BELGRADE IS GROWING AND WILL CONTINUE, BUT IS IT DEVELOPING?

On Thursday, September 23, we presented the results of a public opinion survey on the functioning problems and priorities of the city's development. The survey was conducted in the context of the preparation of the GUP of Belgrade until 2041.

The general urban plan sets the key guidelines for the development of Belgrade, which will only be operationalized later by lower level plans. Such a strategic plan is adopted every 20 years and therefore represents a unique generational opportunity to discuss together what kind of city we want to live in. However, we know absolutely nothing about the process of creating the plan, except for the initial decision on the creation from August 2019. The survey of public opinion was therefore conducted with the intention of starting a discussion among the public on topics relevant to the preparation of the GUP - problems and shortcomings in the current functioning of the city, but also priority directions for the development of the city in the future.

The research was conceived through the cooperation of the team of the Ministry of Space (Marko Aksentijević, Jovana Timotijević and Iva Čukić), political scientist and researcher Vujo Ilić and urban planners Jasmine Đokić and Ana Graovac, and it was conducted by the market research agency MASMI.

Iva Čukić i Marko Aksentijevic, in front of the Ministry of Space, presented the key conclusions that say that the majority of citizens believe that the city is developing according to the interests of the powerful (52.4%), that the development of the city is not uniform throughout its territory (46.8%), and that even 62.4% of the sample believes that citizens are not informed or involved in making decisions about the development of the city.

The two areas with the most problems in the functioning of the city are traffic (improvement of public transport, reduction of congestion, construction of metro, etc.) and environmental protection, that is, environmental problems and an increase in the number of green areas.

Some of the conclusions of the research show that almost every other citizen of Belgrade, i.e. 44% of the sample, he does not feel safe in his city when it comes to the dangers of environmental problems, such as air or water pollution. The fact that as many as three quarters of citizens (74%) believe that there are not enough green areas in Belgrade speaks to this problem.

Environmental protection, i.e. ecological problems and increasing the number of green areas, is the direction of the city's development that 46 percent of citizens see as key, and how many people are aware of the importance of this problem says yes and would almost 9 out of 10 citizens supported the introduction of mandatory waste sorting or 88%.

As for traffic, traffic jams are a problem for three quarters of citizens (72%), and almost half are dissatisfied with parking (44%). The vast majority of citizens, 72 percent of them, believe that the metro should solve existing traffic problems, which does not coincide with the current plans for its construction. Two thirds of citizens (70%) support the development of cycling as an equal mode of transport. When talking about parking, 80% of people believe that more parking spaces are needed, but only 17% of them are ready to increase the number of parking spaces by reducing public space, sidewalks or green spaces.

The data on citizens' attitudes about the equipment and functioning of the most basic infrastructure, such as the supply of drinking water or sewage, are interesting, and show that the city is not developing uniformly. Regarding the supply of drinking water, at the city level, about 56 percent of citizens are satisfied, but when we look at suburban settlements, such as Grocka (53%) or Mladenovac (47%), more than half of the citizens are not satisfied with the supply of this basic life resource. As far as sewerage is concerned, at the city level, over a third of citizens are dissatisfied (35%), while in suburban settlements, that percentage is almost twice as high.

Based on the data on citizens' attitudes about large infrastructure projects, we can see to what extent the public is insufficiently informed about the urban development of the city, that is, that citizens' attitudes change significantly due to the provision of more information. So, when we ask citizens whether they would support the construction of a commercial and business complex in Kosutnjak, if it involves deforestation, the percentage of support decreases from 11.7% to 3.5%. The same is the case with other projects. Regarding construction gondola connecting Ušće and Kalemegdan, the percentage of citizens who support the project drops from 20.9% to 5.9% when it is presented to them that such construction includes the risk of endangering the cultural heritage and not including Kalemegdan on the UNESCO World Heritage List, while expansion of the city on the territory of Makis with a potential threat to the source of water supports only 4.5% of the sample compared to the original 22.2%.

It is worth noting that on this occasion no additional information was provided to the respondents, but only the risks that these projects inevitably bring were highlighted in the question. For example, when it comes to construction of the national stadium, to the question "Do you support the construction of a national stadium on the territory of Surčin?", 34.8% of citizens answered that they fully support and support it, while to the question "Do you support the construction of a national stadium on the territory of Surčin with additional national borrowing?" only 13.3% marked that answer.

Jasmina Djokic, an urban planner with experience in creating plans of all levels, presented her impressions of the research results, primarily from the perspective of their importance for the process of creating plans, and especially the General Urban Plan.

Although there is no standardized methodology for collecting input data, Đokić stated that the development of such a comprehensive strategic plan requires an extremely complex information base. First of all, it is necessary to collect relevant data from the census, which in the case of the Republic of Serbia is 10 years old data that should be used for the twenty-year development plan. Furthermore, among the input data, all currently adopted strategic documents must be found at both the republican and city level. In this way, strategies from the field of environmental protection or social policy, for example, get their spatial form through GUP. Some of the key strategies, however, were not yet adopted or updated at the time of drafting the GUP. Finally, as Đokić stated, the third type of input data is represented by surveys of public attitudes, which includes both experts and the general public. The Urban Institute published a survey during the process of drafting the GUP, which is good, but not enough. In addition, the survey was not conducted on a representative sample.

In this sense, Jasmina Đokić also emphasized the importance of the research conducted by the team of the Ministry of Space, partly because it represents the views of the representative public, and partly because it is very clearly oriented towards the future development of the city.

Finally, explaining the importance of participation in urban planning, Đokić also mentioned that, specifically for the process of passing the GUP, there was no timely involvement of the public in the very design of the plan. Instead, both the wider and narrower public will only encounter the concept of the plan at an early public inspection, when he will have the opportunity to comment on the already offered proposal. However, this kind of research offers the possibility to compare the offered concept of the plan with the representative views of the citizens, and to direct some of the possible objections that will be instructive to whether and to what extent that concept corresponds to the affinities and needs of the citizens.

The formulation of specific topics and questions was preceded by a conversation with 50 respondents through 5 online focus groups, based on which a questionnaire was created for the quantitative phase of the research. The survey was conducted from June 11 to July 8, 2021, using the CATI technique on a representative sample of adult citizens of Belgrade (1211 respondents, with a booster sample of 72 citizens of smaller municipalities with the aim of achieving a minimum of 40 respondents per municipality, which totaled 1283 respondents in the sample).

Other research results presented at the conference can be viewed below.