Rakovica
Yugoslavia's tractor capital since 1927—Rakovica's IMT survives under Indian ownership while the industrial workforce that defined it has dispersed.
Rakovica exists because socialist Yugoslavia needed tractors—and because industrial production requires flat land near rail lines. This Belgrade municipality became home to IMR (Industrija Motora Rakovica) in 1927 and IMT (Industry of Machinery and Tractors) in 1947, factories that together equipped Yugoslav agriculture with domestically produced machinery. At their peak, IMR and IMT built tractors and engines under license from Perkins, Landini, and Massey Ferguson, exporting throughout Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Balkans.
The factories anchored a working-class identity. Rakovica was industrial Belgrade: metal workshops, engine noise, shift workers. When Yugoslav socialism collapsed, so did the industrial logic. IMR shut down in 2015; IMT limped along until India's TAFE bought it in 2018, maintaining some production of tractors between 47 and 80 horsepower. The factory survives, but the workforce that once defined the municipality has scattered.
Today Rakovica transitions like all post-industrial neighborhoods: brownfield sites await redevelopment, housing expands into former industrial zones, service employment replaces manufacturing. Serbia's automotive sector has revived elsewhere—€8 billion in component exports in 2024, 100,000 workers nationally—but Rakovica's tractor factories captured a different era. By 2026, the question is whether the municipality can leverage proximity to central Belgrade for real estate development, or whether it remains defined by industries that no longer employ.