Kojanić’s article reframes resilience not as a managerial slogan imposed by states, experts, or development agencies, but as a politically mobile concept capable of being appropriated by weaker actors in struggles over urban futures. Centred on Belgrade’s flood-prone Danube landscapes, especially the Pančevo Marshes, Reva Pond, Ovča River Island, and the proposed “Belgrade Danube Park”, the argument shows how ecological language travels between scholarship, activism, and public pedagogy. Rather than merely reproducing neoliberal techno-politics, resilience becomes entangled with green infrastructure, ecosystem services, biodiversity protection, climate adaptation, and resistance to “investors’ urbanism”, a mode of development privileging speculative profit over public and ecological goods. The case of Swamplandia is decisive: through blockades, clean-ups, outdoor lectures, design collaborations, and neighbourhood mobilisation, activists translate academic vocabulary into civic claims for flood mitigation, wetland conservation, children’s spaces, and infrastructural dignity. The article’s synthesis is therefore subtle: resilience remains ambivalent, since it can individualise risk and instrumentalise nature, yet in Belgrade it also enables a counter-hegemonic grammar through which non-state actors re-politicise planning. Its conclusion is that socio-environmental justice emerges when resilience ceases to mean adaptation to imposed vulnerability and becomes a collective demand for liveable, democratic, ecologically literate urban space.
