This book focuses on the spatial transformations in the most dynamically evolving urban areas of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. It links the restructuring of the built environment with the underlying processes and the forces of socio-economic reforms. The detailed accounts of the spatial transformations in a key moment of urban history in the region enhance our understanding of the linkages between society and space.

This book presents multidimensional socio-economic transformations taking place in the post-socialist cities located in selected countries of the Central European region. The analysis includes case studies from the Eastern part of Germany (Chemnitz, Leipzig), Poland (Łódź, Kielce, Katowice conurbation, and peripheral urban centres from Eastern Poland), Slovakia (Bratislava, Nitra), the Czech Republic (Olomouc, Brno), and from Hungary (Pécs). The analysed urban areas have undergone far-reaching political and socio-economic changes in the last 30 years. These changes began with the collapse of communism and the centrally planned economy system in the region of Central Europe. The beginning of this period, often referred to as post-socialist transformation, dates back to 1989. The consequence of the aforementioned political processes was the multifaceted socio-economic and demographic changes that significantly affected urban areas in Central Europe. This book presents an attempt to summarize the main long-term processes of changes taking place in these urban areas and to identify contemporary and future trends in their socio-economic development. The book will be valuable to undergraduate and postgraduate students in human geography, urban studies, economy, and city marketing, especially with an interest in Central Europe.

This book explores the changing approaches to urban common good in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. The question of common good is fundamental to urban living; however, understanding of the term varies depending on local contexts and conditions, particularly complex in countries with experience of communism. In cities east of the former Iron Curtain, the once ideologically imposed principle of common good became gradually devalued throughout the 20th century due to the lack of citizen agency, only to reappear as a response to the ills of neoliberal capitalism around the 2010s. The book reveals how the idea of urban common good has been reconstructed and practiced in European cities after socialism. It documents the paradigm shift from city as a communal infrastructure to city as a commodity, which lately has been challenged by the approach to city as a commons. These transformations have been traced and analysed within several urban themes: housing, public transport, green infrastructure, public space, urban regeneration, and spatial justice. A special focus is on the changes in the public discourse in Poland and the perspectives of key urban stakeholders in three case-study cities of Gdańsk, Kraków, and Łódź. The findings point to the need for drawing from best practices of the socialist legacy, with its celebration of the common. At the same time, they call for learning from the mistakes of the recent past, in which the opportunity for citizen empowerment has been unseized. The book is intended for researchers, academics, and postgraduates, as well as practitioners and anyone interested in rediscovering the inherent potential of urban commonality. It will appeal to those working in human geography, spatial planning, and other areas of urban studies.

This book presents cross-national insights into spatial fragmentation in post-socialist cities in Europe. Trying to rethink the heritage of the last 30 years of transformation and grasp current processes taking urban units of various categories as examples, the book exemplifies typical or unique causes of political, social and ethnic disintegration of cities in Central and Eastern Europe. Presenting spatial studies into different cases of conflict in a cross-national context, the authors apply concepts of contested and divided cities, urban geopolitics, cultural atavism, contested heritage, etc. The book is divided into four parts. The first part raises the issue of genesis, development and contemporary discrepancies of cities divided by political and state borders. The second part includes chapters which deal with the impact of ongoing geopolitical divisions, wars, and ideologies on the social and political tensions as well as their polarising effect on urban territory. The third part comprises reflections on controversial relations of ethnic and national culture with urban space. The fourth part deals with socio-economic transformation of post-socialist cities which went through transition of old patterns of spatial planning and attempts to establish more rational and justice spatial order.

The development of post-socialist cities has become a major field of study among critical theorists from across the social sciences and humanities. Originally constructed under the dictates of central planners and designed to serve the demands of command economies, post-socialist urban centers currently develop at the nexus of varied and often competing economic, cultural, and political forces. Among these, nationalist aspirations, previously simmering beneath the official rhetoric of communist fraternity and veneer of architectural conformity, have emerged as dominant factors shaping the urban landscape. This book explores this burgeoning field of research through detailed cases studies relating to the cultural politics of architecture, urban planning, and identity in the post-socialist cities of Eurasia. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers.

The cultural landscapes of Central European cities reflect over half a century of socialism and are marked by the Marxists' vision of a utopian landscape. Architecture, urban planning and the visual arts were considered to be powerful means of expressing the 'people's power'. However, since the velvet revolutions of 1989, this urban scenery has been radically transformed by new forces and trends, infused by the free market, democracy and liberalization. This has led to 'landscape cleansing' and 'recycling', as these former communist nations used new architectural, functional and social forms to transform their urbanscapes, their meanings and uses. Comparing case studies from different post-socialist cities, this book examines the culturally conditional variations between local powers and structures despite the similarities in the general processes and systems. It considers the contemporary cultural landscapes of these post-socialist cities as a dynamic fusion of the old communist forms and new free-market meanings, features and democratic practices, of global influences and local icons. The book assesses whether these urbanscapes clearly reflect the social, cultural and political conditions and aspirations of these transitional countries and so a critical analysis of them provides important insights.

This volume deals with the materialization of identity in urban space. Urban spaces played an important role in the formation of national identities in post-socialist successor states, whereas the articulation of national identities markedly affected the appearance of the post-socialist cities. Opened by an overview of the research on (post)socialist cities in recent urban history, the book traces the post-socialist intertwining of space and identities in case studies that include Astana and Almaty, Chisinau and Tiraspol, and Skopje, while also linking it to the socialist urbanism, exemplified by the case study on postwar Minsk.

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.

Mapping Vilnius is the first book in a series promoting Critical Urbanism as a way of analyzing the changing relationships between citizens, the state and the international context in shaping urban spaces in Central- and Eastern Europe. In this participatory research into two districts of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, mapping is used as a process-oriented technique to visualize these relationships in transition. It book was edited by the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism at the European Humanities University in Vilnius. Among the authors are Felix Ackermann, Vaiva Andriušytė, Philip Boos, Benjamin Cope, Dalia Čiupalaitė, Inga Freimane, Elisa Gerbsch, Tomas Grunskis, Max Hellriegel, Alina Jablonskaya, Justas Juzėnas, Anu Kägu, Andrei Karpeka, Yagmur Koreli, Miodrag Kuč, Siarhei Liubimau, Miglė Paužaitė, Indre Ruseckaitė, Tomáš Samec, Aliaksandra Smirnova, Kamilė Užpalytė, Gerda Vaitkevičiūtė, Kotryna Valiukevičiūtė, Clemens Weise, Lennart Wiesiolek