The paper contributes to filling these voids by investigating a specific demolition-based urban regeneration strategy named permanent reconstruction, which has been launched in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, and applied to low-density neighborhoods with a derelict housing stock, being seen as a tool for achieving sustainable urban development.

Moreover, the regeneration policies of cities in non-EU Balkan countries with a distinctive transitional path remain largely unexplored. Adding to the findings of the researchers who explored the common planning issues in Serbian cities, general requirements in these terms may be summarized as follows: (1) abandoning the practice of catering to developers' needs, ignoring the public interest, and blindly accepting the neoliberal philosophy (2) implementing public policies and unambiguously defining the public interest (3) avoiding rigid, top-down approaches (4) unfettering the planning profession and making it as independent from politics as possible (5) ensuring that the planning process is democratic, adaptive, participative, inclusive, and pro-active as well as evaluationand feedback-based (6) fostering transparent decision-making procedures (7) enabling synergy between the stakeholders, i.e., local governments, private developers, and local community, and collaborative decision making and last but not least, (8) developing new forms of urban governance to facilitate active and meaningful public engagement.Īlthough a growing body of literature examines the post-socialist European context of urban regeneration, studies on the demolition-based approaches are relatively scarce. Yet, in order to omit the double-edged sword effect, some crucial changes need to be made in the planning domain, whereas the role and duties of the public sector should be redefined. Keywords: culture-led regeneration post-socialist transition Novi Sad turbo-folk urban culture. Having completed the analysis, the authors propose the means for redefining the relationship between culture and regeneration in second-tier Serbian cities, yet also in other CEE cities of similar size, emphasizing the role of culture, responsibilities of the local authorities, significance of bottom-up approaches and relevance of place context. Furthermore, they analyse the outcomes of culture-led transformation conducted in the absence of cultural strategies and in-depth regeneration policies and marked by the laisser-faire attitude of the local authorities. They also investigate the interplay between the citizens’ cultural preferences, visions of urbanity, private sector’s interests and usage of urban space, and discuss the impacts of spontaneous utilization versus exploitation of space and culture. In an effort to contribute to understanding various challenges that Serbian cities have been facing since the fall of communism, they seek to identify cultural effects of a very distinctive process of transition.

In this paper, the authors join the emerging discussion on the post-socialist context of culture-led regeneration through a case study of a street in the old core of Novi Sad, Serbia. In contrast, the majority of second-tier Central and East European cities, primarily non-holders of the European Capital of Culture title, still seem to struggle with clearly defining the relationship between culture and urban regeneration, precisely determining the responsibilities of the key actors and making the distinction between social and economic goals in regeneration projects. In West European cities, culture has evolved to become a crucial ingredient of regeneration projects, in which stakeholders’ cooperation is of utmost importance and economic and social benefits are often well balanced.

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