The Fantasy of Reason: Reevaluating Belgrade's Twentieth-Century Urban Plans Through Borislav Pekić's Houses

Abstract: Through a mapped exploration of Borislav Pekić's Houses , this article repositions official urban plans of interwar and socialist Yugoslavia as fantastical documents. Houses ' protagonist, Arsenie, enables an examination of the spatial rationale of modernity that undergirded Belgrade's twentieth-century urban planning and drove increasingly interventionist and high modernist approaches for fabricating an ideal city. Drawing on Arsenie's perspective, the article traces how Belgrade's existing material conditions prompted ever more visionary and idealized elite prescriptions for urban space. It analyzes the first General Urban Plans of both regimes, contemporary news reporting, and Arsenie's journey through Belgrade, urging a critical reassessment of the "reason" so readily attributed to elite modernizing projects—projects that crystallized around elite perceptions of Belgrade's disorder, chaos, and peripherality.