Beach is an ultimate freespace: opened to everyone, democratic, it is a place of socializing and connecting with nature and its elements. Urban beaches go even further. In the encounter of the water and the city, they mirror all social and urban transformations. These public spaces, where the modern ideals of equality and healthy lifestyle were meeting and being fulfilled, have dramatically changed in Montenegro in the past decades. They turned into places of consumption and exclusivity, their accessibility diminishing rapidly and their capacity effectively decreasing to less than a third.
At the same time, the massive uncontrolled urban development increased manifold the size and density of the coastal towns, creating around the original nuclei an urban tissue without identity, order, structure, infrastructure – nor public space. In addition, the old model of tourism, where the public and tourist spaces and interests were shared, has been substituted with the neoliberal one. It creates an impossible tension between the living towns and the hypercontrolled, enclosed resorts, privatizing the shared freespace and blocking a comprehensive urban experience from the citizens and tourists likewise.
How can a town live without public space? How to be on the coast without the sea? How can the beach tourism grow without beaches? How to be an ecological state without nature in the towns? How is it possible that one society gives up its urbanity and future? Its youth and its health? How to build resilience in (and to) such a situation? A lusophone definition of urban beaches as ‘yellow squares’ (praças amarelas) indicates a possible answer to many questions that arise from these contradictions: the role the beaches in the Montenegrin coastal towns still may recover and advance to become bearers of urban resilience.
Mila Nikolić