Bežanija Blocks, New Belgrade. Tracing Time in Concrete

This essay investigates the long-term transformation of the Bežanija Blocks (Blocks 61–64) in New Belgrade through a research-by-drawing methodology that combines architectural survey, archival research, interviews and situated observation. Moving away from the monumental reading of Socialist-Modernist mass housing as a static Brutalist artifact, the study enters the domestic interiors to trace how political, economic and demographic shifts become materialized in rooms, partitions, thresholds and everyday spatial adjustments. Focusing on four apartments across different blocks, the essay reconstructs the intertwined evolution of property regimes (from state allocation to give-away privatization and open housing market), occupancy patterns, and spatial modifications. Through layered axonometric drawings, timelines, narrative captions and analytical diagrams, the project expands the notion of the “document” to include domestic space itself, together with interviews, photographic campaigns and real-estate listings as research material. Drawing operates not merely as representation but as an investigative device capable of rendering visible the cumulative traces of tenancy rights, illegal occupation, market pressures, generational turnover and short-term rental economies. By aligning spatial transformations with legal and demographic timelines, the essay demonstrates how the afterlife of Socialist housing unfolds through incremental, often invisible acts of adaptation. The Bežanija Blocks emerge not as fixed relics of Modernism but as dynamic infrastructures continuously renegotiated through everyday practices, revealing how urban history is inhabited, contested and re-scripted at the scale of domestic life.