violent cartographies of dispossession and precarious forms of subaltern reterritorialization.
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