Belgrade: Formal Informal

The ETH Studio Basel, Contemporary City Institute is part of the Department of Architecture at the renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and is located in Basel, Switzerland's architectural hotspot. The results of Studio Basel's initial research project on the urban condition of Switzerland, published in 2005 as Switzerland - "An Urban Portrait", were much reviewed and controversially discussed in the general media and academic and professional periodicals in Switzerland and abroad. Studio Basel currently maintains a research program on processes of transformation in the urban domain on an international scale, focusing on the urbanisation process on the seven Canary Islands, the development of the tri-national region of MetroBasel (Switzerland, France, Germany), and on cities such as Belgrade, Havana, Nairobi, Casablanca or Hong Kong. "Belgrade. Formal/Informal" presents the results and conclusions of Studio Basel's research campaign in the former Yugoslavian and now Serbian capital, investigating in particular the city's development from the times the international embargo against the Milosevic-regime after the Yugoslavian wars of separation of the 1990s until the present day. The book presents in detail and richly illustrated the city's change in times of upheaval and a situation of acute shortage. It shows the result of an interplay of guided and of accidental urban planning and construction, and what visual situations have emerged from this. The authors take Belgrade as an example for how cities develop embedded in today's global process, partially shaping it, and affected by its adverse repercussions.