Cities from state-socialism to global capitalism: an introduction

Abstract

The process of political transformation in the former statesocialist countries has led to far-reaching changes in nearly all fields of their socio-economic systems. As cities are the nodal points of the economic and social life, contemporary developments in the urban areas have major implications not only for the actual transformation of cities but also for the wider framework of the socio-economic transition1. The tremendous and sometimes very spectacular changes which have taken place in the cities of Central and Eastern Europe have attracted great interest among social scientists in general and urban geographers in particular. The considerable attention paid to the transition of the post-socialist cities is well reflected in the growing number of scientific publications dealing either explicitly with the question of urban restructuring (Fassmann and Lichtenberger, 1995; Andrusz et al., 1996; Kovacs and Wiessner, 1997) or some of the general features of the transition which culminate typically in cities (Frydman and Rapaczynski, 1994; Gorzelak, 1996; Pickles and Smith, 1998). Despite the increasing amount of literature on the post-socialist urban transition, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding and theoretical explanation of these processes. This is not least because the transition having swept through the communist bloc since 1989 is still far from over. On the other hand case studies based on interdisciplinary and comparative approaches are also rare. In the present special issue of GeoJournal we try to fill the gap and continue the discussion on post-socialist cities raised by an earlier special issue of GeoJournal (1997, p. 2) dealing with Russian cities. Papers in this special issue cover a wide range of topics that are thought to be relevant in the current process of East European urban transition. The diversity of contributions is guaranteed not only by the topics and countries covered, but also by the academic background of the authors. Authors were recruited from various disciplines in social sciences ranging from urban geography to sociology, economics and urban planning. They are all noted experts on urban issues in their respective countries with long empirical and theoretical research experiences, and they have all been involved in different international research projects dealing with some aspects of urban change in the last few years. Geographically, contributions to this issue cover principally the northern part of Central and Eastern Europe namely Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia and the so-called new German ‘Bundeslander’. This is partly because it would have been impossible to deal with the whole region in one special issue and, moreover, comparable findings of research projects are mostly available from these countries. The majority of the papers included here concentrate not only on the post-socialist phase of urban development, but also deal with the characteristics of the socialist and pre-socialist period, and thus contribute to the better understanding of the notion and characteristics of the ‘Socialist’ city (French and Hamilton, 1979).