Cities of Dust and Mud: Urbanism and Bourgeois Fantasy in the Balkans, 1820-1920 (Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe)

This book explores the social costs of urban change and the limits of modernity through a comparative study of two Balkan cities, Belgrade and Sofia.Between 1820 and 1920, both cities grew from small Ottoman towns into large national capitals, as their bourgeois elites envisioned new, urban societies on the European borderlands.This book traces the lofty ambitions and dire consequences of this project: situated on the periphery of global capital flows, elite-led attempts at remaking Balkan capitals into European cities relied on dispossession, brutal labor control, and real estate speculation, while failing to achieve their goals of exponential growth. Drawing on a rich array of archival sources, Miloš Jovanovic considers the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Belgrade, municipal corruption in Sofia, anxieties over sex work and the regulation of intimacy, and attempts at creating docile workers through policing and prisons.Bringing working people to the forefront, he shows how the modernit