This study investigates the transformative potential of contemporary museum architecture, emphasizing the intricate relationship between management requirements and spatial design. Contemporary museum practice must adapt to diverse visitor preferences and secure operational funding beyond public sources by increasing ticket sales through personalized visitor pathways. This necessity has led to a growing trend of reconfiguring permanent collections via temporary exhibitions to enhance performance and revenue. The study aims to demonstrate the strategic utilization of material and technical opportunities within museum structures, underscoring the critical role of spatial organization in optimizing functional arrangements and enriching the visitor experience. Methodologies include integrating museum management needs into architectural design and employing revised spatial configurations to improve accessibility and connectivity. A case study of the City Museum of Belgrade’s central building illustrates these methodologies’ application, enhancing direct access to galleries and expanding potential walking routes. Detailed analysis reveals that redesigned museum layouts can significantly boost efficiency, performance, and visitor satisfaction, thereby supporting the overall sustainability of cultural institutions. This approach enables traditionally resistant public museums to adapt to modern challenges by developing services and programs that attract diverse audiences and enhance visitor experiences, ultimately contributing to their economic, environmental, social, and cultural sustainability.

Although a growing body of literature examines the post-socialist European context of urban regeneration, studies on the demolition-based approaches are relatively scarce. Moreover, the regeneration policies of cities in non-EU Balkan countries with a distinctive transitional path remain largely unexplored. The paper contributes to filling these voids by investigating a specific demolition-based urban regeneration strategy named permanent reconstruction, which has been launched in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, and applied to low-density neighborhoods with a derelict housing stock, being seen as a tool for achieving sustainable urban development. The specific research aims are to explain the origin of this strategy; analyze the institutional and planning framework, mechanisms, and dynamics of the regeneration process through a case study; and assess its outcomes based on a mixed methodology. The main research objective is to identify the issues of a post-socialist entrepreneurial urban governance, primarily deriving from Serbia’s distorted transition, which hampered the development of a strategic, integrated, and locale-conscious approach. The findings suggest that Novi Sad and other Serbian cities necessitate socially responsible and context-perceptive regeneration that would produce sustainable regeneration projects. The authors propose the means for redefining them, emphasizing the responsibilities of the public sector and the significance of involving the local community in the planning and decision-making process.

Utilizing culture as a tool for the regeneration of industrial brownfields represents a fairly new trend in post-socialist Europe. This topic has garnered some academic attention; however, studies primarily originate from EU member states, whereas the examples from non-EU cities remains largely unexplored. In addition, the literature dealing with the temporary creative use of derelict industrial sites in post-socialist cities is scarce. The case study-based paper contributes to filling these voids by investigating the creativity-driven informal activation of the Kineska Quarter in Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia and the European Capital of Culture for 2022, and its planned transformation into a creative district. The research aims are to examine the capacity of temporary uses to act as a hard infrastructure of the culture-led regeneration, identify the policy framework that shaped the project and highlight its shortcomings, detect potential sustainability issues, and examine how soft factors affect the use of hard infrastructure. The findings suggest that the redevelopment of a creative brownfield based on the simulation of bottom-up decision-making and hastily developed and blurry regeneration policies lead to uncertainty about its sustainability. They also suggest that post-socialist cities lacking experience in this field necessitate a context-perceptive, socially responsible, and locale-conscious approach to the (then sustainable) culture-led regeneration of spontaneously activated brownfields sites, which requires meaningful and not just pro forma involvement of non-institutional actors in the policy- and decision-making process.

Experiencing rapid development and growth, cities worldwide face a surge in air pollution, primarily driven by the increased concentrations of the particulate matter (PM) originating from various anthropogenic sources, such as traffic, household fuel combustion, and industrial and construction activities. Urban green spaces can naturally filter PM through physicochemical processes, serving as effective urban planning instruments for the improvement of the air quality. Focusing on a street in Novi Sad, the second-largest city in Serbia, this study investigates the efficiency of vegetation in mitigating air pollution, specifically PM10 emissions from traffic and construction activities. Using the contemporary monitoring and modelling techniques for measuring and predicting PM10 concentrations, the focus of this research is to evaluate the efficacy of vegetation in affecting and minimizing detected PM concentrations. The results indicate a significant reduction in the monitored PM10 concentrations behind the green barrier compared to the modelled concentrations near the pollution source (on the road) for both traffic and construction-related emissions. The paper highlights the capacity of green elements to act as natural air pollution mitigators and suggests better integration of strategic environmental management into urban planning to foster the development of healthier and more sustainable cities, providing recommendations to facilitate this objective.

The beginning of the new millennium provokes governments and researchers to recognize the importance and the effect that Particulate Matter (PM) has on the whole environment. PM has been marked as one of the key ambient air pollutants, due to its high sorption ability. World Health Organization indicated PM present in ambient air as pollutant with adverse, acute and hazard effect on human health and built environment. The city of Novi Sad, Serbia is rapidly expanding, redefining architectural, urban and environmental matrices. Architectural spatial transformations - construction sites need to be considered as temporal unique pollution hot spots. Trend of active construction sites increasing number in Novi Sad affects the ambient air quality. Goal of the research is to emphasize PM pollution problem on the construction sites in Novi Sad and to illustrate and display the trends in mitigation measures application during 4-year period (2019-2022).