Cardboard city

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A view of Karton city from Gazela bridge
A view of Karton city from Gazela bridge

Cardboard city (Serbian Cyrillic: Картон сити. Latin: Karton siti) is an urban neighborhood of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in Belgrade's municipality of Novi Beograd.

[edit] Settlement

Karton siti (Serbian for cardboard city) is an informal settlement, or locally classified as unhygienic settlement, basically a slum. As its name suggests, most of the houses are built from cardboard or some other non-building materials, like plywood or nylon bags. The settlement resembles Brazilian favelas and it is without any communal infrastructure (roads, running water, sewage, electricity).

It is entirely populated by the Roma people, who live on collecting garbage which they also store in Karton siti, which gives an even gloomier picture of the settlement, clearly visible for anyone who drives over the Gazela bridge. The location of the settlement, under the bridges of Gazela and Stari želenički and officially belonging to the Block 18-a, is a big problem for the city government, not just from the visual point of view but more as a major health concern. The settlement is just a few kilometers away from the downtown Belgrade and right next to the Block 19 and Block 20, in a total contrast to the ultra-modern constructions like congressional Sava Center, five-star hotels Hyatt Regency Belgrade and Hotel International CG and futuristic complexes of Genex Apartments, Savograd and Avenue 19-Park Apartments.

There are 986 people living in the Karton city (501 men;485 women) of whom 278 are children living in 237 "households" according to the census taken by the city authorities in August of 2007.[1]

[edit] Controversy

A typical "family house" in the Karton city
A typical "family house" in the Karton city

The City Government announced in 2005 that it will evacuate the Roma population from the settlement into another one, made of the temporary container houses in the area around the neighborhoods of Dr Ivan Ribar and Blokovi. Population of these neighborhoods protested, opposing to this decision. Government replied calling them racists and that the decision will be realized anyway, but the inhabitants posted whole variety of cons: that city government should disperse the population on the territory of the entire city, especially on Dedinje, the richest neighborhood of Belgrade; that simply moving the population without giving them any jobs or education wouldn't make the difference and that they would turn the new settlement into copy of their old one very soon; that city government is doing this to make free the land in the area that would be one of the most expensive in Belgrade. The protesters definitely made a strong economic argument: building such a large low-income housing project would significantly depress the real-estate prices in the neighborhoods of Dr Ivan Ribar and Blokovi, wiping out up to 30% of the inhabitants' home equity. The protesters argued that there is no reason why they should exclusively bear all these costs to solve a problem to whose cause they have not contributed.

Some NGOs supported the city government, also labeling the protesters being a racists, but some pointed out that the solution proposed by the city was not good, not just from the economic side, but also as the future settlement was to have fence, thus it would just create another ghetto without solving the problem. After months of verbal clashes and protests, city officials backed off and the problem remains on ice for the time being. In July 2007[2], city government again announced it will relocate an estimated 245 families with 1,500 people from the settlement in spring 2008, when the reconstruction of the Gazela bridge is due to begin (the crossroads surrounding the settlement were built in 1971). However, the data on how and where the population will be relocated were not given, but the census of population within the settlement began in August 2007[3],

Term kartonsko naselje is applied to any other such settlement, anywhere in Serbia (Belgrade, Kragujevac, Niš, etc). To avoid this derogatory term, in the recent reports TV stations and newspapers refer to the settlement as Gazela, after the bridge.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Serbian:Večernje novostiKamp posle čerge
  2. ^ Politika daily, July 18, 2007, p.24
  3. ^ Politika daily, August 2, 2007, p.8
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Neighbourhoods and suburbs of Novi Beograd