Paths of Socio-Spatial Change in Post-Socialist Cities — Insights from Five City-Regions in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, intense research has been focused on the manifold processes and patterns of change in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) triggered by the breakdown of the socialist system and shaped by increasing globalization and internationalization. Urban research on socio-spatial issues has boomed, producing, on the one hand, empirical studies that investigated relevant spatial and societal processes such as suburbanization, gentrification or marginalization as single phenomena detached from urban regional contexts — comparing, for example, socio-spatial processes in large-scale housing estates of different cities in CEE. On the other hand, studies emerged which portrayed and explained the entangled socio-spatial changing and persistence within one city-region (Sýkora 2007, Marcinczak 2012). Until now (2013), however, no studies have taken a city-regional investigatory approach which considers the inter-playing developments of different neighbourhood types while at the same time comparing these city-regional insights among post-socialist European countries. More than 20 years after the start of societal transformation in CEE, clear socio-spatial development trends are showing, new processes are being indicated, the fundamental factors determining these developments are becoming evident, and new theoretical concepts such as the idea of post-socialist‘heteropolitanization’ (Gentile et al. 2012) are being developed.