Which Common Ground for the Balkans? January 2018 temporiuso KOsovo 2.0 Temporiuso ko gradi grad Tulla Culture Center WHICH COMMON GROUND FOR THE BALKANS In Albania, Kosovo, Serbia and other countries of the Western Balkans there has been 15 years dominated by clientelism and short-term gains for those directly involved in the privatization of public and common assets, or simply their abandonment. Because of this, there is now a growing need and demand for active citizen involvement in imagining and influencing their habitat. Still, there are not many exam- ples of this, or tracks to follow. Rooted in a bottom-up approach, the project Which Common Ground for the Balkans aims to create a common ground to trigger and increase the participation of communities in discussions and activities over the shape and use of common spaces. Which Common Ground for the Balkans is implemented by Temporiu- so.net (Italy), Ko Gradi Grad (Serbia), Tulla Cultural Center (Albania), and Kosovo 2.0 (Kosovo). The four partner organizations, all with substan- tial experience in this field, also aim to identify, shape and offer models with citizens’ input that can continue to be applied for future cultural and social centers, co-working places or collectively driven housing. The project Which Common Ground for the Balkans is funded by Balkan Arts and Culture Fund BAC. BAC is supported by the Swiss Government through the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). by: Who Builds the City (Ko Gradi Grad) (Belgrade, Serbia) What has our common ground been like up to date? When it comes to our field of action — the socially and economically sustainable reality of housing in the context of Belgrade — the “common ground” that brings many of its citizens together is, para- doxically, the widely-felt injustice and vulnerability they experience in regard to housing conditions. Public policy dictates that housing is a matter that should be resolved through the mechanisms of the real estate market. Since the inception of this housing market in 1992, 98 percent of housing has become private while social housing makes up only 0.8 percent. Real estate prices have been persistently unaffordable — with an average of 1,300 euros per square meter — while the average household income in Belgrade hovers around 500 euros per month, one of the lowest levels in Europe. As a result, 90 percent of people in Serbia are deemed too poor to qualify for a mortgage, and those that do not possess a home face extreme obstacles to resolve this through the housing market. Even if they do overcome these obstacles, their difficulties are not over: More than 70 percent of households that have the security of tenure strug- gle to pay their outgoing expenses. This situation pushes Belgrade’s citizens into despair, sinks vulnerable and elderly people into dire poverty, and contributes to many young people seeking better opportunities abroad. Most of all it splinters the population into fragmented individuals, operating in survival mode. The challenge is to let a common ground emerge from these conditions in the form of a citizen-driven, emancipatory movement, that incorpo- rates mechanisms of mutual trust and support. by: Who Builds the City (Ko Gradi Grad) (Belgrade, Serbia) What are the threats to communal, shareable, and currently powerful initiatives that work in this field? The first initiatives have already emerged to address the urgent and unsustainable housing conditions in Belgrade, but they are still small-scale, vulnerable and operating in a context defined by powerful legal and economic interventions by both public and private actors. These interventions include the Law on Housing and Maintenance of Buildings (Zakon o stanovanju i odrzavanju zgrada) that came into effect at the end of 2016, a law that does nothing to protect citizens against evictions — which can result from insecure income, outstand- ing debts, fraudulent mortgages, privatisation, etc. — while introducing a new professional field of licensed managers, essentially privatising a communal responsibility. In practice: the law deals with buildings and not with people. The Belgrade Waterfront development does nothing to alleviate the lack of housing affordability, but nevertheless is being constructed thanks to a massive injection of public funds and is being promoted with an overwhelming PR violence. Recent developments from the State Agency for Construction, which builds apartments that end up for sale at only a fraction cheaper than the market, do not offer any real alternative. In the face of these interventions, citizen-driven initiatives that actually address the needs of the population face difficulty in making them- selves perceived as viable and significant actors. However, the sheer dominance of particular public and private interventions — not just in legal and economic terms, but equally in the amount of media space that they occupy — have triggered an energetic counter-movement that seeks to provide alternative visions for the city, such as the Ne Da(vi)mo