Whether transnational middle-class migrants perceive Belgrade as an attractive and comfortable city

Abstract

The research focus is on whether transnational middle-class migrants perceive Belgrade as a city suitable for their way of life. At the outset, the analytical framework links the social production of contemporary cities to processes of globalization and transnational migration, with a focus on post-socialist cities and Belgrade as the object of empirical research. The second part of the paper contains data analysis based on the 21 semi-structured interviews with middleclass transnational migrants who had lived and worked in Belgrade for at least a year at the time of the interviews, conducted in late 2018 and early 2019. The analysis focuses on the opinions of transnational migrants regarding housing and working conditions in Belgrade in comparison to their previous experiences; on daily routines and practices they can or cannot realize in Belgrade; and on the importance they attach to globally standardized places (such as international cafes, restaurants, shopping malls, etc.) as compared to locally specific equivalents. In the concluding section, seeking to examine whether the Belgrade entrepreneurial urban policy meets the expectations of these transnational actors, the key research findings are summarized in a manner accordant with the inputs they could provide for Belgrade?s urban development.

Migration in the national context - mapping the research challenges

“…Izdvajanje i analiza sadržaja radova u nacionalnim časopisima međunarodnog značaja u Srbiji ukazali su na visok stepen podudarnosti sa međunarodnim trendovima u istraživanju ovog fenomena. Problematika migracija i razvoja najčešće se posmatra kroz prizmu dijaspore (Bobić, 2009: Despić, 2010Anđelković, 2019;Mitrović, 2019) i transnacionalnih veza (Pavlov i dr 2013;Petrović, 2020), uz naglašavanje uloge i značaja migrantskih mreža (Despić, 2010) i povratnih migracija (Vasojević, 2018;Vasojević i Kirin, 2019) kao važnih instrumenata razvoja. Pored toga, posledice odliva mozgova (Avramović, 2012), kao i potreba zadržavanje visokoobrazovanih lica u državi (Despić, 2018) se navode kao važni faktori.…”