This book offers a cross-European analysis of urban and regional strategies of reconciling welfare and competitiveness. It develops an understanding of the strategy challenge to reconcile competitiveness with cohesion, and provides an analysis of cities and regions as actors in multi-level governance settings. The book offers a European comparative view on housing, labour markets, enterprises, ethnical issues, gender dimensions, urban development projects, transport, and sustainability.

This book explores urban dynamics in Europe fifteen years after the fall of communism. The ‘urban mosaic’ of the title expresses the complexity and diversity of the processes and spatial outcomes in post-socialist cities. Emerging urban phenomena are illustrated with case studies, focusing on historical themes, cultural issues and the socialist legacy. Among the cities analyzed are Kazan, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, Komarno, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia and Tirana.

Warsaw is one of the most dynamically developing cities in Europe, and its rich history has marked it as an epicenter of many modes of urbanism: Tzarist, modernist, socialist, and--in the past two decades--aggressively neoliberal. Focusing on Warsaw after 1990, this volume explores the interplay between Warsaw's past urban identities and the intense urban change of the '90s and '00s. Chasing Warsaw departs from the typical narratives of post-socialist cities in Eastern Europe by contextualizing Warsaw's unique transformation in terms of both global change and the shifting geographies of centrality and marginality in contemporary Poland.

Policy, Planning, and People presents original essays by leading authorities in the field of urban policy and planning. The volume includes theoretical and practice-based essays that integrate social equity considerations into state-of-the-art discussions of findings in a variety of planning issues.

Recent history has seen Bosnian and Herzegovinian (BiH) cities undergoing several transitions. Their cities have developed under socialism (1945 – 1992), have suffered through the civil war during the 1990s, and during the last twenty years have been undergoing a slow and multifaceted transition to an indeterminate end point. Focusing on the post-socialist, postwar, and neoliberal transitions experienced in BiH, the book shows that planning systems deviated from control-oriented and top-down regulation to flexible approaches for more open for informal development. The book analyzes several levels of planning-related processes: the former Yugoslavia, BiH, the city of Mostar, and three urban zones (the Industrial Zone Bišće Polje, the City Zone Rondo, and the Historic District and the Old Town Zone) in order to offer insights into the new planning systems in the late phase of post-socialist transition.

Iron Curtains has been awarded Honorable Mention for the 2013 ASEEES Harvard Davis Center Book Prize! The prize is sponsored by Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and is awarded annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography. Utilizing research conducted primarily with residents of Sofia, Bulgaria, Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs, and Privatization of Space in the Post-socialist City explores the human dimension of new city-building that has emerged in East Europe. Features original data, illustrations, and theory on the process of privatization of resources in societies undergoing fundamental socio-economic transformations, such as those in Eastern Europe Represents the sole in-depth monograph on contemporary urbanism in Southeast Europe Makes a broader statement on issues of urbanism in Europe and other parts of the world while highlighting the complex connections between cultures and cities

In port cities around the world, waterfront development projects have been hailed both as spaces of promise and as crucial territorial wedges in twenty-first century competitive growth strategies. Frequently, these mega-projects have been intended to transform derelict docklands into communities of hope with sustainable urban economies—economies intended to both compete in and support globally-networked hierarchies of cities. This collection engages with major theoretical debates and empirical findings on the ways waterfronts transform and have been transformed in port-cities in North and South America, Europe, the Caribbean. It is organized around the themes of fixities (built environments, institutional and regulatory structures, and cultural practices) and flows (information, labor, capital, energy, and knowledge), which are key categories for understanding processes of change. By focusing on these fixities and flows, the contributors to this volume develop new insights for understanding both historical and current cases of change on urban waterfronts, those special areas of cities where land and water meet. As such, it will be a valuable resource for teaching faculty, students, and any audience interested in a broad scope of issues within the field of urban studies.

Metropolitan commercial real estate markets are highly influenced by global forces, the regional economy, and institutional behaviour. While descriptions of regional commercial real estate markets are well known and widespread in academic literature, this monograph goes beyond that in explaining the dynamics in and variations between European metropolitan markets. By comparing those markets on relevant indicators and through extensive data analysis, a number of explaining factors is revealed. Contributions on specific metropolitan markets with different positions within the real estate cycle illustrate not only the characteristics of the local economy and its institutions, but also urgent issues such as battling vacancy, changing retail hierarchy or managing obsolescence. ​