Reviving Socialist Shrinking Towns in the Lower Danube Region in Serbia by Embracing Their Modernist Urban Heritage

Abstract

A socialist city was one of the most important spatial legacies of a socialist state in Eastern Europe, where its main tenets were adjusted to (re)form an urban environment for proletariat as a focal group. However, the implementation of a socialist-city agenda was confronted to the urban legacy of presocialist periods in many East European cities and towns with long history. Therefore, the ‘purest’ socialist cities were usually completely newly-formed urban settlements. The most notorious examples were usually bigger or middle-size cities with the large plants of heavy industry. They have been often exploited as a research theme last years, usually regarding their fast and uncontrolled urban shrinkage after the fall of socialism. This focus has left smaller socialist cities and towns somehow ‘in shadow’. This research is dedicated for three examples of new socialist towns located in the Lower Danube Region in Serbia: Donji Milanovac, Tekija, and Brza Palanka. All of them are unique due to their formation; old towns were flooded by the formation of two artificial lakes in the Iron Gates System on the Danube River, so new towns were fast built in modernist manner to relocate the population from the former ones. Today, these towns are more known in Serbia by extreme urban shrinkage due to the overall isolation by the formation of both lakes. Nevertheless, the recent rise of cultural tourism on the Danube has given a new impulse for the towns’ life. This paper aspires to revalorise their modernist urban heritage and to discuss if this element can be utilised for their further regeneration, driven by cultural tourism on the Danube.