Serbia: EXPO 2027, anatomy of an urban planning and environmental scandal
Balkan Courier | July, 2025
Link to the original article: https://www.courrierdesbalkans.fr/Serbie-EXPO-2027-anatomie-d-un-scandale-urbanistique-et-environnemental
Every day, excavators disfigure Belgrade in preparation for EXPO 2027, the specialized exhibition that the Serbian capital is preparing to host with great fanfare. Students and experts are scrambling to unravel the legal, environmental, and economic implications of this colossal project with its vague outlines. Anatomy of an oversized project with a whiff of corruption.
Under the alarmed gaze of Novi Beograd residents, the felling of trees began along the Ušće promenade in Friendship Park, one of the capital’s last green spaces. The activist network Beograd osatje (Belgrade Remains) and the zbors (local, self-organized neighborhood assemblies) in this part of the city quickly called for rallies. “The procedures that led to this action are opaque and unacceptable,” reads the website of Ministarstvo Prostora, an organization specializing in territorial and urban policies, which emerged from the struggle against Belgrade Waterfront about ten years ago.
The Belgrade Waterfront urban plan now seems almost insignificant compared to the megalomaniacal development project of EXPO 2027, a specialized exhibition for which the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) has chosen Belgrade as the host city, under the slogan “Play for Humanity – Sport and Music for All.” Although the exhibition pavilions are located in the urban area of Surčin, west of the city near the airport, the facilities extend throughout the entire capital.
For several months now, excavators have been at work along the Sava River, digging a new and unrecognizable city upon the ruins of the old, like a cancer devastating everything in its path. It’s a painful sight for many Belgraders, who have been forced to watch, helpless and overwhelmed, as the Old Bridge over the Sava and the Jugoslavija Hotel were destroyed . Other vestiges of the socialist era, true architectural emblems of the city—such as the Belgrade Fairgrounds or the bombed-out former Army Headquarters complex —are also threatened with imminent disappearance.
For Ana, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Architecture, the project is being conducted with alarming opacity and ignores the long-term consequences for the city. Since the start of the student protests last November, students in her faculty, supported by their professors and organizations like the Renewable Energy and Environment Regulatory Institute (RERI), have carried out extensive research to unravel the legal, environmental, and economic issues surrounding the project. This mobilization has revealed numerous gray areas, including suspicions of corruption, the preservation of natural resources, and, perhaps even more seriously, the safety of the infrastructure.
Belgrade’s last green spaces and access to water are under threat.
To circumvent legislation and implement such a large-scale project, a process similar to that used in the Belgrade Waterfront planning was employed. At the time, the project was designated as a “project of national importance.” A special law thus allowed existing local urban planning regulations to be bypassed, permitting the continuous expansion of the special zoning plan without clear boundaries.
“The plan for the special zone for the Expo was first announced in 2019, with an initial perimeter of 72 hectares. The current plan, following the adoption of new expansion phases, now covers an area of 850 hectares, the equivalent of 1,600 football fields, even though no roads or facilities are clearly mapped,” explains Ana. By comparison, previous World Expos have occupied an average area of 25 hectares.
While EXPO endangers protected areas and Belgrade’s last remaining green spaces, it also raises another equally crucial issue: access to water. The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) issued a formal warning in February 2025, stating that the project posed risks of “irreversible environmental damage” and threatened Belgrade’s water supply infrastructure.
The EXPO site is also located in a sensitive area, above Belgrade’s main source of drinking water. Despite alarming analyses of the vulnerability of the groundwater, the authorities continued construction—without a prior environmental impact assessment—and the damage already caused by the excavations is irreversible. Strategic agricultural land, as well as wetlands that serve as flood protection along the Danube, which have so far been carefully (and strategically) spared by Novi Beograd’s urban planning, are also affected by this vast project.
“During the planning process, the need for Belgrade residents to have spacious, undeveloped green spaces was ignored,” laments Ana. Public consultations were deliberately postponed, canceled, or held online. However, a record 700 objections to the project were received by the Agency for Spatial Planning, and in March, a petition from the opposition party Kreni-Promeni, with over 100,000 signatures, was submitted to the BIE, demanding its intervention to cancel the event.
Corruption and disregard for safety standards: a Novi Sad-like situation?
Even more worrying, the project stipulates, among other things, that the facilities can be used without permits, with inspections postponed until after the event. Only the report of a technical committee appointed by the investor would be considered, without validation by a competent public authority. According to Dragomir Ristanović, an advisor at RERI, this amounts to eliminating any legal guarantee regarding the safety of the buildings. With 3.5 million visits planned and up to 40,000 people expected per day, the safety stakes are considerable. The consequences go far beyond a single event: the constructed infrastructure (housing, primary school, daycare centers) will become permanent without ever having undergone the required inspections.
Furthermore, public tendering procedures were eliminated, in violation of the Public Procurement Act, while most of the preparatory work for the event was awarded to companies close to the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). As part of EXPO, the Skok u budućnost (Leap into the Future) program includes the construction of an aquarium, a natural history museum, a 21st-century museum, a new pier on the Sava River, and a bridge connecting Novi Beograd to War Island—this protected and difficult-to-access biodiversity hotspot in the heart of Belgrade… The list is dizzying.
The value of this project is estimated at €17.8 billion, far exceeding the €1.29 billion initially budgeted for the EXPO alone. “There are doubts about the justification for such massive debt, given that similar projects in the past have not been economically viable,” says Ana. For further comparison, the last specialized expo was held in Kazakhstan in 2017, and its preparation and maintenance cost approximately €2 billion.
Towards a convergence of struggles?
Under pressure from student demands for early elections, President Aleksandar Vučić is rejecting any concessions, conditioning any potential vote on the completion of preparations for EXPO. Will the cancellation of EXPO signal the end of the Vučić regime? Until recently, the opacity surrounding the project meant that only the academic community, particularly students and professors, remained truly engaged and well-informed on the subject. But in recent weeks, the situation seems to be changing: a convergence between student struggles and anti-EXPO mobilizations is emerging.
Following the protests against the destruction of Novi Beograd Park, a petition was launched demanding the immediate suspension of all construction activities in the area, as well as its permanent protection as a cultural and natural site. The petition quickly garnered over 10,000 signatures, while a student-led rally against the demolition of the Belgrade Fairgrounds complex was also organized in mid-July.
In early July, civil society organizations petitioned the BIE. In accordance with the principles of the 1928 Convention on International Expositions, the United Nations Convention against Corruption, to which Serbia is a signatory, and the BIE’s mandate to ensure the integrity of world expositions, as well as the responsibility of citizens to inform international institutions of threats to the public interest, the petition calls for the creation of an independent monitoring mechanism and an audit by international experts.