Comparative Debates in Post-Socialist Urban Studies

Abstract

Recent urban research on post-socialist cities includes a wide range of empirical studies dealing with processes of sociospatial change since 1990. Despite this accumulated knowledge, studies that explicitly question the underlying comparative assumptions involving post-socialist cities are rare. Against that backdrop, this study seeks to contribute to a selfreflective debate on understanding post-socialist cities vis-à-vis wider debates on comparative methods in urban studies. The starting point is the new interest in comparisons as a way to stimulate critical thinking in urban research in the wake of postcolonial studies. The main intention is to transfer some parts of this debate to the context of post-socialist urban studies, and to raise awareness of the often implicit comparative assumptions that underpin such research. Drawing on an extensive comparative study of sociospatial differentiation in Budapest, Vilnius, Sofia, Leipzig, and St. Petersburg, this article focuses on the challenge of explaining the diversity of post-socialist urban forms in relation to an increasingly interconnected globalized world. The argument here is for the need to widen the research agenda on post-socialist cities in order to raise consciousness for implicit comparisons with Western experiences, to address the global interconnectedness of the urban experience, and to call the reification of the post-socialist city as the basic entity for comparison into question. [Key words: comparative urbanism, post-socialist urban development, entangled modernities, socio-spatial differentiation.]

The Post-Soviet Urban Poor and Where They Live: Khrushchev-Era Blocks, “Bad” Areas, and the Vertical Dimension in Luhansk, Ukraine

“…In the CEE context, this means that there is reason to reexamine how the socialist left-overs are metabolized by the neoliberalizing, globalizing, commodified postcommunist city, which means that these residues need to be properly described and understood without falling into the discursive trap of using the Western European model(s) of urban development as point of reference (cf. Wiest 2012;Ferenčuhová 2012). Such an exercise has theoretical consequences that require reflection: is the socialist legacy simply an obsolete relic of the past, bound to meet the same destiny as the system that created it (Sýkora and Bouzarovski 2012), or does it engage with and within the transformations induced by the capitalist order, almost as a Latourian actant, creating a new form of hybrid urbanism (Golubchikov et al 2014) that transcends any given categorizations?…”

Zombie socialism and the rise of neoliberalism in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe

“…After ascending as a denominator of all things post-1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, several scholars in geography, anthropology, and sociology have pointed out that the concept of post-socialism has become less relevant (Boyer and Yurchak 2008;Cervinkova 2012;Chari and Verdery 2009;Dunn and Verdery 2015;Ferenčuhová 2016;Hirt 2013;Horvat and Štiks 2012;Humphrey 2001;Pickles 2010;Rogers 2010;Stenning and Hörschelmann 2008;Tuvikene 2016;Wiest 2012). Against this backdrop, we indicate one location where one may find continued relevance of socialism (and its "post").…”

Global games, local rules: Mega-events in the post-socialist world

“…Müller (2015) captures this relational view in his framework of transportation-transformation-translation, in which he considers both the processes of mobilisation and the outcomes of mobility in order to conceptualise how knowledges, policies and ideas inevitably transform as they are transported from one place to another. In considering the role of elsewhere for hosting mega-events in the post-socialist world, all the papers in this issue underscore the value of comparative research in showing how urban development in the post-socialist world is a fundamentally translocal affair (see also Wiest, 2012).…”