Housing for the new socio-economic elite - a case study of novi sad

Abstract

This paper examines the spatial dimension of economic inequalities that occurred in Serbia over the last 2 decades. The paper presents a case study of a city of Novi Sad, which has undergone radical changes both within its social and spatial structure that even today remain unparalleled in the region in terms of their nature and rate. In the 1990s, the specific political and economic conditions have led to the great transformations in demographics and the overall social structure, since the city, formerly experiencing negative population growth rates, has been rapidly populated by refugees from the wars in former Yugoslavia. At the same time, a large gap between the poor and the wealthy was created as the result of changes that marked the transition to the post-communist society. This has caused great changes of the built form that previous master plans could not anticipate. The implications of this process for housing involved the spatial segregation of diverse socio-economic groups. The paper presents 2 urban fragments where the houses for the new economic elite were built, both of which represent inadequate models. Both cases represent monotonous environments that lack spatial complexity and not encourage community binding. Therefore the paper also includes a proposal of a new concept for the housing for the inhabitants with higher-incomes.