BIBBIDI-BOBBIDI-BOO: The Reinvented Magic of Urban Shopping?

Abstract

Built on the principles of the Athens charter and Modern movement, New Belgrade was a spatial representative of a new state and the post-war Yugoslav society. However, at the turn of the 21st century the processes of transition, globalization and EU-integration started, shaping New Belgrade into a polygon of another experiment, initiated by a number of local and foreign greenfield investments. The intensification of commercial, business and administrative activities has created a new identity of this urban entity, imposing new rules and elements into the rigid modernist concept. The shifts of consumption patterns and contemporary life style have imposed new shopping demands which reflected in a new typology of shopping nodes/centers dispersed throughout the territory. The paper will focus on the period of the 1990s and 2000s analyzing the application of ‘global rules’ to shopping nodes and their network. The new layer of consumerism will be related to large/small scale spatial and social changes of New Belgrade, which have generated new urban energy while boosting further development and increasing the value of existing structures. The emphasis of the analysis will be on large shopping malls which announced another phase of New Belgrade’s development offering elements of traditional ‘inner city’ atmosphere implanted into the modernist grid.