This book highlights Belgrade, reviewing its recent and historical developments and emphasizing its major ongoing planning projects. The book is divided into eight chapters. The first, entitled The urban, political and socioeconomic rise and fall of Belgrade through its history, introduces the reader to the city, and is followed by a chapter on Belgrade’s urban plans through history. The book continues with a chapter on one of the major urban projects in the former Yugoslavia, the construction of New Belgrade, its development and results, entitled New Belgrade: from no man’s land to modern city. In turn, the following three chapters explore three dominant contemporary topics: Belgrade’s riverfront redevelopment; Reimaging Belgrade: the case of Savamala; and Sustainable Belgrade. Expansion of the pedestrian zone in the city center. The book draws to a close with a chapter on Future predictions: South-Eastern European metropolis of the 21st century. This chapter in particular discusses large city projects and includes predictions about the city’s future.

Can the Balkans ever become a peaceful peninsula like that of Scandinavia? With enlightened backing, can it ever make common cause with the rest of Europe rather than being an arena of periodic conflicts, political misrule, and economic misery? In the last years of the twentieth century, Western states watched with alarm as a wave of conflicts swept over much of the Balkans. Ethno-nationalist disputes, often stoked by unprincipled leaders, plunged Yugoslavia into bloody warfare. Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled to find stability as they reeled from the collapse of the communist social system and even Greece became embroiled in the Yugoslav tragedy. This new book examines the politics and international relations of the Balkans during a decade of mounting external involvement in its affairs. Tom Gallagher asks what evidence there is that key lessons have been learned and applied as trans-Atlantic engagement with Balkan problems enters its second decade. This book identifies new problems: organized crime, demographic crises of different kinds, and the collapse of a strong employment base. This is an excellent contribution to our understanding of the area.

The family can be viewed as one of the links in a “golden chain” connecting individuals, the private sphere, civil society, and the democratic state; as potentially an important source of energy for social activity; and as the primary institution that socializes and diffuses the values and norms that are of fundamental importance for civil society. Yet much of the literature on civil society pays very little attention to the complex relations between civil society and the family. These two spheres constitute a central element in democratic development and culture and form a counterweight to some of the most distressing aspects of modernity, such as the excessive privatization of home life and the unceasing work-and-spend routines. This volume offers historical perspectives on the role of families and their members in the processes of a liberal and democratic civil society, the question of boundaries and intersections of the private and public domains, and the interventions of state institutions.

After the collapse of state socialism at the end of the 1980s, young people in Eastern Europe began to play a dramatically different role in society. Once cast as the vital, reinvigorating protagonists of the communist ideal, they emerged as promoters of democratisation and agents of a now hegemonic market system. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, an event symbolising both the lifting of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, an international seminar was held in Budapest to discuss how the opening of eastern European societies to western Europe and the world had changed the living conditions and experiences of young people growing up in the region. This collection of essays, based on this seminar, examines the circumstances of young people in eastern Europe before and after 1989 from a variety of angles: their transition to adulthood; their living conditions; the scope they have for social participation; the way in which they construct their identities and constitute and represent current social realities; their cultures and genders; and the interplay of continuities and discontinuities around this historic watershed. This book, which pays particularly close attention to the relationship between research, policy and practice, is an invaluable tool for anyone wishing to achieve a deeper understanding of young people in Eastern Europe today.