The international competition for the new regulation plan of Novi Sad was held in 1937, in which Juraj Neidhardt’s design was awarded compensation instead of a prize. However, upon further consideration, the city administration decided to adopt a new version of Neidhardt’s plan in the following years. In addition to this plan, he won the administration’s trust to design a series of lower-level plans for the city in 1938-1941. Therefore, Neidhardt became the most prominent figure in the urban planning process triggered by the 1937 competition. However, his final regulation plan for the city from 1941 was rejected in the first post-war revision in 1945, failing to lead to any fruition. Nevertheless, the researchers later characterized the radical modernist approach of this plan as the inspiration for the subsequent general plans of Novi Sad, namely due to introducing the idea of cutting new axes through the urban tissue. There is room today, however, to re-evaluate these claims about the radicalness of Neidhardt’s plan since its solutions were deemed insufficient in bringing radical quality to the urban space of Novi Sad. Furthermore, in the 1938-1941 period, he designed a series of perspective drawings for the new regulation of the streets in the oldest urban core of the city, which brought a decisively modernist approach to treating the urban heritage: keeping only a selection of the most iconic monuments while replacing the rest of it with new modernist structures. These designs can contribute to reinstate the knowledge about Neidhardt’s approach to treating historical heritage, considering his later intricate studies of Bosnian and Macedonian architectural landscapes.

Urban regeneration in Serbia is shaped by complex and competing public, private, professional and community interests, while the existing planning framework lacks a structured pre-planning methodology for examining these interests, contextual conditions and alternative development trajectories before formal planning decisions are made. This study aimed to address this gap and support the articulation of common interest in sustainable urban regeneration. The research synthesised an analysis of the Serbian regulatory and strategic framework and a review of international policy frameworks into a set of methodological requirements, which were translated into an operational Phase 0 framework comprising an analytical layer, a strategic layer and subsequent implementation through existing planning and design instruments. The resulting methodological framework integrates interdisciplinary spatial analysis, stakeholder and interest identification, measurable and interpretative indicators, scenario development and evaluation, and the formulation of a documented strategic orientation. The principal contribution lies in the integration of these otherwise distinct analytical, participatory and scenario-based functions into a single pre-planning framework in which objectives, alternatives, trade-offs and potential consequences can be examined while development directions remain open to revision. The proposed methodology provides a basis for more transparent and anticipatory decision-making in Serbian urban regeneration.