Garden City in Interwar Serbia: From England via Russia

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the authors of Russian origin in applying the concept of a garden city in interwar Serbia in response to rapid urbanisation and uncontrolled urban growth of many Serbian cities. After the Revolution in 1917, about 250 architects and civil engineers immigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from Russia and got actively involved in design and construction work in their adopted homeland. Some played an essential role in urban planning practice in Serbia. To explain their contribution, examples of planned and realised garden-city-type neighbourhoods in two cities, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, and Kragujevac, the centre of military industry in middle Serbia, are analysed. By examining unpublished archives documents, original urban plans and the little-known book Big City and Garden-cities (Большoй городь и города-сады) by George Pavlovich Kovalevsky, this paper aims to set new directions for critical research on knowledge transfer in urban planning theory and practice between Russia and Serbia.