Beograd (Let’s Not D(r)own Belgrade) movement against the Belgrade Waterfront development. by: Who Builds the City (Ko Gradi Grad) (Belgrade, Serbia) What has recently reinvigorated active communities in regard to the use and sharing of spaces, and commonly organized initiatives? The Belgrade Waterfront development has been the most visible and controversial factor that has reinvigorated communities.Although inter- ventions such as this claim that they will significantly improve the living conditions of Belgrade’s population, the 3,000 euros per square meter apartments within the development show that in reality, they aim to open up economic opportunities to a small minority of the pop- ulation, while neglecting the difficulties of the vast majority. This large-scale investment has mobilized a growing number of residents, rising from a few hundred in 2015 to tens of thousands to date. This type of high visibility intervention has to some extent obscured a range of smaller challenges that have also energized communities, in the form of mounting pressures experienced by citizens. These pres- sures include their difficulties in covering the cost of utilities, the persistent threat of evictions and the ongoing struggle to repay bad mortgages denominated in Swiss Francs, amongst others. In situations where, for example, the state has constructed housing projects that lack public infrastructure but provide space for a petrol station or a church (like in the case of the Stepa Stepanović settlement in Belgrade), people have begun to act as united individuals in defence either of their own life and livelihood, or as part of a common action to preserve their position in the city. The difficulty of covering utility bills, particularly heating bills, has brought national attention to the problem of energy poverty. This has been spurred on in particular by a citizens’ initiative called Udruženi pokret slobodnih stanara (United Movement of Free Inhabitants), which originated from tenants organizations in apartment buildings in the city of Niš, who demanded the right to disconnect their apartments from the public heating system, and take more control over this and other local government services, including parking. The ongoing sequence of evictions by (private) bailiffs has also ignited a broader front, with a more structured exchange between a number of initiatives and groups — activists and affected citizens have been connected in the struggle for the right to housing. Examples include groups like Zdruzena akcija Krov nad glavom (United Action Roof Above One’s Head) and Kolektivna odbrana stanara (Collective Defence of Inhabitants) that formed in Spring 2017 in Belgrade. by: Who Builds the City (Ko Gradi Grad) (Belgrade, Serbia) What mechanisms can be envisioned that will help in the recovery and reinvigoration of common spaces and approaches? What can be imagined? How to envision the common ground as a community? In situations where citizens are left to their own devices, emergent forms of self-organization provide opportunities for self-empower- ment. With Pametnija Zgrada (Smarter Building), Ko Gradi Grad has opened the possibility to imagine, and potentially construct, an entirely different housing model. Starting from dissecting the impossibility of finding affordable housing today in Belgrade, this arrived at a bottom-up low cost DIY approach that looks to the community itself to plan,invest in, and possibly even construct its own housing. In future, such an approach may also emerge around and against the threat of evictions. Self-help groups might provide not just a line of first response against the evictions themselves, but may offer struc- tural help in dealing with this precarious situation, such as the support network provided by PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgage) in Spain. This work also includes applying pressure towards changing related laws. Finally, when it comes to the scale of the entire city, new forms of governance are required that are responsive to the needs of the resi- dents, and that are generated and sustained by residents themselves. The movement against the Belgrade Waterfront development has reached the point where its next steps require imagining such new horizons. In February 2018, the initiative Ne Da(vi)mo Beograd enters - - enters municipal elections of Belgrade, aiming at changing the way politics is done. Thinking and acting on this scale could mean a breakthrough in “com- moning” the city; while fragments of such an approach exist, from participatory budgeting to horizontal models of non-partisan city gov- ernance (such as that found in Barcelona), the challenge is to realise what it could bring to cities in the Balkans. by: Rina Kika / Kosovo 2.0 (Prishtina, Kosovo) What has our common ground been like up to date? There have been a number of initiatives to access and use public space in Kosovo over the last year. In Gjakova, a group of people reno- vated a park next to the house of the writer Ali Podrimja and created an open-air cinema.