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Old Posted May 19, 2007, 3:25 PM
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First-phase of Belgrade's waterfront redevelopment begins!

A few days ago, the following article appeared in the Financial Times:

Quote:
At the crossroads of Europe
By Neil MacDonald

Published: May 4 2007 19:34 | Last updated: May 4 2007 19:34


Dorcol, its residents say, is home to Belgrade’s “best criminals”. The gritty neighbourhood, edging along the River Danube in the shadow of the Serbian capital’s historic Ottoman Turkish fortress, used to produce the toughest boys’ street gangs, who would look for trouble in adjoining parks and housing areas.

Long-time residents still affect a certain swagger. “People who live here stick together,” says Milovan Mihajilovic, a stockbroker in his 30s. “We never say we’re from Belgrade. We’re from Dorcol.”

Still, the area also holds strong appeal for outsiders, especially those with a taste for stately art nouveau, Bauhaus or neo-classical apartment blocks in need of renovation. Well-located apartments in good overall condition already attract high prices and, according to estate agents, the market is likely to improve further in the next three to four years thanks to new building projects, pending legislative reforms and the construction of a regional highway system linking Vienna to Thessal­oniki and Budapest to Sofia, intersecting near Belgrade.

Dorcol is just a small section of Stari Grad, meaning “old city”, the first of 17 municipalities in the Serbian capital. The neighbourhood name – coming from the Turkish dort yol, literally “four roads” – emphasises its location at a crossroads that has in centuries past been the source of economic sustenance for the area.

Two navigable rivers, the Danube and its tributary the Sava, remain key assets. Although the strip along Dorcol’s north-facing waterfront is now occupied mainly by warehouses, public utilities and socialist-era sports facilities, that is about to change. Marina Dorcol, a 25,700 sq metre tract of high-quality mixed commercial and residential buildings with offices and 600 apartments, is scheduled to open by early 2009. Dutch-Israeli developer Engel East Europe has a mandate for thorough urban rejuvenation, including an on-site aquarium, a tidy “fitted shoreline” and new docks for yachts and other pleasure craft.

The Belgrade daily newspaper Blic recently declared that “in three years Marina Dorcol should become the new elite Belgrade neighbourhood”.

Links with the €160m marina project are bound to spur new activities throughout Lower Dorcol, the roughly 30 blocks of flat land lying to the north-east side of Cara Dusana Street, the main traffic thoroughfare, says Miroslav Cvetkovic, director of Cvetkovic-Roskov, an estate agency covering Serbia and newly independent Montenegro. This area is the true historic crossroads, the original Turkish part of town, which can still be detected in its comparatively narrower, less right-angled streets. It is also, naturally, where the Dorcolite swagger is most pronounced.

Upper Dorcol, extending uphill from Cara Dusana to Studentski Trg (Students’ Square), already has trendy bars and restaurants and some of Belgrade’s most sought-after residential addresses. But “that’s not the real Dorcol”, Mihajilovic insists.

Both the upper and lower sections, like the rest of central Belgrade, took a pounding in the first world war. After Gavrilo Princeps, a young Bosnian Serb, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an artillery barrage rained down on these parts of the city from Zemum on the other side of the Sava. As a result there are few buildings dating from before the 1920s in Belgrade, although Upper Dorcol does retain many relative antiquities left behind by the inter-war elite. Lower ­Dorcol, by contrast, was working-class and – until the second world war – predominantly Jewish. Its typical single- and two-storey buildings tend to look fairly nondescript from the outside.

Pass through the front gate, however, and the special character of the “courtyard apartment building” becomes apparent. Around the roofless space in the centre are multiple single dwellings in varying degrees of dilapidation. In the current market, these are some of Belgrade’s least wanted properties; in the worst instances, they lack running water. But, given their prime location, the potential for gentrification is clear, provided that there are some basic structural reforms in the market. “You can’t find that many houses changing hands in Dorcol,” Cvetkovic explains.

Complicated ownership is one problem. Even in Upper Dorcol, a typical four-storey building might include about a dozen apartments belonging to separate proprietors. “You can’t buy them all out. It would be far too expensive,” he says.

Ownership of many downtown properties is also notoriously confused thanks to widespread property confiscations that took place in most former communist countries. Serbia is far behind its neighbouring new European Union members Bulgaria and Romania in addressing the issue and progress was hindered by inconclusive elections in January. However, a draft restitution law that will open the way for mortgage lending is on the parliamentary agenda. “We should have [it] by the end of this year”, says Jovica Jakovac, general manager at the local branch of estate agent Colliers.

Other key steps for the next government to take include simplifying construction permits and eliminating the outdated state monopoly on city land. The new Serbian constitution, passed late last year, already makes this possible, according to Milan Parivodic, acting minister of finance in the out­going cabinet.

These measures will go some way to overcoming another stumbling block in the Dorcol market: inefficient pricing. Its neighbourhoods are currently viewed as multiple micro-locations of varying desirability. So, for example, on Jovanova and Jevremova, parallel hillside streets running the length of Upper Dorcol, a flat with high ceilings in a building with a grand marble entrance would cost not less than €1,650 per sq metre, which is quite high for Serbia. And “that’s for an apartment in really bad shape,” Cvetkovic says. If the structure is sound and the surfaces are well maintained, the purchase price could exceed €2,100 per sq metre.

These values reflect the fact that many long-time occupants are in no mood to sell. To secure an old flat laden with middle European character, househunters must “buy these people’s emotions” along with the parquet floor, tiles, chandeliers and oak bookcases, he says. Local companies that used to buy old flats to renovate and resell have closed down or shifted to other types of investment in the past four years, deterred by low profit margins.

People are sometimes more willing to sell – and to take more reasonable offers – along Cara Dusana, a street clogged with traffic during the daytime and with trams rumbling by through the night. Some owners once hoped to attract businesses seeking a central office location but an extreme shortage of parking spaces makes this difficult so estate agents are now focused on the residential market. With new development in the area, market analysts see prices evening out and transactions picking up in coming years.

There’s no question that Dorcol is a more charming place to live than New Belgrade, a drab sprawl of cinderblock monstrosities that has spread since the 1950s over former swampland on the former Austro-Hungarian side. “Everyone knows everyone here. People say hello on the street,” says Ljilja Glumac, owner of a beauty salon on Jovanova Street who was born and lives in the rival Sava Mala neighbourhood.

As for the big-time Serbian criminals for which the neighbourhood was once known, they have moved out to the suburbs and now linger in Dorcol only as a romanticised memory.

What the article is talking about, Dorcol Marina, will look like this:

Photos courtesy of BEOBUILD.NET:







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  #2  
Old Posted May 19, 2007, 3:34 PM
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On this map of Belgrade's downtown core, the future site of Dorcol Marina is marked with a red box:

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Old Posted May 19, 2007, 3:37 PM
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If you're wondering what the second phase has in store for us...note that just to the right of Dorcol Marina, is the location of Port of Belgrade.

Under recently announced plans, it will be moved out of the downtown core to the other side of the Danube river, clearing up a lot of valuable space:

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