Introduction: Post-socialist cities and urban theory

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgment

Slavomíra Ferenčuhová acknowledges the support from Project No. MUNI/A/1114/2015, “Society and its dynamics: qualitative and quantitative perspective” (SPOJKA).

Notes

1. “Post-socialist,” “post-communist,” and sometimes even “post-Soviet” are concepts that are used almost interchangeably in the literature, despite their slight differences in meaning. In this publication, as theme issue editors, we opt for “post-socialist,” not least because past debates concerned the “socialist” rather than the “communist” city. Even so, this does not amount to an endorsement of the “post-socialist city” concept per se. Because the post-socialist city is a widely used and understood concept, we will continue using it in the rest of this introduction, dropping the initial quotation marks which are intended to emphasize the somewhat contentious nature of the concept and of the associations that it carries. Our main focus is on post-socialist cities in Central and Eastern Europe, but many of the insights contained in this volume are relevant elsewhere, too.

2. Reading Homi Bhabha’s Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse (1984) is particularly inspiring in rethinking the ambivalent meaning of post-socialist identity.

3. In this case, “provincializing” and “de-provincializing” are not to be seen as each other’s opposites. Mbembe and Nuttall (2004) and Leitner and Sheppard (2016) use the term “provincializing” in somewhat different ways.

4. This figure excludes articles that provide statistical overviews of general urbanization trends, and other works of similar character.