Blocks 61–64, New Belgrade. Notwithstanding Brutalism

The chapter investigates the long-term transformation of Blocks 61–64 in New Belgrade (Bežanija Blocks), a paradigmatic example of Socialist-Modernist mass housing in former Yugoslavia. Rather than interpreting these large-scale residential ensembles through a binary opposition between Socialist planning and post-Socialist neoliberal urbanism, the study proposes a micro-analytical and narrative methodology to trace layered, incremental, and often invisible processes of change. The research unfolds along three interpretative axes—temporal sequencing, regime shifts, and transformations of legal and institutional frameworks—articulated through four “concrete stories”: the intensification of use through micro-commercial initiatives; maintenance as a design practice in the renewal of public sports infrastructure; the redistribution of educational facilities within residential plinths; and collective resistance to green-area densification. These cases reveal how everyday practices, civic mobilization, condominium governance, and fragmented property regimes reshape the Modernist open block beyond simplistic dichotomies such as formal/informal or continuity/rupture. Methodologically, the chapter combines archival research, cadastral and planning analysis, fieldwork, interviews, visual documentation, and space-time diagrams, drawing on microhistory as an interpretative framework. The study contributes to current debates on the afterlives of Socialist-Modernist urbanism by arguing that heritage persistence depends less on preservation than on ongoing negotiation, maintenance, re-appropriation, and collective defense of shared infrastructures. Through the Bežanija Blocks, the chapter reframes post-Socialist transformation as a complex, multi-scalar process in which small-scale actions accumulate into structural urban change.