The paper gives the overview of the policy of urban planning in CEE and Southeast Europe during the socialist period. That policy was based on centralistic system which caused specific type of internal structure of the cities. Besides that, the paper compares the changes in the urban planning that took place during the 1990s as the results of global and integrational processes, market rules and privatization, decentralization deindustrialization, commercialization, social segregation etc. These changes are already obvious in urban areas. At the end of the last century unstable policy and economic crisis in Serbia slowed down these processes both the changes in the functional-spatial structure of the cities and especially the changes related to the institutional policy in urban planning.