PROJECT STANDARDS FOR THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GRAND CREATIVE PARK OF THE CITY OF KRAGUJEVAC

Belgrade Design Week and the City of Kragujevac are inviting you to the presentation of the project : The project standard for the future development of the Grand City Park , in the framework of the European Initiative Human Cities/

Jovan Jelovac , founder of the Belgrade Design Week, and Professor Aleksandar Vuja , in front of the architectural studio DVA , will present the project “Grand Creative Park of the City of Kragujevac ” and answer participant’s questions  . The presentation will be held on Monday 23 May 2016, from 17: 00- 19:00, in the building of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences – building A, entrance from the side of the street Dr. Elizabeth Ross , Mali amphitheater ( AP23 ) .

The Grand Park was traditionally a favorite promenade for all generations in the city of Kragujevac, where the dense canopy of century-old trees, walkways, benches and sports grounds represented a valuable place for relaxation and recreation. Unfortunately, in recent decades, the park has shared an inevitable fate of the general deterioration of its city. As an ecosystem, the Grand City Park is a rare urban tissue of park greenery maintained over one hundred and fifty years. The benefits of this heritage, the potential social interactions, the microclimate and emotional aspects that it generates all contribute to the general perception of this type of architecture as a focus point, around which we can gather our attention, assess our will for a better tomorrow and present it as our contribution to the urban community gathered around the pan-European Human Cities / project.

The aim of the City is to enable its citizens, by means of participatory urbanism and cooperation with Serbian and world best practices in the field of innovation and design. This is just the first step of defining a new framework of citizen’s participation about the park’s future design, with the primarily intention to provoke and activate a responsible involvement of all stakeholders into a joint search for standards of a possible development scheme. These standards define not only the principles of how to preserve and develop the park in a certain timeframe, but also new standards of how to initiate and decide matters regarding this and other valuable parts of the urban tissue.

A further objective of the project is to open up the dialogue with the citizens and inspire them to review, in a wider context, the existing urban, green and historical premises of Kragujevac, stretching from the Grand Park to Šumarice, and to try to integrate them into one uninterrupted entity, designed as a unique model of relaxation and contemplation, while at the same time creating a new cultural and historical destination for high quality tourism in Serbia’s heartland. This innovative complex would link the latest achievements of domestic and international creativity with existing rich heritage sites of the city of Kragujevac, which already include the best works of giants of creative thinking such as Vojin Bakić and Ivan Antić.

We invite you to join us, as citizen, professional, neighbor,partner in the Human Cities/ project or project opponent, and contribute with your comments and suggestions.