The vista of rusting boats and drab wasteland that greets visitors passing over the river Sava into Belgrade is set to be transformed into a futuristic forest of skyscrapers under ambitious redevelopment plans that have deeply split Serbs.

Construction for the Belgrade Waterfront project is due to kick off this summer, bankrolled by Gulf Arabs, and will forever change the appearance and, critics say, also the character of Serbia’s capital city, home to around 1.3 million people.

The project crowns an unlikely but fruitful alliance between Serbia, an aspiring European Union member, and the United Arab Emirates that spans defence, agriculture and cheap financing.

A UAE property developer plans to spend at least €3 billion building 5,700 apartments, 2,200 hotel rooms, offices for 12,700 people, a curvaceous 200-metre tower and a sprawling shopping mall on the 1.8 million square metres of prime riverside land.

The project marks the first foray into central and eastern Europe by Abu Dhabi-based Eagle Hills and board member Mohamed Alabbar, the UAE real estate tycoon behind the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

Supporters say create thousands of jobs and address a severe shortage of office and retail space in downtown Belgrade.

However, detractors say it is folly – a Xanadu conjured up without public tender or consultation, soulless, elitist and jarring with the look of the existing, centuries-old city. A contract has yet to be signed even as land is cleared, fuelling complaints about transparency.

“It’s still unreal to me,” said Dejan Ubovic, founder of KC Grad, a cultural centre in the graffiti-riddled Savamala district that has become a mecca for tourists and artists and stands on the perimeter of the proposed Waterfront site.

“Nobody normal would have anything against some kind of improvement,” he said. But this “megalomania” has “very little to do with ordinary Belgraders”.

Fearing for Savamala and the city itself, activists face a tough fight to block a project likely to define – for better or worse – the rule of current Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.

Vucic’s nationalist-tinged but pro-Western policies have won him a hold on power not seen since late strongman Slobodan Milosevic, whose war in Kosovo brought Nato bombs down on Belgrade in 1999.

Contacted by Reuters, Eagle Hills cited Belgrade’s potential as a “regional hub” as a reason for its planned investment, adding: “[The project represents] the future of the city and a world-class benchmark for dynamic, mixed-use living.”

That growth potential is tied up with Serbia’s EU ambitions.

The project gives the UAE a toehold in a country likely to join the EU, the world’s biggest single market, in the next decade while costs remain relatively low.

It can also avoid the tough public procurement rules, transparency and regulation demanded of EU members but more easily circumvented in Serbia.

Belgrade mayor Sinisa Mali, a Vucic ally, says the new work for local firms would help drive the anaemic economy.

“Do they [the critics] want hundreds of huts, shacks, people living in abandoned railway wagons?

“Do they not want an investor to come and invest several billion euros, to put to work the local construction industry and employ 20,000 people?” he said in an interview with Reuters.

Purists like Belgrade former chief architect Djordje Bobic fear for the city’s distinctively erratic architectural heritage.

“Belgrade will be left to peer shyly from behind a bunch of senseless, aggressively scattered skyscrapers,” he said.

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