Visiting Belgrade as an urban professional
Author: Rossana Didonna, Junior Expert, Biodiversity and Nature-based Solutions at ICLEI Europe
The first thing I remember about the site visits organised during the Urban Nature Exchange (UNE) in Belgrade was the sound of birds rising from the reeds at the Reva Wetland. Another rhythm lay beneath the city: the wind moving through tall grass and ponds surrounded by dense vegetation; the distant echo of frogs and crickets hidden somewhere in the transitional ecosystems that characterise the riverbanks.
We had spent the previous hours discussing Urban Nature Plans, biodiversity, resilience, governance. Familiar words, the kind that usually remain contained within presentations, indicators, and policy frameworks. But at Reva, those concepts suddenly became tangible. The wetland did not feel fragile only in ecological terms; it felt strategically fragile, temporarily tolerated within an increasingly densified metropolitan system.
In transforming cities, landscapes such as wetlands, floodplains, spontaneous vegetation, and riverbanks are still too often described through the language of absence. They become “empty” land, “unused” land, “underdeveloped” land: spaces waiting for investment, infrastructure, visibility, or economic return. And yet places like Reva are already performing essential functions for the city. They regulate water, absorb heat, protect biodiversity, ensure ecological continuity, hold memory and provide breathing space inside metropolitan systems. But because these services are less visible than concrete, less immediate than profit, they remain vulnerable to a development logic that continues to associate value with occupation.
The following morning, walking along the waterfront, the contradiction became impossible to ignore.
Belgrade unfolds through layers of construction and destruction accumulated over centuries. Roman traces beneath Ottoman fortifications, Austro-Hungarian geometries interrupted by socialist infrastructures, bombed buildings standing beside reflective glass towers. Belgrade has been destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly because of its geography, because the confluence of the Danube and the Sava made it both strategically powerful and permanently exposed. The city developed as a frontier, suspended between empires, political systems, economic transitions, and spheres of influence. The rivers connected Belgrade to the world while simultaneously exposing it to conflict, invasion, and control.
This layered condition still shapes the waterfront today. Walking along the riverbanks, it becomes clear that these are not simply redevelopment areas or recreational zones, but deeply contested territorial spaces where ecology, memory, infrastructure, investment, and public life continuously collide. Industrial silos coexist with luxury developments, informal floating structures with carefully curated promenades, green corridors with speculative urban projects. The city feels caught in an ongoing negotiation between reinvention and erasure.
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the Belgrade Waterfront project. The new skyline projects an image of confidence and modernity that many contemporary cities seek to emulate. But walking there after visiting Reva made the transformation feel unsettling. Beneath the polished surfaces lies a much deeper narrative: the idea that “urban nature” achieves legitimacy only after being transformed into spectacle.
Belgrade’s inhabitants have repeatedly criticised the project for its investor-led governance model, weak public participation, and inconsistent planning procedures that bypassed ordinary democratic processes. Yet what remained with me most strongly was not only the socio-economic dimension of the project, but the cultural logic behind it: the growing inability of decision-makers to recognise value in spaces that remain commercially/residentially undefined, or ecologically autonomous.
And yet Belgrade continues resisting this logic. During the UNE, conversations about planning constantly intersected with discussions of stakeholders emergence and engagement, civic mobilisation, environmental activism, and public resistance. In this sense, the city feels deeply alive. It is shaped not only by layers of destruction and reconstruction, but also by the ongoing power dynamics of who has the right to determine the city's future, and by histories that refuse to be erased.
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